A Downtown Reporter

Book Review: I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and What-Have-You

2007-10-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

New York Press
October 3, 2007

"I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and What-Have-You"
Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Scott Shuffitt, and Will Russell, Creators of Lebowskifest
With a Foreword by Jeff Bridges
Bloomsbury USA , August 2007
(Paperback)
256 pp.

With a budget of $15 million and an opening weekend gross of just $5.5 million, The Big Lebowski—the Coen Brothers’ nod to Raymond Chandler about bowling, pot, Southern California, mistaken identity and much more—was a box office flop when it hit theaters in 1998. Enough critics dismissed it to negate any positive reviews it received, so it seemed headed for the dustbin of movie history. Since then, it’s become a cult classic, especially among college males and stoners of every stripe. And of the four particularly rabid Lebowski fans who put together this bible for “Achievers” (a Lebowski reference that hardcore fans appropriated for themselves), two are founders of Lebowski Fest, a gathering that began in Kentucky in 2003.

The book examines Lebowski from every possible angle: interviews with cast members and the real-life inspirations for characters like Walter, Jesus and, of course, The Dude; profiles of some seriously devoted Achievers; lots of photos, gimmicky graphics; and a heavy dose of trivia. (Bet you didn’t know two of the three men the Coens based Walter Sobchak on actually did interrogate the real life Little Larry, and that they actually presented his homework to him in a plastic evidence wrapper. But it was algebra, not social studies.)For Achievers, this is new shit that’s come to light, which means it should be read straight through, to commit all the ins and outs to memory. For everyone else, it’s a worthy addition to any coffee table stack, something they can flip through at random for a chuckle or two. And for those who don’t like The Big Lebowski at all, that’s just, like, their opinion, man. -- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com
http://www.nypress.com/

Book Review "Nobody Belongs Here More Than You: Stories by Miranda July"

2007-09-12T14:27:00.000-07:00

Scribner
Hardcover ($23.00)
191 pp.

New York Press
September 12, 2007

Once, an old friend of mine co-wrote a shadow puppet opera and performed it in Denver. That same friend stood on stage at a club several January Firsts ago in nothing but a diaper as the New Year Baby. And more recently, he and some other artists created an exhibit out of spam emails and displayed it in a performance space in Manhattan. The average person isn’t fascinated with the seemingly trivial the way he is. And the average person doesn’t go to such lengths to stage things this esoteric—unlike the characters in Miranda July’s short stories.

July (born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger) grew up in Berkeley, California, and is a video, performance and Web artist, as well as a playwright. She got the attention of moviegoers after the release Me and You and Everyone We Know, her 2005 feature debut, which she directed, wrote and starred in. It won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and four prizes at Cannes including the Camera d’Or (for best first film).

Taking into account the writing in No One Belongs Here More Than You, her debut story collection, and the pale, bewildered-looking figure who stares out from under a mess of dark curls on the dust jacket, it’s a surprise to hear how unremarkable her voice sounds, how commonplace her outfit and how level-headed she comes across when interviewed.

The 16 stories in No One Belongs, are a highly unusual, often funny look at the functions and the fleeting nature that relationships of all kinds can have. Or, depending on the reader, they’re the bizarre by-product of someone who thinks way too much.The relationships the stories revolve around exist between tenants, lovers, exes, friends and neighbors and, in “Making Love in 2003,” even novelist Madeleine L’Engle and a young writer who fantasizes about L’Engle’s husband. (A disclaimer promises that the things the L’Engles do in short story are entirely fictionalized).

For the most part, the stories take place inside the heads of the narrators, with regular detours that follow the neurotic infrastructure of their thinking. They appear to be tangents, but zip back to the point just when it seems things are about to cross into total irrelevance. They’re closer to the kind of extensions of thoughts most people would not record the way July has.

In “Mon Plaisir,” the narrator explains how she and her soon-to-be ex-lover have dismantled their relationship piece by piece as if it were self-assembly furniture: “And our few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment?”In “Ten True things,” the narrator describes her employer, a married accountant she’s having an affair with: “A better accountant might actually account for something instead of hiring another, slightly cheaper accountant to do the accounting, and skidding by on the difference … Accountants do this all the time, and so do Indian restaurants. Sag paneer? … the waiter hands the order to the cook, the cook hands it to the busboy, the busboy runs down the block and orders sag paneer from the other Indian restaurant, the shoddy one, takeout. This is why the more expensive restaurants take longer to bring out the food…In this case, I am the busboy, I am the one who hires the real accountant…”

To the characters in No One Belongs, and especially to the unnamed narrators—who you can safely equate with July herself—even the most accidental, tenuous encounters between people are relationships of some kind. Her characters are motivated by conflicting desires and aversions, their attitudes and intentions are constantly in flux.

The best way to read a short story collection by a single author is intermittently, by leaving a good collection lying around and reading one or two stories, and then putting it back down on, in my case, the floor. There may be some authors who are able to write in a multitude of voices that change from story to story, however, read straight through, No One Belongs starts to sound like a disjointed novella told by very similar-sounding narrators. It’s partially because everything is told in the first person, which can become redundant. Though in all fairness, half of the stories in the book appeared on their own in literary magazines like Tin House, Zoetrope and The Paris Review, before they were collected here.

The upside of No One Belongs Here More Than You is that Miranda July emerges loud and clear as a fresh, original voice, that will probably be back soon (with a novel, perhaps?). And that's a very good thing.

-- Matt Elzweig
http://nypress.com/20/37/abouttown/bookreview1.cfm

Q & A with Melissa Plaut, cab driver, author

2007-09-05T14:45:00.001-07:00

New York Press
September 5, 2007

After a layoff from a comfortable, but mind-numbing, ad agency job, Melissa Plaut, a copywriter and editor, basically gave up on making a living through words. Instead, she decided to embark on a long series of adventures instead of slogging through a “career path” until retirement. The first one was to become a cab driver, which Plaut, 32, did in 2004. About a year later, she began blogging about her experiences, but just for her friends. Due to the blog’s unexpected popularity, it ultimately led to a Random House book deal. The result is Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do With My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab, out now.

Has your driving outside of work changed at all?

Now I drive every car as if it were a cab. I can’t undo that sense of urgency and madness. You need to make a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time. I’m also a terrible backseat driver now.

What surprised you about the job when you started?

I went online and found the TLC [Taxi & Limousine Commission] and saw the list of things I needed to do to get licensed. None of it involved a driving test. In terms of what happened when I actually got in the cab, I thought it would be a little bit more dangerous than it is. It’s dangerous, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not as bad as I had feared and maybe most people assume it to be. You know there’s so much money in the city now that there are fewer people actually robbing us.

Ever had any accidents or criminals in your cab?

There are people who beat the fare, or try to beat the fare. I chased some kids. I’ve had a couple fender benders. I’ve had very many close calls that could’ve been very severe accidents. That’s just from being on the street so much. And I’ve never been held up or anything (knock on wood). I escaped this summer unscathed, with the guy who was going around pointing a gun at everybody’s head.

And how long do you think you’ll be doing this?

I have no idea. I don’t want to drive a cab for the rest of my life, but I may feel like a cab driver for the rest of my life.

There was a long period of time when you were driving around without health insurance. Were you terrified?

I wasn’t scared. I just prayed that nothing happened—and that if it did happen that it wasn’t my fault, and somebody else’s insurance could cover the bill.

What are some of the crazier things that have happened in your cab?

They’re not like “somebody had a baby” or “there was a knife fight in the backseat,” or anything. A guy got in and wouldn’t tell me where to go, and just gave me money to just drive until the money ran out, and then ended up having me take him to a strip club and wanted me to come in with him. He gave me another 20, and I just left him there. People do have sexual relations. I don’t know if anybody’s had full intercourse in my cab. I don’t think it’s happened, but then again, I can’t say I’m sure about that.

Is that uncomfortable for you?

It’s a little awkward, but I don’t want to say anything. Really, the best I can hope for is that they tip well and don’t make a mess.

How well do you know the other cabbies?

I made a bunch of friends at my garage. And obviously not just anybody, but I have a little crew, a little clique or whatever; guys that just treat me like one of the fellas. And far as I can tell, nobody holds back in front of me. In the beginning they may have, but they know me well enough to know I can handle anything if they can handle it.

So what are the cabbies with their phone attachments stuck in their ears talking about?

They’re talking about you.

Really?

Yeah. Most of them. They’re talking about either if you’re interesting, or if you’re doing something interesting, shitty, stupid, annoying. They’re also talking about where they’re going, which is also where you’re going. You know, “This guy just got in. We’re going to Williamsburg.” They’re talking about traffic as well. I always thought they were talking to friends from outside work. They’re talking to other cab drivers. The only people who are willing to talk on the phone with you for that long are the other people who are that bored for their 12-hour shift—isolated and frustrated. They’re like, “traffic on the 59th Street Bridge. Don’t go, use the lower level. I’m going to goddamn LaGuardia, it’s 5:30, I hate this guy. I hope he tips me.” It’s on and on. Whatever you’re doing, they’re talking about it. How about you? I don’t like to because I get so distracted. And I find my tips are better because I don’t do it. If a cabbie calls me and he’s like, “There’s traffic, don’t do this,” or something, I will take that call for a second. I will also just talk to them, but in-between fares. And I’ll be like, “Aw, this stupid guy just got out, and he took me all the way out here, and he didn’t even tip me, and he was, you know, jerking off the whole way there.”

-- Matt Elzweig
http://nypress.com/20/36/news&columns/Q%20&%20A.cfm

Q & A with Tim Hatcher, Pedicab Driver

2007-08-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

New York Press
August 22, 2007

Tim Hatcher, 33, is one of the many pedicab drivers who wait outside Central Park for customers. He takes them to various parts of Manhattan, but concentrates on giving tours of the park.He fell into the pedicab world a little over two years ago, after realizing how hard it was to get full-time graphic design jobs without connections.

It’s obvious Hatcher, who holds two college degrees, likes what he does. But with the city’s new pedicab regulations scheduled to take effect on September 20, Hatcher, like many of his fellow pedicab drivers, is concerned.

What will the new regulations mean to you if they’re not revised or annulled?

We asked them to regulate the industry a couple years ago when there were less pedicabs. To wait to do it now and then put a cap on it is really unfair. If they had put the cap of 325 a couple years ago, there might only have been 325 cabs. They wait ’til there’s [500-600] cabs, and then they put half of us out of business? [Pedicabs] have been in the United States about 20 years, but there has never been a fatality. Pedicabs have been in New York City for about 12 years. There’s only been one hospitalization that I know of.

How are you paid?

You haggle and make up prices. Extra weight is a factor. Uphill is a factor. Rain is a factor. Wind is a huge factor. If you look at this, it’s like pulling a parachute behind you. You always have a bottom line. Sometimes you end up going below it if it’s a really slow day. If you see somebody who’s injured or somebody who needs help, then you do them a favor. If you get somebody coming out of the theater and they’re on a romantic date, you know they’ll pay 20 bucks.

What’s your schedule like?

You make up your own schedule, usually. I like to work early in the morning when it’s quiet and peaceful. Other guys work midnight to 4 a.m. And you can make a lot of money fast if you know where the clubs are. But I don’t like dealing with drunk people. I’d rather deal with kids and tourists.

Any outrageous passengers?

This Japanese businessman. He was just trying to get across the city. But he wanted to make it like a game show. And he said he would give me like an extra dollar for every car I passed. And then he would give me like an extra five dollars for every time I did this, an extra dollar for every time I did that. And I knew he was in a hurry, so I’m racing anyway. And I really poured it on because it was added incentive. And suddenly, all of the traffic hit gridlock. And I can squeeze around gridlock. So I’m passing hundreds of cars. At one point, I pulled the bike up and walked it on the sidewalk, and dropped it down on to another side street. And the guy was so happy, but he admitted he didn’t have that much money. He was really amazed, so impressed. [He was] like, “Wow, you guys really work hard.”

Riding is probably good exercise.

You get exercise, but it’s all in the legs. I like to call it the “Tyrannosaurus Physique,” because you get the massive legs and no upper body.

Do you ever feel vulnerable to getting hit by taxis and buses?

On occasion. But I feel much safer driving this in traffic than I do a car. On this, you’re much lighter, much more maneuverable. You can see 360 degrees. If the situation is getting dangerous, I can pull this right off the road, up onto the curb.Are the drivers as international as the cabbies? Oh, definitely. Most of the more international guys, they’re kind of seasonal workers. Some of them are illegal aliens, which is a problem. And some of them are kind of duped into doing this. People run a scam where they’ll ship guys over, promising them they’ll make a lot of money, put them all up in like bunk beds in their aunt’s basement, and then put them on bikes and say, “Go out and make $300 a day.” And they go out and they can’t do that.

Is there any rivalry among you guys?

There’s some. A lot of cliques. In a perfect world, we’d all get along, but I’ve seen shouting matches that almost turned into fistfights over misunderstandings and people stealing rides from each other and stuff. Right now, if you look, there’s100 bikes and there’s not too many customers. And that’s not a good thing.

What about cab drivers?

We only take people short, 10 to 15 block distances. Our closer competition is probably the horse and carriages. But that’s only in the park.

Is it a friendly competition?

It varies. Some horse [and carriage] drivers are friendly. Some have actually driven by and screamed insults.

-- Matt Elzweig
http://nypress.com/20/34/news&columns/Q%20&%20A.cfm

Q & A with Juliana Luecking, Public Comment Filmmaker

2007-08-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

New York Press
August 6, 2007

Picture New York, a group formed in response to new rules the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting proposed for filmmaking and photography on city streets and in other public spaces, had a major victory on August 3, the final day of a public comment period the Office set up. After the group hand-delivered a petition signed by over 34,000 opponents of the new rules, the Office scrapped the proposal and agreed to draft a new one, and release it for another public comment period. Under the rules the Office proposed in June, groups of two or more, filming with a tripod would be limited to 30 minutes in a single location. Groups of five or more would have no more than 10 minutes. And two or more people, filming for 30 minutes or more, would be required to have a permit and a $1 million liability insurance policy. Picture New York and the New York Civil Liberties Union feared that the restrictions would be disastrous for amateur filmmakers and even tourists.

Filmmaker Juliana Luecking made the first of several YouTube videos by activists against the regulations, and recorded a press conference at NYCLU headquarters just before the Film Office visit on August 3.

Did you get the impression the Film Office gave in begrudgingly, or that they were at least, starting, to agree with you?

I have a mixed understanding of that. They didn’t let us in the office. I didn’t know if it was about security or that they really didn’t want to confront us as a group. The guy that accepted it from us was very easygoing, but didn’t really say much and didn’t really want to speak to reporters that were there.

How difficult was organizing all this?

The phenomenon that in two weeks Picture New York, a group of very experienced, savvy, media folks and artists were able to generate such a big media campaign without financial support at all just blows me away.

Why did it matter to you so much?

There was really never a need for this before. And I don’t think anything’s changed, culturally, to warrant a change in the Constitution. And I think that’s what this eventually would require. It's a real threat to freedom of speech, freedom of expression.

Has anyone ever tried to shut you down while you were out filming?

At [the] World Trade Center I tried to set up a tripod and the police had me take it down immediately. That was back in February. How did you get involved in the public comment process? I didn’t even know there was a public comment process. I read about this in the New York Times, and I called the NYCLU to tell them that I thought I was kind of a poster child for this issue. But even before I interviewed with them I just made a video and I put it up on YouTube as soon as possible because I just knew it was wrong. And, my video’s about three minutes, and I just kind of step-by-step describe what the regulations are like, and question why should I have to get permission for doing what I’m doing? So, luckily the folks at Picture New York posted my video. And from there, they did great outreach. I really had no idea it would be that big. I just felt like I had to say something about it.

What has the process of getting permission to film in the streets been like up to now?

The city wanted to know, basically, if you were going to be blocking a street or a sidewalk, or using a crane or any of that big movie equipment, which makes sense. And the other few people in that crew that would do this work of applying for the permit, they’d name the particular time, the exact location, you know like, what [section] of the sidewalk they’d be using. And The city would decide if that was going to be disruptive or not. And I believe after the World Trade Center went down New York was really encouraging more filmmakers and more business to come to New York. I mean, we’ve seen zillions of film crews everywhere.

Are you going to stay involved with this issue?

What I’m interested in, actually, is if anything like this, these regulations, is affecting any other small towns, bigger cities, rural areas, even, in the United States, if there’s any connection between city councils and government wanting to shut down photography. I’m hoping that we can set a tone in New York that this stuff has to be figured out with the inclusion of the Constitution in mind. So, the video that I cut [on August 3rd] is available [on pictureny.org]. And I might do one more that’s encouraging people to check out what’s going on in their own area.What would you do if you the rules had become law?I would continue shooting past 30 minutes, and if a police officer ordered me to stop, I would try to continue until they forced me to stop and arrested me. And then I’d go out and do it again.

— Matt Elzweig
http://nypress.com/20/32/news&columns/Q&A.cfm

Washington Square-off: Neighbors, pols weigh in on privatization, redesign

2007-07-30T08:09:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 30, 2007

The man was wearing a dark cape and was standing inside the Washington Square Park fountain, which The City renamed “Tisch Fountain,” after a $2.5 million pledge from the foundation in 2005. He was near the northwestern rim of the fountain, and had something that resembled a do-rag on his head. He was speaking in a tone too controlled to call yelling, but more than loud enough to be heard by all those around him, at the very least, the people sitting directly in front of him and nearby. Exactly what he was talking about was unclear, but a substantial portion of it was a plea for anyone of influence who might be listening to please “publish” his “book.” He was not so far gone as to not know what city or day or century or planet this was, but mental illness comes in all shades of blue, and he was down in that sub-spectrum somewhere.

Up above this part of the fountain, a bare-chested kid with surfer hair, who looked homeless, approached a black man sitting on a bench in the shade. They talked quietly for a second or two and walked into the sunshine a few steps away. Then they stopped so the man could make a call on his cell phone.

Interactions like these are typical, but they’re only part of what goes on inside Washington Square Park on any given day.

On the Fifth Avenue side, a kind of retro ragtime band was unloading their gear while a string duo played chamber music behind them. At one point, two men on a bench in the same area were talking about the complications that could arise if one of them were to run for office. They didn’t say which office.

A courtly-looking senior couple walked by slowly, and two young women came in through the Fifth Avenue entrance just past the musicians. “This is where I used to hang out in college,” the first one said. “I was just thinking the same thing,” the other replied.

Graeme Humphrey, 24, was sitting on the southwest side of the fountain. It’s was his seventh or eighth time in Washington Square Park. Humphrey, an actor, works in the neighborhood. He likes hanging out near the large dog run since he’d like a dog, but affording and taking care of one is difficult in New York.

Irena Simonova, 20, a model from the Czech Republic, who lives in Soho, comes to Washington Square Park just about every day. She was sitting in her favorite spot, east of the Arch, near MacDougal and Washington Place, and said the only thing she’d change about the park would be to remove the drunks and homeless people. Maybe the police could help with that, she said, “because I’m scared sometimes.”

Tom, also sitting near the West 4th corner, who wouldn’t give his last name, goes to the park two to three times a week to read and relax. He’s been doing this for 50 years.

And Kristina Magcamit, 19, comes here to study almost every day. She likes to sit by the fountain and the dog run behind it. Magcamit, an NYU student, said she thinks The City’s plan to realign the fountain with the Arch is unnecessary.

All Carlos Casanova, 21, would change about Washington Square Park would be to place “more restrictions on drug-related problems.” He can’t figure out why they’re ignored. Casanova, a dog walker, hangs out by the main dog run, naturally, though he’s usually just passing through.

The controversy over the proposed redesign of Washington Square Park involves allegations that The City wants to privatize public space, or at the very least, make this very public space exclusive. It involves concerns about noise, and it has already been the subject of two lawsuits.
Landscape architect Robert B. Nichols designed the park in its current form, which was completed in 1970. Fifth Avenue ran through the Arch until 1964. And in 1995, The City completed a $900,000 renovation of the park.

An announcement the New York City Law Department made earlier this year called the Parks Department’s initial plan a “renovation” for a “heavily used park, both to restore crumbling park features and to enhance community members’ ability to make use of park space.”
The Parks Department first announced its intent to redesign the park in December 2003, and Community Board 2 voted unanimously in favor of “the concept to refurbish” it, according to court documents.

In February 2005, Parks unveiled its initial plans at another community board meeting. And though the plans provided did not include specific measurements, they showed the renovated fountain spraying a jet as high as the Arch, which is approximately 45 feet high, and increased lawn areas.

Neighborhood residents in attendance, like Jonathan Greenberg, were “outraged,” Greenberg said in a telephone interview.

But going into the meeting, he suspected The City might want to “transform the very nature and spirit” of the park. Greenberg, who polled the crowd there to determine what its priorities were in terms of improving Washington Square Park, said that 197 of 200 respondents favored a smaller, simpler, alternative plan that he and other members of the recently-formed Open Washington Square Park Coalition came up with.

To Greenberg, the results of this and other surveys he conducted were proof that “everyone” was against The City’s plan.

It wasn’t that the community didn’t recognize the need to fix certain things in the park – the bathrooms, the pavement and some of the benches needed repairs, the lighting needed to be replaced, the grass needed to be cleaned up and maintained, and the mound areas should be opened up, and the playgrounds expanded a little – but they did not want a redesign.
“Frankly, they wanted the park to be left alone other than that, for the most part.”

Greenberg said that Parks showed Community Board 2 plans at subsequent meetings as well, but that the department never left them copies to review.

Nevertheless, Community Board 2 approved the plan in April 2005, on the condition that the Parks Department work with City Councilperson Alan Gerson to decide where to put the dog runs and how to design the playgrounds.

And one month later, the Landmarks Preservation Committee approved the redesign.
Gerson and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn stated in an October 2005 letter to Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe that they had reached “30 points of agreement” on the renovation and would support the release of city funds for it.

Some of these 30 points included a four-foot cap on the height of any sidewalk perimeter fencing, a three-foot-six-inch cap on any perimeter fences inside the park; a reduction of the inner plaza that surrounds the fountain by no more than 10 percent, with no reduction in permanent seating between the plaza’s inner and outer circles; and a provision that if a conservancy were created to raise funds for the park, the Parks Department would have to encourage the conservancy to include a representative of Community Board 2 and local City Council members as “ex-officio members.”

The Gerson-Quinn agreement also requires The City to shut down no more than half of the park at any one time during construction, and requires the Parks Department to keep commercial events in the park to a minimum, and consult with the Council members and Community Board 2 before approving them.

The budget is $16 million and a greater portion of the funding will be coming from a private-public partnership than from The City, according to several media reports. If the project goes forward, The City will be responsible for $6.8 million.

In February 2006, Washington Square News, NYU’s student newspaper, reported that the university had pledged $1 million. (Alicia Hurley, an NYU spokesperson, said that NYU is not involved in the renovation plans themselves, and that the university’s only involvement were two requests – that Parks allow it to continue to hold its commencement ceremonies in the park, and that Parks not put a dog run in front of the NYU library on the south side of the park. “There’s no reason for the institution to get involved in any of the design. So we have remained completely agnostic on it,” she said in a telephone interview.)

After reviewing the Gerson-Quinn agreement, Community Board 2 reaffirmed its approval of the first phase of the renovation. But when the Parks Department presented its plans to the Art Commission in January of 2006 – a slide show revealed the dimensions they had in mind for the fountain and grade-level changes for the plaza – opponents of the plan were upset. “They’re bringing the central plaza to a street-level grade,” Greenberg said.

The Art Commission withheld its approval because it wanted a chance to observe an on-site mockup of the fountain area and study the acoustic impact of the water jets, first.

In April 2006, Greenberg and three other plaintiffs sued The City to annul all the approvals the redesign had received, on the grounds that by first announcing specific dimensions at the Art Commission hearing – which included shrinking the fountain plaza by 33 percent, and creating a 45-foot water jet – the Parks Department had unlawfully withheld material information from the community board and the Landmarks Commission. Greenberg also alleged that a Parks Department employee purposely misled the Landmarks Commission regarding the
Department’s intent to reduce the size of the plaza, and that Parks had violated the Gerson-Quinn agreement (by planning to shrink the plaza by more than 10 percent).

The City contended that it had no obligation to show final plans to Community Board 2, since community boards only have an advisory role. But the District Court judge disagreed, and Greenberg and his co-plaintiffs won.

The City appealed, and although the Pataki-appointed, all-male appellate panel agreed that The City had to inform the community board of its final plans, in March 2007, it ruled that The City had fulfilled this obligation, and therefore did not have to resubmit its plans.

Greenberg and co-plaintiff Luther Harris, author of “Around Washington Square,” and another neighborhood group called the Emergency Coalition to Save Washington Square Park (ECO) filed separate suits that were heard together in May 2007. If The City loses either suit, it will have to conduct a time-consuming Environmental Impact Study of the renovation, a process which is subject to public review. Greenberg expects the judge in that case to issue a ruling sometime in the next two months.

If Greenberg is right, and most of the people who would be affected by the redesign don’t want anything more than minor improvements, why would the Parks Department, why would The City, be pushing so hard for it to go through?

To Greenberg, part of the answer is Mayor Bloomberg’s belief in private-public partnerships, “that conservancies are good. Funding a park is a liability to the taxpayers, and … privatizing through the use of naming conventions,” (he mentions Tisch Fountain) is an asset. “The next logical conclusion is renaming the … Arch … How much would Donald Trump pay to name it Donald Trump Arch? That’s where the logic leads. What’s not for sale since we are pimping out our public spaces? … By creating a plan … of which, only half of it is funded [by The City], you create a reliance upon private funding for the first time in the park’s 180-year history.” Greenberg said this would allow the conservancy to function like a Business Improvement District.

But above all, The City’s motivation as Greenberg sees it, is “transforming who uses the park and how … The Parks Department does not want this to continue to be a hangout park. It is the quintessential hangout space in New York City” … “They want to create a garden-style, pedestrian pass-through mall, with an ornamental fountain at the center … which people admire as they pass through and keep moving.”

By reducing the size of open spaces, The City reduces the number of opportunities for people to hang out or play music in the park.

And by doing that, The City can also accommodate its “post-9/11 reality,” in which spontaneous gatherings, especially protests, are security risks. “The euphemisms they use are getting rid of the homeless and drug pushers” … “Half of those guys are just selling oregano or something … I’m not a police genius but you’d think you could do something about that … You don’t need to completely redesign Washington Square Park.”

Of course not everyone is dreading the possibility of a redesign.

Gil Horowitz, a retired psychologist who once attended and taught at NYU, lives in Two Fifth Avenue, a co-op steps away from Washington Square Park. He’s been going to Washington Square Park for over 50 years.

Horowitz is President of the Washington Square-Lower Fifth Avenue Block Association, which he said has always worked with the Parks Department, and that represents residents between Washington Square and Lower Fifth Avenue, most of them co-op owners like himself.

He said the current design of Washington Square Park, which he dates back to 1969 (not 1970, the Park Department’s date), is a poor design and should never have been allowed to go through. The Nichols design “is one of many designs, and many people think, the worst of all the designs the park has ever had.”

Horowitz believes the Gerson-Quinn version of the redesign will go through, and is really hoping it does. “I’ve waited now almost 20 years to see this happen,” he said, referring to a failed attempt by the community board in 1990, when he was a board member, to redesign the park.
Washington Square Park’s condition is beyond simple repair, Horowitz said. “It reminds me of the Mayan ruins, when you go to visit Tulum, near Cancun.”

The renovation plans remind him of the design that predated the Nichols design. “It pays homage to all the prior designs which Washington Square Park has had—and yet takes a look to the 21st Century by moving the Arch. To recognize the Arch, which was not originally there when the park was designed, is an integral and central part of the design. So by aligning them … it recognizes the reality of the 21st Century, provides a view up Fifth Avenue from the fountain.”

He said that he knows of “tens of thousands of neighborhood people” who want a redesign and have championed the current proposal.

The reason you don’t hear as much from supporters of the plan as you do from opponents is that, according to Horowitz, they’re not as loud, and they’re too busy working and taking care of their families to constantly attend meetings. “The other side seems more at liberty for some reason … to come to every meeting and make themselves look like they represent great numbers of people. They do not.”

He thinks there’s nothing wrong with a nighttime shutdown of the park either. One thousand people live in his co-op, including 50 children, Horowitz said. They’re not snobs, they just like to sleep at night, which is why they don’t find a 1 a.m. curfew unreasonable, he said. (Horowitz is also the spokesperson for Two Fifth Avenue.)

Although he has an “emotional attachment” to the park, he said that “virtually none” of his neighbors still use it because the other side is so “possessive” of it. The neighbors tend to take their kids to play elsewhere instead. And the person getting left out is “the ordinary tax-paying, hardworking citizen of the neighborhood.”

The concerns about privatization don’t add up in Horowitz’s view because the supporters of the conservancy idea want the conservancy to have an advisory role, but that’s it, he said. “There would be an advisory fundraising group, and not an ownership group, much like the Board of Education has some business partners. Like IBM might partner with the school. IBM doesn’t organize the curriculum. IBM doesn’t manage the school.”

He noted that originally, the park had a fence, and estimated that in the photos he saw, the fence looked to be between five-and-a-half and six-feet high. Horowitz thinks a fence is a good idea because it will “keep the property safe.” Plantings are being stolen from the park at night, and if The City puts millions into the redesign, he suspects these types of problems will matter to them much more than they do now, in the park’s current state of disrepair.

“I see the golden opportunity to get the park we deserve – late, but not too late.”

-- Matt Elzweig
melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Community Checks Out Parks Plan

2007-07-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 30, 2007

At a City Hall meeting of the Washington Square Park Task Force on July 26, John Krawchuk, the Parks Department’s Director of Historic Preservation, presented the department’s Phase One drawing and took questions from the task force and the public. The proceedings were set up to begin determining, specifically, whether the Parks Department’s plans were in compliance with all the provisions of the Gerson-Quinn agreement.

Due to ongoing litigation, there were questions Krawchuk could not answer.

Members of the public were instructed to write their questions down on index cards and pass them up to the front, where Community Board 2 Parks Committee chair Tobi Bergman read them.

Later in the meeting they were allowed to walk up to drawings and examine them.

The Parks Department will make the Phase One plans available to the public from Monday, July 28, through Friday, August 3. They will be viewable by appointment at the department’s Manhattan Borough office, though Gerson urged the department to make the plans available at the American Institute of Architects near Washington Square Park during this period.

Mary Johnson of the Washington Square Block Association and Gerson raised questions about whether Phase One plans for the plaza that surrounds the fountain were in compliance with the 10 percent maximum reduction in space specified in the Gerson-Quinn agreement. However, that matter is still being determined.

The agreement sets the height limit of all sidewalk perimeter fencing at 4 feet, but Krawchuk said that including the base supports, the sidewalk fences will range from 4 feet 3 and 7/8ths of an inch to 4 feet 5 and 7/8ths of an inch.

A follow-up meeting will be held on Monday, July 30, at NYU, from 6:30 – 8 p.m., in the Great Room, 19 University Place.

-- Matt Elzweig
melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Book Review: "After Dark" by Haruki Murakami

2007-07-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

“After Dark”
Haruki Murakami
Alfred A. Knopf
Hardcover ($22.95)
191 pp.

By Matt Elzweig

Like the characters in his latest, brief, novel, “After Dark,” and the fluctuating realities they inhabit, Haruki Murakami is hard to pin down. In one breath, whether through his work or in interviews, he comes across as shy, sensitive and vulnerable, his passions for jazz and rock n’ roll, endearing in their nerdiness. In the next, he seems grandiose. His words start to scrape the borders that separate sincerity from pretension.

In a 2002 Japan Times article, Murakami talks about his commitment to readers. “I answer my readers’ e-mails … I read about 100 per day, and I write 10 to 20 replies … I think it’s very important for me to read the words from my actual readers, the ones who pay money to buy and read my books.” But in that same interview, he makes statements like this one, from a 2005 International Herald Tribune article. “I went to New York myself, found an agent myself, found a publisher myself, found an editor myself … no Japanese novelist has ever done such things.”

He often presents himself as a rebel pitted against the Japanese literary establishment, and when he says, in the Japan Times article, that Japanese critics don’t like him, he’s not kidding. They don’t appreciate his constant references to Western, especially American, pop culture. They hold his unusually straightforward, stripped-down prose in low regard. And probably see his psychodrama as psychobabble, his sentences more like pop lyrics than literature.
Whether he created this controversy or they did, is a good question, and Murakami offers one partial explanation: that due to the popularity of “Norwegian Wood” (1987), his breakout novel, he could never be considered a “literary” author again. “Most critics don’t like bestselling writers … In the West … my books sell very moderately. So readers there think of me as a kind of cult writer,” the way they used to in Japan.

Murakami’s strength is shining the light of his imagination on eccentric characters in dark landscapes, usually urban ones, and pulling everything – the superficial, the practical, the subconscious thoughts – out of their heads to articulate his ideas and questions, and leaving just enough unanswered.

But while his formidable knowledge of and fondness for Western pop culture gives Murakami, the person, a geeky charm, his pop references are transparent and get in the way of the imagery and dialogue, and everything else that makes his books unique. (“Only the area around the man’s desk receives illumination from fluorescent lights on the ceiling. This could be an Edward Hopper painting titled ‘Loneliness.’”) In a book just under 200 pages, these interruptions become more distracting.

The intersection of strangers and the way fate and free will (if you believe in either) egg each other on, both Murakami staples, always have the potential to make for an absorbing read, and this one’s not bad. It’s not great either.

Just before midnight, a young musician named Takahashi walks into a Tokyo Denny’s and sees Mari Esai, the sister of a girl he went on a date with once, and sits down with her. Mari, a student majoring in Chinese, is the awkward brain to her sister Eri’s superficial model.
The scenes, written from the perspective of a camera lens, are undermined by a screenplay treatment-like narration. Murakami could have written them in conventional third person to better effect.

When Eri is introduced, she’s shown, frame-by-frame, trapped in what seems to be some kind of parallel universe.

Eventually, Takahashi leaves the restaurant. But when one of his friends, the manager of a “love hotel,” finds a Chinese prostitute beaten in one of the rooms by an unknown assailant, they bring Mari over to translate. After they identify the attacker, a “salaryman” (or office worker), working late in the area, in a surveillance photo, they give it to the victim’s pimp.

What’s most satisfying about “After Dark” contradicts what is perhaps the Western media’s most common criticism of Murakami, which amounts to a naked emperor argument – that his books are high on vague metaphysics, and atmosphere, but low on substance.

But in this one, he explores an idea he has played with before, that a kind of moral dualism exists – a fluid border between kindness and cruelty, darkness and light. “There really was no such thing as a wall separating their world from mine,” Takahashi explains, remembering defendants in criminal trials he attended as a pre-law student.

“Or if there was such a wall, it was probably a flimsy one made of papier-mâché. The second I leaned on it, I’d probably fall right through and end up on the other side. Or maybe … the other side has already managed to sneak its way inside of us, and we just haven’t noticed.”

Just before three a.m., the salaryman is back at work. He has just beaten up the prostitute and skipped out without paying for her or the room, and is speaking to his wife on the phone; picking up a carton of low-fat milk on the way home will be no problem at all.

In Tokyo, residents talk constantly about when the “big one” is coming – the earthquake equal to or worse than the 1923 earthquake that killed over 100,000 people in the Kanto region. Who knows if earthquakes are the inspiration for Murakami’s often unstable world? But what could be less stable than a chain of islands on four tectonic plates, where change occurs in an instant?

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Q & A with David Muñoz, a.k.a. Story Man, Hip Hop Artist

2007-07-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 23, 2007

A young man with a bag of CDs and a pair of headphones approaches me in Washington Square Park, and asks if I listen to hip hop. I tell him not much anymore, and he’s not surprised.
David Muñoz, 28, who came to New York from his native California two years ago, sells his albums in Washington and Union Square parks, and markets them as a positive alternative to the brainless bling anthems that mainstream radio and music channels like BET keep in heavy rotation.

“Nowadays, a huge percent of the hip hop that people see in the mainstream is, just garbage. It’s just all about, you know, look at me throw money up in the air while half-naked women dance behind me and I drink a bottle of Cristal and show you all the jewelry I own, or I rented. But there’s still a few guys out there that are real good. And, they just don’t get pushed as well as they should, because of the belief the record company executives have that people want these buffoons, these fake thugs or whatever. But I think that with hip hop record sales going down in the last few years, it’s just a matter of time before the record executives see that they’re going to have to change. Because hip hop doesn’t suck. It’s just that, unfortunately, the image that hip hop has in the mainstream kind of sucks,” he says, when we meet in a coffee shop the following week.

Muñoz’s latest album isn’t political, but his music often is, which makes sense; he studied Government at Georgetown, led student walkouts over standardized testing when he was still an English teacher at his old high school, and in 2004, he ran for Congress as a write-in candidate.

How’d you end up running for Congress?

I was working on an album that was very political, talking about my whole marketing of it. I said, I’m going to be on the cover in a tie, like a politician. And then, one of my friends, he said, maybe you could like run for something, school board or something. I was like, I wouldn’t want to go for school board, I think I’d be wasting my time. And then I said, well I am 25, I could run for Congress. I found out it was too late to get on the ballot, but I could run as a write-in candidate. I liked that because it was highlighting how the way people vote is kind of like taking a multiple choice test. You don’t have to know the person or what they’re about. You just check the box off. As a write-in candidate—every person that voted for that candidate would know that person and know they really wanted that person.

Did you get any votes?

Like a couple hundred.

How do people respond when you approach them in the parks?

I get a great response because it’s just going directly to the people. It may not be, in the eyes of most people, the most glorious way to go about doing it. [But] it’s the most effective way because there’s a lot of people out there that still do listen to hip hop music. And I go out there every day and just find them without having to cross my fingers and hope they walk into a store or somehow find out about it on the Internet. It’s a way to be a cause rather than be the effect. Even if my stuff was in the stores and the Internet was helping me tremendously, I’d still be out there doing it. I get to meet the people that are going to listen to my music and they get to [meet] me.

You do it full-time?

Yup.

About how much do you make a month?

It depends on the weather, depends how much time I’m out there. But I can make anywhere from $20 to $60 an hour.

And what’s the most CDs you’ve sold in a month?

Maybe like 800. And total, I’ve sold, probably around 7,000 to 8,000 CDs.

How old are the people buying them?

Oh, all ages. I’ve had like 90-year-old women buy my CD. In a wheelchair.

Do you ever run into people who are skeptical that hip hop can be positive?

Yeah, but those are people that don’t listen to hip hop.

Are you happy just being your own boss or are you hoping for a record deal?

I would like to be my own boss as long as I’m making money at it. A lot of these guys who have record deals aren’t necessarily very free, and are almost like slaves to their masters. I would definitely go for a record deal as long as it was the right terms and somebody I respected, and they let me keep a lot of creative control. I wouldn’t want them to tell me to like, make songs like 50 Cent or something. Because I had that happen to me.

Really?

When I first got to the city, I ran into these guys in Union Square Park, and then they took me over to this guy’s office. He said, I want to sign somebody and invest millions of dollars. But, he says, two artists sold ten million albums this last year or whatever it was—Alicia Keys and 50 Cent. Then he starts playing me 50 Cent’s CD. And he said, yeah! Like this! like this! He didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. And he wanted me to go get buffed and make songs that weren’t political and sound like 50 Cent or something, and then he probably would’ve went for it. I wasn’t willing to do that.

—Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

The Block: Fourth Street between Second Avenue and Bowery

2007-07-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 16, 2007

At first glance, Fourth between Second and Bowery is yet another idyllic, but typical slice of East Village pie: lots of charmingly grimy to just grimy tenements, and a handful of trees that keep out the sun’s harshest rays and hide some of the local blemishes – mixed in with a sprinkling of storefronts gutted and turned into chic Boomer boutiques to top off the graffiti.
But this block is more than boarded-up windows and fire escapes. It has a rich past and present as both birthing and staging ground for New York theater, especially the experimental kind. It is now the “East Fourth Cultural District,” but it almost wasn’t.

In the 1960s, East Fourth Street was slated for “renewal,” along with eight other blocks east of Bowery, in a Robert Moses plan that really amounted to a full-scale demolition of what
proponents considered a “slum area,” to make way for large-scale housing.

By the mid-70s, the city had taken over all of the commercial buildings and many of the residential buildings in the area through eminent domain and tax lien foreclosures.
Artists, who already had a historical presence on the block, did their own renovations, but there was no official designation to protect and preserve the block’s character.

Fourth Arts Block (FAB) is an alliance of the 15 arts and community organizations based here. FAB negotiated with the city, and in October 2005, the city sold six buildings to cultural groups for one symbolic dollar-a-piece, and allocated the initial capital for renovations.
After the buildings then went through the city’s land use review process, all six received permanent nonprofit status; East Fourth between Second and Bowery became the “East Fourth Street Cultural District.”

What Happened Here

The famous La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and its annex are both here, and number 66 (the annex) was actually a center for the turn-of-the-century German immigrant community, and was also the first Yiddish theater in the city.

Ellen Stewart founded La MaMa (number 74A) in 1961. The focus has always been on new works, especially projects developed and produced by collaborating artists from a diverse mix of ethnic backgrounds and nationalities.

New York Theater Workshop (79) is another venue for original works, and its founder, Stephen Graham, created it in 1979 as an alternative to the commercial theater world, where new playwrights and directors could house their works-in-progress. Eventually, finished works received the same attention, but the emphasis on experimental productions remained. New York Theater Workshop is where Jonathan Larson premiered Rent in 1996, after developing it in the workshop program for two years.

Other arts centers on the block include Duo Multicultural Arts Center (62), which showcases Latino playwrights, actors and directors, and KGB Bar (85), a literary venue that used to be the Ukrainian Labor Home, a social club for Soviet sympathizers. KGB’s upstairs area was once Lucky Luciano’s Palm Casino. Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company; Choices Theatre Project; Downtown Art; Instituto Arte Teatral Internacional; Millenium Film Workshop; Rod Rodgers Dance Company; Teatro Circulo and Wow Cafe Theatre are all here, too.

Renting

The buildings on this block are mostly tenements, and according to Rana Maneri, a Sales Associate at Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy none of the rentals, which are in numbers 57, 63, 65, 69, 71 and 77, are currently on the market. Maneri says that the rentals are primarily rent-controlled or stabilized, and that the average price for a small one-bedroom is $1,995. Two years ago that figure was closer to $1,550.

In 54, 74 and 84, studios start at $1,750, and a lucky few can find one-bedrooms for the same price.

There’s a line of large two-bedrooms in 54 that are convertible to threes. They rent for $3,800.

Buying

On July 7th, a one-bedroom in number 99, a pre-war built in 1930, sold for $690,000. The maintenance there is $700, and an available one-bedroom is listed for $675,000. The maintenance is $770. One-bedrooms in this building range in size from 1,000 to 1,100 square feet.

Other sale properties include a condo development at 72-74.

Amenities

There are two small markets, one in the middle of the block, and one on the corner of Second Avenue. The Fourth Street Food Co-op is here as well, as are Cuppa Cuppa Coffee House, Stillwater Bar & Grill, Phoebe’s Tavern & Grill. East Village Music Store is under KGB Bar and sells used and new instruments. Keshav Music Imports specializes in Indian instruments.

-- Matt Elzweig

Book Review: “Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age – In South Korea’s Prisons”

2007-07-09T07:49:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 9, 2007

“Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age – In South Korea’s Prisons”
By Cullen Thomas
Viking
Hardcover ($24.95)
347 pp.

I’ve often wondered whether I’m the only one who has difficulty staying focused on books or movies that take place entirely in one setting—in a mental ward, on a bus, around a kitchen table, or maybe in someone’s office—or whether it’s a consequence of being born in a generation whose members expect images to flicker and flit along in from them just as quickly as they arrive on screen. I suspect it’s a combination, something both organic and circumstantial.

Whatever the cause, if the action isn’t packed-in, the characters aren’t larger than life, and the dialogue doesn’t snap, crackle and pop, drones like us float off into a parallel universe.
Prison stories can be difficult to bring to life, because like prisoners, and so many plays, they are usually confined to one, narrow setting. They seem to beg for flashbacks. Otherwise, all that’s left, in many cases, are the innovative methods inmates devise to pass notes, smuggle in contraband and fashion weapons from common items. For the most part, Cullen Thomas avoids this in his memoir of spending much of his twenties in a Korean prison.

After getting caught sending himself hashish from the Philippines, Thomas, then a 23-year-old English teacher in Seoul, receives a three and a half-year sentence and serves all of it. He is from the generation, a.k.a “Generation X,” just before mine. But his initial impulse to leave his recently-graduated slacker’s life in New York, for South Korea, sounds like it’s motivated by the same restlessness, that perceived-need for constant stimulation, that characterizes many of my generation. It also characterizes his vision of the vagabond’s unburdened life. And he sets out for Asia, delighted at the prospect of resurrecting the “Jolly Marauder,” an alter-ego he and his brother created when they were kids, “a kind of half-pirate, half-noble adventurer.”

After his unsuccessful foray into drug-trafficking (he is successful in concealing his intent to distribute from the prosecutor, and spares himself more time), Thomas gets a preview of what prison could mean, during an interrogation, when an agent zaps him with what sounds like a cattle prod, and a prosecutor urges him to confess to avoid a 10-year sentence. But the mini-electrocution is not characteristic of his overall treatment, unless Thomas is leaving out other instances of physical abuse; during the interrogation, Thomas realizes for the first time, the relative privileges an American in a foreign country, in legal trouble, enjoys with the local authorities. “The agent at my side says nothing; he just sits there and menaces … I’m lucky that’s all it is. A Korean would have been beaten; other foreigners were, and worse.”

But being American doesn’t exempt him from the underlying codes of behavior that govern the prisoners’ lives. Confucianism, with its emphasis on keeping appearances, respecting elders and maintaining hierarchies, applies just as it would on the outside.

When Thomas erupts after a gangster cutting his hair takes off more than Thomas expects, the gangster, exasperated, replies that “prisoners heads are shaved; it is prison law.”

“That the Koreans didn’t rebel much I understood. I’d been observing their Confucian codes and the ways in which they were intensified in prison. Those codes were strong on obedience, acquiescence, hierarchies that the Koreans couldn’t escape. They were bound together by strong ropes of pride and shame,” Thomas writes.

As Westerners must adapt to collective societies like Korea, it’s doubly so for prisoners there, judging by his experience. “Shame, success, blame, and punishment were shared by all.” While foreign prisoners are held in single cells, Koreans live squeezed together in theirs. Although not all the foreigners are Westerners, to Thomas, this set-up reflects their respective cultures.
During his stay at the Seoul Detention Center, and then at two prisons after his sentencing, he is subjected to sleep deprivation; life in tiny one-man cells, where prisoners stay for 23 hours a day; exposure to the elements; polluted water and generally unsanitary living conditions, minimal nourishment; inadequate medical care and serious limits on communication with the outside world.

But Thomas concedes that despite everything he has to endure, he’d rather do his time in Korea than in the United States. “If I had to be imprisoned, it was my good fortune it was in Confucian Korea … No doubt my life [in an American prison] would have been more comfortable in many ways … but also seedier, I’m pretty sure, more decadent, and more dangerous … In Korea I didn’t have to constantly think about my survival, about being raped or assaulted.” He thinks it also because of Korea’s homogenous prison population. “Korea’s one race has been marinating in a code of behavior and propriety and well-defined roles for centuries … [America has] no uniform code. It’s a cauldron of competing codes … some brilliant life gets born out of her complexity and chaos. But so do some scary prisons.”

His fellow inmates, some of them his friends, include killers, thieves, gangsters and rapists. They help him accept that he is a convict and a prisoner, and to understand how to make his time as bearable as possible. Once an English major at the State University of New York at Binghamton, the classic books family and friends send him add to his understanding of the situation he’s in, and of himself. The textual references he makes are appropriate, and there are just enough of them to enhance the details without sounding pretentious.

To get more time outside of his four-foot-wide cell, Thomas eventually elects to work in an on-site shoe factory, and he becomes a basketball star on the factory team. Work, basketball and teaching English keep him sane, and his outlook gradually transforms. He appreciates his old life more, his family and friends. And instead of rage, he begins to feel acceptance, and even at times, opportunity – the opportunity to face himself, and to see a part of Korea few foreigners seeking to understand it ever get to. Having spent formative years there, he is more mature and more thoughtful.

He brings up the idea that Confucianism is behind the various things he observes, so often that, at times, it’s hard not to wonder whether he’s over-generalizing, and whether more complex forces, either by themselves or in concert with Confucianism, are at work.

Thomas is at his best when describing what’s going on inside his head, the prison friendships he forges, which would probably be unthinkable anywhere else (one with an American child-killer comes to mind), and keeping everything in context.

There are moments, descriptions of the routines of his monotonous captivity that may make The Latest Generation antsy. But all in all Thomas provides a credible account of a worst-case scenario with a good mix of flashbacks, anthropological observations and self-analysis.

It would be easy to write off Thomas as a privileged kid from the suburbs who has committed a frivolous, unnecessary crime, and after all, is serving three and a half years, in a place where many others will never see the outside world again. But as he points out, referring to Nazi concentration camp survivor’s Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” “suffering in a man is like gas in an enclosed space; regardless of the volume of gas, a little or a lot, it will spread out to fill the space evenly,” and “each man … regardless of how his fate,” matches “up with the rest,” feels “his [suffering] painfully and intensely.”

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Q & A with Jane Slotin, Director, Makor

2007-07-09T07:45:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
July 9, 2007

“Makor” means “source” in Hebrew, and is the 92nd Street Y’s cultural center for twenty and thirty-somethings and Baby Boomers. Makor is moving to Tribeca this fall, and one thing Director Jane Slotin really likes about the sprawling new Hudson Street location is its accessibility from other parts of downtown, New Jersey, Brooklyn and the Upper West Side.

Why the move, and why the new location?

A lot of it had to do with our constituents. There was a time when the Upper West Side was definitely full of lots of young singles. And, as you know, Brooklyn has become a big hot spot, as well as downtown.

Does the move mean that young singles, particularly young and middle-aged Jewish singles, are migrating downtown from West 67th Street?

That’s part of the reason, because it is true, the Upper West Side’s gotten a little more family-oriented. But what we find with our programming, and I think it’s true for young professionals in their 20s and 30s, they will follow the event.

What types of programs are among the most popular?

Makor Music is probably our signature program. As you may or may not know, Norah Jones got her start there. Also, I think music, in terms of programming itself, is more universal. Our film program is also a heavy signature for us. We’ve previewed films for film companies, or HBO—the Marx Brothers is a very popular series—[we have] various film festivals. We do our “Reel Jews Film Festival” every year, which is quite popular. Every one of our films has a talk with it.

With all these areas, how do you stay current and select the kinds of things that appeal the most to the crowds you tend to draw?

We stay ahead of the curve. And our job is to really know what the next trend is, what is going to happen, what people are going to be talking about… And it kind of infuses what the staff does… [Programmers] mix it up. If there’s going to be a certain theme that’s going across some of the theater readings that we’re having, we try to get that kind of art or lecture to go along with it.

The 92nd Street Y values pluralism and encourages both Jews and non-Jews to attend its programs. Do conflicts ever arise when you hold talks and give classes about Israel and the rest of the Middle East?

It’s what we do best. We’ve done both the pro and the con of what’s happening over in the Middle East. We’ve done it through documentaries, we’ve done it through series. And that’s part of the talk element that makes our programming strong. It’s just—mix it up, and you get people talking, and you have a lot of pro and con. I get a lot of calls, sometimes there’ll be something, something might be too pro-something, and you get “how can a Jewish organization do this?” And it’s really our obligation to keep opening up, and to have passionate patrons who come, that leave discussing and thinking, and having a new way of looking at it. And we show all sides. We don’t have a party line.

Can you estimate the proportion of Jews to non-Jews in your programs?

Different programs have [a] different mix. But I’d say overall, it’s 60 percent Jewish, 40 percent not.

How do you balance the value you place on pluralism and dialogue with the desire to maintain a Jewish identity?

It’s about talking afterwards, you know, having that discussion that comes along. So, you can have someone like Tony Kushner come speak. He has a new film out. It’s not so new now. But, we showed it, and [it’s] all about his life and putting together “Angels in America.” But one thing about Tony Kushner, he’s very political. So then we talk back. We can say ‘so what (italics)are(italics) your feelings about Israel?’ Or, he might have talked about his family when they were growing up Jewish. So that’s what we’ll talk about. But we talk about it in the context of the art, or the event, or the program.

We have a yoga class, and the yoga teacher talks about the fact that the Kohans used to meditate also… When “The Passion [of the Christ]” came out, the film, we would take groups, and we’d come back and we’d talk. And sometimes it would be a rabbi and someone from a Christian organization… We don’t have an agenda… We want you to think.

What activities and programs are popular with the Baby Boomers?

Well first of all I do want to say, the Y actually started the Daytime @ program, five years ago. And so now where “Baby Boomers” are on AOL, and shows up on every ad, and almost every third article, again, the Y was very ahead of the curve on this. They [committed] and actually created programming that addresses what we call the “Rehire, Retire, Rewire,” transition part of life for Baby Boomers.

What draws so many musicians to Makor’s music club?

When Makor started, it was a venue for artists, a lot of them who didn’t have a place to play in. It was really when world music was becoming popular. And there weren’t a lot of venues. And Makor was a home for that. And Makor really, I would say in the beginning, was about much more the new, the emerging, the undiscovered. Now, a lot of the bands that started at Makor, musicians that didn’t necessarily have [any] other [option] for that kind of venue, now play all over New York. And when you are known for those kind of signatures, then [there are] more people who are calling you up. And we don’t just fill the space. We actually program it, and that makes a big difference.

—Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Dead Air: Downtown Webcasters Join Mass Protest Against Royalty Hike

2007-07-02T07:46:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

July 2, 2007

Internet radio stations across the country were quiet for 24 hours on June 26th. The small Webcasters who participated in the “Day of Silence,” to protest a federal ruling that increased royalties on the music they play, argue that the increase is unacceptably high and threatens to keep them offline forever. A coalition of Internet radio stations called SaveNetRadio organized the event.

“Small Webcasters” are defined by the Small Webcaster Settlement Act of 2002 as those with $1.25 million or less in revenues.

For SoundExchange, the performing rights organization that collects the royalties, and that proposed and negotiated the increase, the payment is long overdue and will compensate artists and copyright holders for providing products that are rightfully theirs.

In May 2007, SoundExchange made small Webcasters an offer, which would decrease the rates set by the Copyright Review Board (CRB) with the revenue-based ones they paid from 2003-2005, which set royalties for small Webcasters at 10 to 12 percent of revenue.

Tribeca Radio, East Village Radio and WNYC2, the public station’s 24-hour classical stream, all participated in the day-long hiatus.

As the composer of the “Nobody Beats the Wiz” jingle for the now-defunct electronics chain, which Biz Markie based his 1988 hit “Nobody Beats the Biz” on, and which was later featured in a popular “Seinfeld” episode, Tribeca Radio founder Leigh Crizoe is no stranger to royalties. But he says SoundExchange is asking for way too much. “Look, I’m a musician, I’m a writer too. So yes, I want to get paid when my music’s played… But make it a fair price. Let the big guys pay the most money.”

With his son, Shaune Velazquez, and his partner, Rhio, Crizoe runs the station out of his home on Hubert Street.

Crizoe created Tribeca Radio a year and a half ago in response to what he saw as a lack of choices and quality in the mainstream media.

As a music producer, Crizoe saw a “vacuum.” That is, he couldn’t get the records he produced played on mainstream stations.

Crizoe says there was a time when a producer could visit a DJ directly to promote his records. But eventually, the DJ lost the power to choose what was played, and it became the program director’s choice. That power was gradually given to consultants, who began to select programming for specific formats, with an individual consultant deciding what music anywhere from 40-100 stations could play. Today giant corporations like Clear Channel, which, according to its most recent annual report, owns 1,176 U.S. radio stations, control most of what DJs play. And Crizoe says the four major record companies – BMG, Sony, EMI and Universal – have drastically reduced the number of independent labels, which he says numbered in the hundreds ten to fifteen years ago.

Crizoe thinks the same thing is happening with Internet radio. “The same big guys who [ate] up all the … little record companies, and the same huge broadcasters, have gotten together, and they’ve decided to put Internet radio out of business by making the royalty rates that we pay to play music, literally, unconscionable.”

He finds it unfair that on-the-air stations don’t have to pay royalties for sound recordings, and says the way they pay the publishing rights organizations – ASCAP, BMI and SESAC – is the way Internet radio stations should be charged. “It’s negotiable. It’s not designed to put them out of business.”

Publishing rights is another area he knows about firsthand because he and Velazquez were once in the business of collecting publishing royalties for Latin artists, by acting as their liaison to ASCAP and BMI, in the days before the Latin divisions of the major record companies were significant portions of their business. (On the day we meet, Crizoe mentions that a BMI check earned from those days just arrived in the mail.)

Internet radio is full of possibilities, Crizoe says. And he wants to get advertisers, and provide a forum for beginning broadcasters, so that he can develop their shows until they’re good enough, he hopes, to be picked up for syndication, or to be recruited by big radio stations. And if any of them are, Crizoe will get to be their show’s agent for a specified period of time.

Velazquez is planning to set up an antiques and historical items-type business in another part of the space Tribeca Radio is housed in to raise money, so he can market the station more aggressively.

But Crizoe is nervous because Tribeca Radio is funded by his outside investments, and the station accepts donations, but is currently making no money. Last year he spent over $50,000 to run the station for streaming costs, errors and omissions insurance (for potential lawsuits related to show content), and equipment. Crizoe owns the building the station is in, and the studio is in a space that was once a source of rental income.

And he’s afraid that if the new rates are allowed to stand, he’ll be forced to make some serious programming compromises to avoid going completely under. He says that he’d have to stop playing mainstream music completely, and hire a full-time employee to make agreements with independent artists and copyright holders that would waive their SoundExchange rights. And if SoundExchange overruled him, he’d have to switch his programming to all talk.

“In other words, they want to be my partner.” And since he hasn’t made any money yet, “they want 10-12 percent of my losses,” he says, referring to the 10-12 percent that SoundExchange will expect from him if he becomes a “commercial” Webcaster, under their new offer. “If I lost $100,000, that means they want $10,000 to $12,000 … the government doesn’t even do that.”

According to SaveNetRadio, the list of 103 Webcasters who participated in the “Day of Silence” on its site is only partial – that “tens of thousands of U.S. Webcasters” participated.

The new rates, which apply through 2010, were contested by Webcasters. But in March 2007, the CRB, which has jurisdiction in the matter, upheld the rates in a closed-door proceeding. It set July 15, 2007 as the date that Webcasters will have to be paid up by.

The rates were originally set in January 2006, and the judge’s ruling is retroactive. That means all Webcasters who paid the previous royalty rate for sound recordings will have to pay the difference for the past 18 months, a major contention among them that is being used to justify the claim that they’ll be out of business if these new rates are not nullified.

They are advocating legislation, the Internet Radio Equality Act, filed in the House of Representatives, this spring, by Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Don Manzullo (R-Ill.), that would vacate the CRB’s ruling and set standardized royalty rates for commercial Internet radio and other alternative platforms (satellite and cable radio, and jukeboxes).

In their ruling, the CRB rejected the Webcasters’ request that the rates be replaced with a revenue-based royalty structure, on the basis that it would be too difficult to ensure payment.
“You’d have to go in and audit them, and different people define revenue in different ways,” one reporter who is very familiar with the case explains in a telephone interview. “And what the judges said was that while they’re not necessarily against a revenue-sharing model … none of the parties who were in that proceeding proposed any solution that would overcome some of their concerns.” The source chose to remain anonymous because speaking to Our Town downtown without clearance is a violation of policy at the company the source works for, and there was no time for that.

Small, noncommercial Webcasters still pay the revenue-based 10-12 percent rate, the reporter explains, but are upset because under the new rate system, if they have beyond a certain number of listeners during an average number of listening hours, they will become “commercial broadcasters,” which will subject them to a fee structure that is calculated per performance, or the amount of times a song is played, and that number is multiplied by the amount of people listening to it. And that can really add up.

And even if they haven’t crossed over into “commercial” territory, under the new royalty system they will now have to pay a $500 per channel minimum, which many Webcasters are complaining they can’t afford. But the source points out that many of the small noncommercial Webcasters are members of Live 365, the largest Web radio network, and pay well over $500 for that privilege.

Currently satellite and Internet radio stations have to pay royalty fees for sound recordings, and publishing rights. Traditional, on-the-air stations only pay for publishing rights, but musicFIRST, a coalition SoundExchange belongs to, is lobbying Congress to require on-the-air stations to pay royalties for performance rights (the right to play sound recordings).

Richard Ades, a spokesperson for SoundExchange, claims that “more than half” of the Webcasters on the SaveNetRadio list are “noncompliant in general” with regard to paying royalties for the sound recordings they play. But, he says in a telephone interview, the large Webcasters are “pretty much compliant.”

Ades thinks the opposition has it all wrong and is spreading misinformation so they can keep playing artists’ and copyright holders’ (i.e. labels’) music for free, and making money off it in many cases. “We want the Internet radio to thrive. It’s important for all kinds of artists, a broad range of artists, the small artists … And frankly, there are a lot of new music platforms out there, and we support them all. We’re just saying the artists need to get their fair share of the pie.”

He says the “Day of Silence” was actually a good thing for the artists and labels that want the rate increase to stick, because it underscored their point in a way. “That is, without music, there would be nothing to build these radio stations and build these businesses.”

One thing he thinks people don’t realize is that SaveNetRadio is funded by The Digital Media Association (DiMA), whose board of directors consists of American Online, Apple, Live 365, RealNetworks and Yahoo! Not exactly a ragtag band of start-ups. “SaveNetRadio has testimonials from over 400 artists on their Web site,” Ades says. “Ninety percent of those artists have never received any royalties. And there’s two reasons. One, these people haven’t been played. Or two, they’ve been played, and these Webcasters have not reported and not paid them,” he claims.

To Ades, the Webcaster who installs software into his computer, plugs in a cheap microphone and starts playing music off his iTunes is a hobbyist. “Look, a lot of these operations … they would have to pay $500 a year to stream up to a [limited amount] of music. And that’s a reasonable amount to pay for a hobby. I mean, I don’t know what fishing costs. I think hunting costs like $1,800 a year, you know? It’s a hobby. But the artists are working very hard. They’re paying for music lessons, they’re buying instruments. They’re doing all kinds of things to perfect their craft, to perfect their art. Why shouldn’t they be paid?”

Ades thinks people have a sense of entitlement to music that doesn’t exist for any other product, and he thinks that all kinds of musicians and record companies are suffering because of it. “What’s being lost is the respect for the people who create the music.”

One common assumption is that on-the-air stations are exempt from paying royalties for sound recordings because to record companies, airplay is free promotion. And Webcasters argue that this freebie should be extended to the Internet since Webcasting has the same promotional effect.

Ades says the statistics don’t support the idea that traditional on-the-air radio stations are a promotional tool, and he says that on-air DJs don’t even mention artists and labels, for the most part. “Sales of music are way-way down.” On the net and other platforms, people consume music, but don’t purchase it, he says.

When asked about SoundExchange and DiMA/SaveNetRadio, the source familiar with the CRB proceeding says it’s important to take the facts and figures the organizations give “with a grain of salt [since] they’re all lobbyists” … “When SaveNetRadio says that they have X number of artists who are supporting them, you have to ask, are they professionals, people who are making a living by music? Or are they people who are sitting by their computer making music just because they like to, but they don’t depend on royalties to make a living? And are the large commercial Webcasters using the plight of small Webcasters in order to get rid of this decision so they don’t have to pay it either?”

One musician who can credit the Web with a lot of his recent success is Jonathan Coulton, a singer-songwriter (and happily-retired software designer) who lives in Brooklyn, and who’s developed a significant following through a combination of blogging, corresponding with fans, and allowing them to download, and also buy his music right off his Web site.

He’s also been able to promote his geeky brand of novelty folk-rock through Internet radio.
Coulton disagrees with the idea that SoundExchange’s rate-hike will help artists. “As an independent musician who doesn’t really get a lot of airplay, I’ve no doubt benefited greatly from Internet radio, and I depend on exactly these kinds of small-scale grass roots broadcasters to get my music out there,” he writes in an e-mail. “If they can’t afford to stay in business, I don’t see how the royalty hike is going to help artists like me at all.” (In fact, this reporter discovered Coulton’s music while listening to Pandora, one of the larger free Web radio services, when Coulton’s “First of May,” a song about having intercourse outdoors, came on.)

Coulton says that although he doesn’t “like to bash labels just for the sake of bashing them … it’s hard not to see this as another case of a frightened industry trying to muscle back some control.”

He notes that although Web radio services like Pandora play his music, he is not in the SoundExchange database, so he won’t benefit from a rate hike; Coulton would expect to find his name in the database, which is compiled from electronic play logs submitted to SoundExchange by cable and satellite subscription services, Webcasters and Satellite radio services, but when he checked it wasn’t there, and he had no idea why. “I suspect it’s an imperfect system … ;)”

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Q & A with Clayton Patterson, Artist, Author "Resistance: A Radical Political and Social History of the Lower East Side" (Uncut)

2007-06-25T14:33:00.000-07:00

An edited version of this interview with Clayton Patterson appeared in the Q & A section of Our Town downtown on June 25, 2007:

In his new anthology of essays and images, artist, writer and community activist Clayton Patterson looks at the events and figures that shaped the Lower East Side’s history. Several of the accounts were written by the players themselves.

When you left Alberta, Canada for New York in the late 70s, were you already focused on the Lower East Side in particular?

Well actually the way we got here was that, I had been a printmaker. And that’s … specialized area. I did lithography and etching. And so, that was kind of a rare field, and so, both Elsa and I came here as, I came here as a printer, to work in a print shop, a fine art print shop, to do like lithography and etching and stuff like that. So I had like a specialized sort of education, if you like, or work skill. And, so that kind of got us going and on our feet in terms of a job. And then, I learned about the Lower East Side. But I had been, got in to Soho early, and I was showing, and being successful—I really hated that world. So eventually I migrated over here. I mean, the whole world of Soho was kind of like about, you know, elitist, snobbery.

Even back then.

Oh yeah. Big time. Julian Schnabel, three of them out there, with their shirts off, smoking big cigars, flexing their muscles in front of the Art News. I mean it’s like I was saying “what kind of shit is this?” It was like a frat party or something.

Where was your print shop and where were you living?

We lived in Brooklyn for three weeks. And then we moved to Broome Street, which was part of the Lower East Side. That’s the same building that Keith Haring lived in, and he was a nice guy. And that was between the Bowery and Christie on Broome Street. And then we moved to the Bowery, because I had made so much sculpture that we had basically forced ourselves out of house and home. So I moved to this large space on the Bowery. And I was working for our landlord. I was like the manager of the building. So I would hook things up.

Because you always needed as much spare time as you could to do your art. So, but we saw the Chinese crossing Canal Street. And what that meant was, in the early 80s, was that, you know Hong Kong and Taiwan thought that they were going to be eaten up by Red China. So they moved out billions of dollars, and a lot of it came to these different Chinatowns. And you could just see this huge amount of money rolling across Canal Street. And then, Zaccaro was one example, [who had] a lot of real estate around there. And he sold a lot of it to—he was then married to Geraldine Ferraro—he sold a lot of it to the Chinese. And then, within a very short period of time, Little Italy almost disappeared, except for the stores on the front. But all the apartments they had above just became Chinese. And the Chinese purchased a lot of property.

And since we were on the Bowery itself, and were living in the big loft, which was actually a commercial space not a residential space, that meant that we were going to be forced out because of economics. So we spent a year trying to figure out where we’d want to live, and looking for a place. And eventually after going to 42 banks and whatever, because we had found this place, but it was very hard to get a mortgage, even in those days, even though this was like, one of the worst parts of the Lower East Side. Took a lot, but we finally got a mortgage, and so we bought a building and then we lived here.

What is it about the Lower East Side that fascinates you so much?

Yeah. I think the Lower East Side was like a complete melting pot. It was a collection of everything. You know one of the things you get with immigrants, is you get the whole population. So you get the geniuses and the retards, all together. You know? And you get the people who are ambitious—in all fields—crime, law, invention, writers, artists, the whole thing. And so, the Lower East Side always had a lot of rich qualities in its people. And then the other thing you had, because of that rich quality, and how diverse the culture was, because it was an immigrant neighborhood so you’d always have residual effects left behind. So the Irish would move out because they moved up, but something Irish would stay behind. The Germans would come, and they would go, and they would leave maybe the architecture. And then the Jews would come, and they would leave, you know, food and you know, theater, and all kinds of different parts—writers, newspapers and on and on. And then the Puerto Ricans would come, and then Dominicans would—so you would have this complex, huge anthill filled with all kinds of different and diverse cultures. And because of that, and the cheap rent, it was always an attraction for artists and creative people. So within this mix, in came all these artists and the creative people because of the cheap rent (italics)and(italics) that the flourishing multicultural aspect of the neighborhood. So it was an amazing place. It was like the Disneyland, you know, without the rules and restrictions and the Singapore attitude of Walt running the place.

What about the Lower East within the context of the rest of Manhattan?

Yeah, well I think two things … one is New York itself, all of New York, seemed like— you know the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island maybe not—but most of it was almost separate and different from the rest of America. You know what I mean? I say Staten Island maybe, because Staten Island tends to be a little bit more sort of conservative and like other parts. But the rest of it, certainly parts of Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, even, and Manhattan, had almost another world quality, almost like it was unique, like a country unto itself. And then when you got to the Lower East Side, you had an exaggerated view of all of that. You know, it was like a cornucopia of just, eccentricities and creativities and personalities and types of people, and, it was just a very rich environment. But it was basically poor.

And did it change you in any way, or did you fit right in?

Ah, I’m sure it changed me a lot! Probably. I mean if I was living in Calgary, I probably wouldn’t have gold teeth and a skull hat and … a long beard, I don’t know. But, yeah, definitely. It changed me tremendously because it was enriching. I mean I learned so much by being, just by being here, things that would, you could take, you know, numerous courses at university on, and still only superficially kind of material. When you’re here—I mean I’ve learned so much stuff firsthand, which is amazing. So it’s been a very enriching experience.

How was the writing process for "Resistance," different from your work on your last book, which was about the film and video history of the Lower East Side?

The major difference is, once it’s finished, the political people are anxious to get their message out to the world, so inclined to put together talks and book readings. Whereas the art people expect everything to be brought to them, which is different. They sort of see themselves in different ways. The political person wants to get the message out, the art person wants you to come to them for the message. So, what happens is, is that “Resistance” is getting a lot more activity and readings, and the events around it, just because of the political people.”

Now one of the really interesting things about “Resistance,” is I think it’s, for a radical political, social history, it’s probably one of the most unusual books ever. And the reason for that is, because of the wide cross-section of people. Like you go from having anarchists, really political radicals, publishers of radical newspapers, to the chief of police, and to a cop going to school to become a sergeant, as well as a homeless person. So you really get the whole wide cross-section of people. And each person makes their own contribution. Like, if you look at, for example, the cop, striving to become a sergeant, he wrote in the book, that because of the riot tape, it became acknowledged that that night was in fact a police riot. So that comes out of John Jay College. And also the fact that they changed after that to a paramilitary model. So even though they tell you that it’s community policing, the model that they’re following is a paramilitary one, which was a whole shift of training and thinking about police work in New York City. So that was complete change.

And then you have the homeless person, who talked about, they were in the park, the night of the riot, and the chief told them what part of the park they could stay in, which means that the police were not there to curfew the park, and to empty the park. The police actually were allowing the homeless to stay in there. So the mythology had always been that the police were there to kick out the homeless. Not true. They had had a conflict with the anarchists a week before, and the anarchists had basically chased the cops out of the park. And the next week they came back to kick ass, which, actually, the captain of the precinct at that time said “well we couldn’t let them win again,” whereas in fact they did.

And so, but you also get, like I say, the police perspective. And if you read like the policeman’s perspective of looking at the riot tape, it’s much different than your average person looking at the riot tape, because he does it from an analytical leadership position. And he’s obviously much more sympathetic to the police, and he didn’t think the police really did anything that much wrong. It was a leadership problem. Had the leadership been better, none of that would have happened. So he has a whole different take on the riot than let’s say the anarchists would. So you get all the positions. And then it goes back all the way to Dorothy Day and Emma Goldman. So it gives a broad history of the neighborhood.

…And you start off, you get to Lynne Stewart at the very beginning. She writes about her initial entry into being politicized. That happened at P.S. 64. That building has been going on in some sort of political struggle, one way or another, for like the last hundred years or whatever. And then somebody else writes about the next, the latest phase in Lynne Stewart’s life, which was being the attorney who was brought up on the treason charges or the terrorist charges. So you have a really wide-ranging group of people and experts in the book, quite a lot.

How did you find these contributors?

Well, because I’ve documented in the neighborhood for such a long time, and have been basically, all of the scenes that I’m doing the books on, are areas where I’m somewhat familiar with, like video and film. You know, I’ve documented parts of that for a long time as well as being involved in video for a long time. So, I pretty well knew at least an overview, where to go, who to go to, and who to kind of sketch out and find. And with the radical political history book, I mean I spent years being involved in Lower East Side politics, more street politics. So I understood the street and kind of the radical part.

So as far as your “involvement in Lower East Side street politics” is concerned, were you an actor or were you just documenting it all?

I think that there’s a reality to what’s going on. And it’s like, you know, when you’re documenting something, in a way, you try to be as unbiased as possible of course, because you want to get the overall picture. But on another hand, it’s kind of like being a reporter in a war. No matter what, you have to be somewhat sympathetic to the side that you’re with. You’re not going to go to Iraq and write all great things about the Iraqi soldiers and how terrible the Americans are. But there’s another part of it. It was also community. And since I’m a community person, I also took the community point of view, so that without question, I was also an advocate. So I was both. I was an activist and I was a documentarian. I started off as a documentarian. But after seeing what I saw as inequalities, and this march towards gentrification, which I saw as, and eventually got to see as sort of like an assassination of all of what I had come to know and love about New York City, was being erased. So I also became an advocate and an activist against the gentrification.

Were you part of any organizations?

No. No. Independent – doing videos, getting them into court -- always as an independent, 100 percent. Always as an artist. Always as an artist. The cops would like to call me an anarchist, but I didn’t follow you know, like Emma Goldman’s ideology, or any other anarchist’s ideology. I’m an artist and I’ve followed my own path.

You mentioned a march to gentrification, it sounds like it started long before the current buzz about gentrification downtown.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Can you tell me about that? And also, of the things people are kind of lamenting, things that have recently been lost to gentrification, how much is gone forever and how much is recoverable?

I think on a certain level it started out with Nixon. And there was a whole idea after the riots in the inner city…And the whole idea was to break up the inner cities … and [remove] all the energy and vitality that were in those places – it was like combustible, like a bomb. Okay? They saw, you know, it as a real force, like a power force. And so eventually—and the term “spatial de-concentration,” actually came out. And spatial de-concentration was about de-concentrating the inner city of the people. And so the idea sort of started to percolate. And then eventually, it got to the idea of, by Moynihan, “planned shrinkage.” Now planned shrinkage, means taking of the services of the inner city – fire department, the banks, cutting back on the cops, ambulances. And when you cut back all those services, it makes it, it stretches the, you know, the powers of the people and, as well as, you know, the budgets. So the services are way cut down. So a lot of people leave, and especially a lot of—and though it might be in quotes called “the good people with families” and trying to do better for their families or whatever … So they move on, just because it becomes too dangerous, and too critical. So you get this really kind of elimination.

And then you start getting the fires. And there’s, actually very little’s been written about the fires … A family called the Wallaces that wrote something about the fires. And they were considered sort of left wing wing-nuts. And then there was a person called Yuri Kapralov, who wrote about downtown, the fires in the neighborhood. And he wrote a book called “Once There Was a Village.” And then, so you had, Yuri wrote “Once There Was a Village.” And that was … a document about the fires. And then after the fires, and really as Vietnam was winding down, you get this huge influx of drugs. So then area became a drug area. So between kind of the lack of services and the drugs, those two combined to make, much devastation.

And then came the fires. And the fires were set by a number of people. Some of it was landlord arson, trying to get insurance [on] the building, and that was part of it. But there was also a part that many people leave out, and that was the people that—the residents in the building burning the building down, because if you were a fire victim, you then became first in line for the projects. So the projects were a very desirable place to live in those times, you know, elevators, nice views, big apartments…And plus they were scaled for the size of your family, whereas the tenements, everybody was jammed in.

So then by the time you get to ’88—and plus you then have this economic crunch in New York City, where it lost the tax base and everything’s collapsing. So by the time you get to the third term of Koch, you have Tammany Hall all over again, filled with criminals. I mean if you go through the indictments that came out of the Koch era, it was like, pretty enormous.
And then the riot tape showed you had police that were completely out of control. So, anarchy in the police department. No central organization, no control whatsoever, (italics) no authority(italics). And all that was shown in the riot tape. So they realize you’ve got to straighten out the police department. So who actually made those gross and enormous changes? – the person who really never gets recognized for it. Because by the time Koch left, the city has totally collapsed. I mean it was in ruin. You know, drugs everywhere. You know, the whole city was in chaos.

So Dinkins then was the person who started the reorganization of the police department. The first thing he did, one of the first things he did, formed the Mollen Commission. The Mollen Commission went in and started stripping down the criminality in the police department, and getting rid of it. So then you started having, you know, all of these drug-related cases dealing with different precincts. The 9th Precinct, for example, had their own chapter in the Mollen Commission. Then there was the Dirty 30, and you know, Michael Dowd and his sleazy crowd. And so you had all these different—and so they kind of did a generalizing cleaning up, which meant that a lot of the other precincts that were involved in criminality, like for example, the 7th Precinct and the 5th Precinct obviously was involved in drugs as well—But the example of the 9th, and the internal machinations cleaned a lot of that out. Like Chrystie Park over there, in the 5th Precinct, that used to be an open drug market, the whole thing. I mean from morning til night, hundreds, thousands—drugs were sold there daily.

So, then after the cleaning out of the drugs, next part of operation clean up the police department became the reorganization of the structure in the department following the paramilitary model. You know, one sergeant, six men. You know, they would, then, because of the riots and things that were happening on the Lower East Side…certainly between '88 and '92, a very political, active period, street politics and whatever. The police by 1992, were really pretty much reorganized. There was cops down here who really kind of were like on the street and then eventually, the initiators to get the task force moving in a protest, to deal with protests. And then you had an intellectual side that started feeling, figuring out laws and tactics to use, to give the police more authority. So you had like [one type] on the streets, getting the order, and then you had the [other] come in and start organizing the legal aspects of it, the nexus. And what’s the constitutional parts of it? So all these cops, in the 9th, this became a golden ladder. They all became chiefs. This was like the golden ladder to success.

But it changed the police department radically. And by 1988, the police could not close Tompkins Square Park. By 2001, they could close the whole city – bridges, subways, ferries, airports, tunnels, all the streets. And they could do it in a couple hours. They could shut the whole city down. And that was the difference of coming out of 88.

So, to get back to your question is, is that yes, so there is no heaven on earth. And when you lose one thing, you get something else to replace it. And the one thing, when you get rid of the drug[s], you know where the street’s in a complete corruption, it’s a good thing. But with everything comes a bad thing. And so what we end up with, is this taking out so many of the people in the neighborhood that used to be here. You end up having it become safe in a sense, so you get a real estate boom. And the real estate boom escalates the prices. And as the prices start going up, people realize, well you can get more for a bar in terms of rent, than you can for a candy store. So what they do is they sort of plan this area out as kind of like a New York NYU dorm kind of situation, and they ended being down here as an entertainment zone. So that entertainment zone also has a huge proliferation of bars, and bars’ll pay high rent. And each one of those bars is taking out what was often a family-owned business or a small business. And so you get this elimination.

The one thing you got with the destruction of the inner city was the loss of the individual landlord. And then you started getting these corporate takeovers, and these lawyer groups. And then by the time you get to this period, most of the buildings are owned by, you know, smaller groups of people, but large numbers of buildings. You then start getting the loss of the stores. So all these family-run stores, they get pushed out. And then eventually, you end up with just bars and expensive restaurants. So now you’ve lost your community, because all the community services, and all those mom and pop places, they’re all gone, for the most part. And all these new people are here with bars and restaurants and trying to make it and doing the best they can, and they’re working as hard as they can. But they’re not really part of the old neighborhood. So you got, everything is new. You’ve got the loss of services, and the loss of you know, mom and pop stores. And then you get a hoard of drunk people. So really what bars and restaurants do is they bring in a crowd. They don’t service a community. So all of a sudden you get thousands of people from somewhere else. So what you created for the drugs, you end up with this four in the morning screaming and people puking on the street, and all the rest of it.

So even though it seems safer, the hell side of it’s definitely a bigger hell, because at least with the drugs it was a neighborhood thing and you knew the people.

And so, and then you get the high cost of living and rent. And so, now you get a situation where all the people who were here before, will never be here again, because they can’t afford it. So, what that means in the end, and this is one of the reasons for doing the books, is that I believe, certainly in the Lower East Side and probably New York City, this is one of the most dramatic historically changing times we have ever lived through, but not only we have lived through, but the generations of people before us have lived through.

When the Slocum went down, which was a tragedy, and all the Germans, Christians moved uptown, there was a big influx of Jews. And the Jews that came in were kind of like the, the Germans that left because there were still the immigrants. And so, you know, the buildings remain the same, you know the ethnicity changed, but the population was pretty much the same struggling people, new people, poor people. You know all of the struggles were basically the same.

But with money, I mean it changes everything. It changes the zoning, it changes the kinds of buildings we have. We now have expensive hotels, and getting to be a number of them, luxury hotels.

What do you mean “with money”?

Well what happened was, this is the first time, the Lower East Side has ever really turned that economic corner, where the money has stayed. Like there were times in the past where like, let’s say on Avenue A—Ageloff Towers—that was like luxury building for that time. But then the Depression came. So it didn’t sustain the change…So now we have like this luxury building, you know the expensive hotels, the building across from Katz’s, here. You know these are like monstrous buildings with luxury. The Christadora was like a settlement house. That was like the big skyscraper down here. And so, that wa like human services. This is all about attracting people with money and making it luxurious, putting in hotels, that are luxurious. So the whole skyline has changed. The kind of people here have changed. And then, as you decompose the whole old neighborhood, it’ll never be back. Like people say, “well wouldn’t a dirty bomb do it?” Well a dirty bomb might lower the rent, but it won’t bring back the culture. Because the Lower East Side was like an anthill built on hundreds of years of culture, and little remnants remained. You know like the guy around the corner who sold the cardboard, boxes. You know, 92 years in the business. He’s gone. You know, Polish meat store, 52 years in the business. That now is closed. All of those people were sort of diamonds on this, this ring of jewelry, this necklace. Well now it’s all new. So even if you bombed it and started over, you don’t have that history, that culture, the resources to resources to reach back to.

Okay, but weren’t those people like the newcomers of their time?

Oh they were. But they were poor and struggling and new. You know, I mean, how many years did it take Lebewohl to make [the] 2nd Avenue Deli. You know, we didn’t have large, luxurious hotels coming in here. These are like little small mom and pop places. That guy, you can’t come here and be that butcher anymore, because there’s no way you can pay that price and be the butcher. The butcher had to move because he couldn’t afford it. So what’ll go in there’ll be a bar or a restaurant. So yes, some of those people were there before, but the new people can’t come here and be that. They’re just too expensive. So you get Whole Foods instead of bodegas. You get, you know, Starbucks instead of Olympic Diner.

When you spoke about the 70s and 80s, and when you talk about now, it sounds like too extremes. Assuming you don’t want extremes, what’s the solution?

I don’t think there is a solution. I think that, you know, it’s like by saying I don’t think there’s a solution, what I’m saying is I’m not suggesting there aren’t things that can be done. But history makes its changes, and it’s slow and it’s progressive. And it’s that we’re moving way over to the right. And some of the things before, like around ’88, like some of the signs seemed like nonsense. “1988 = 1933” But 1933 was like the beginning of Hitler and all of that. And then, you know, “No Police State.”

Well what we’ve ended up with, is a form of fascism, and is a form of a police state. I mean now they’re taking out bicycles that are all being parked on 6th Street and just removing them all. If you go through a red light on a bicycle you can get a fine. If you don’t – you know Bloomberg, all of his punishments deal with money. If you don’t have a bicycle bell, if you don’t have a light on your bicycle. I mean all those little things are increments. And pretty soon, it becomes only about law, instead of having that flexibility that New York used to have.You know, and, so you end up with you know where you can’t ride bicycles in large groups of people. I mean there’s so many things now you can’t do. So, that becomes a burden because the New York—but the tradeoff is is it’ll lose its art and its culture, because, back to this changing period of time, everything that came before of us, in terms of the Lower East Side, basically everything was connected to no money, or cheap rent, or cheap food, or cheap restaurants.

You know, Jackson Pollock who lived down here at one time, he can’t be here again. So the guy making the drip paintings and changing art history can’t be here because he wasn’t making money making drip paintings for a long time. You know, Rothko, William Burroughs, I mean you know, he couldn’t be paying $2,000 a month from writing that book “Junky,” you know or Ginsburg with his poetry, or Emma Goldman with her political ideology, or Dorothy Day and her kind of anarchist Catholic position. You couldn’t have any of those things because they were all depending on cheap rent.

So almost so much of the genius that New York is known for, for all of its creative culture, it was all based—the premise was cheap rent. And so … we’re creating a wasteland of that kind of culture. It won’t be a city of great painters and that kind of thing, because it’s … never been that related to money until now. You know writers, being a writer, you know if you’re a great writer you know, you don’t start off with, you know, making millions of dollars. A lot of times people struggle for years to get noticed. So the long, hard struggle is going to disappear.

So, it’s almost at a point of, I would say to young artists, I would say don’t come to New York. This is not the place to be. You can’t—you know, working for these smaller papers. I mean at what point are these small papers not going to have journalists, because the journalists aren’t going to be able to survive, working with a small paper. So it really effects everything and all of us.

You know, it might be bullshit to Bloomberg that the subway fare goes up to three bucks, and that rent is $2,000 a month. But if you’re working for Our Town downtown or The Villager or the Village Voice or any of those independents, the subway going up to three bucks is brutal. You know, I mean it really is. I mean the fact that a sandwich, for lunch, is eight bucks, is brutal. You know the fact that the rent is 1500 bucks, it’s brutal. So that starts eliminating all of those things. So that changes. So what do we have to do? Do we have to have a rent-stabilized thing for the guy who works for downtown, or an artist? I don’t know. I mean it’s, eventually, you lose so much. And that’s the richness and the vitality of New York.

You’re saying we do need that, or you’re asking that question?

Well I’m asking that question because … I mean you’d have to have some sort of—I mean I think there’s two things. I think that everybody should own their own property. And with the amount of buildings there are in New York, I mean, the fact that these big, you know, monolithic corporations can come in and take over, like they did in Stuyvesant Town—you know those people should’ve been able to own their property. They should’ve been given first rights. Those apartments were apparently built for the military coming back. It was a social service, those buildings. That was the reason that those places were built…They should remain in the hands of the people, the people that live there should be able to buy their apartments. And if they could buy their apartments, then they would stay at the standard and level of where it is. But having this huge company come in and pay billions of dollars for it and take over, and then coming in with all of their scheming lawyers, and all their scheming management companies, they’re going to clear that place out. And they’re going to get rid of those people. So that’s wrong. There has to be a place for the people.

Your work over the years has been largely political and you’ve tried to remain objective. But what are your own political leanings?

I think that we should all be treated equally no matter what in the eyes of the law. I don’t think people should have need for a press pass for example, other than to get into certain places. But I think that the street should be free and belong to all of the people. I think that people deserve a fair and decent place to live, at a fair price. I think most people should be able to own their own homes. I think that there should be a lot of consideration for people who contribute to society, but sometimes their contributions take a long time to be observed and to be seen, like for example, artists and writers and poets, so that there should be some way of incorporating them into the society, in a way, that’s equal and fair. I think that you know, the arts and education shouldn’t be just geared towards trying to get people to make money. It should also be geared to what’s interesting and what people want to explore, and so that they themselves can become more whole and connected to who they are. I think that there should be you know, an opportunity for as many different publications and magazines and newspapers and that to exist.

You know I that there’s a lot of things that are kind of based in equality and the good life and what makes a meaningful and enriched life for the individual. I think the society should be more about individuals rather than huge corporations and international takeovers. I think we should get back to each person being able to be seen as an individual and make a contribution. That kind of ideal.

Sort of you know, along that lines, I guess you know, kind of a humanitarian point of view. And I that the, you know, the police and the other thing should be at the service of the people, not at the service of money. I think that everything once it gets to only relate to money, we lose our humanity. And so basically our consideration, we have to change our focus, from just money, to humanity.

How do you answer someone who says that’s utopian?

Well you know, the reality of life is is that there’s no heaven on earth. And like I say, every little thing that comes with a bit of good also comes with a bad. So you’re never going to find utopia, it’s just never going to happen. But I think that we can find things that are more fair for more people. And I think it’s the larger context of the people that’s more important, rather than a small group … over-exaggerated rights of a smaller group of people. What’s happening is is that we’re becoming a have and have-not society. And that’s not fair or equal to anybody. And that’s not really what America was about, where we should all be able to share somehow the bounty.

So all of a sudden you get a guy like Bloomberg, he makes billions of dollars, and he can buy being the mayor. And then he wants to make, to have fewer cars in the city so he’s going to charge everybody eight bucks to get in. Well everything is based on money in that equation…That’s not fair. That’s not equal. He might be a nice guy, but he’s cutting out a lot of people. You know, I mean it’s like, let’s say you’re living in Queens because you can’t afford to live in Manhattan, and you have a car, but you have press plates … it’d be eight bucks to get in the city. I mean after awhile it’s like Jesus Christ, why don’t we get it equal for more people. It has to be just—the glory has to be about more than just, money. And me. You know, it might be a little bit idealistic, but I mean we can get into the glory of us rather than just me, and the guy with all the money. Change the values a little bit. Loosen up.

You have a large place on Essex Street. Have you ever been approached by the big real estate companies?

Oh, all the time.

Really?

Oh yeah, sure, of course. Where would I go? I mean where would I go? I mean you know. I don’t know … I guess what’s happening is, on a certain level, it’s not me leaving New York. It’s New York leaving me, which is an interesting thing. And so, I’m lucky that I’m older, because I’ve now accumulated a large body of work. So I can now spend the next several years working on what I’ve done in the past if you like. You know I have an archive, art, all that stuff. But if I was a young person just starting out? Fuck, it’s brutal. I mean it’s brutal.

Let’s say you being a young guy writer. Maybe you also want to write books or whatever. I mean all of a sudden because of the money thing all the time … they’re only publishing like the Stephen King books, because he’s guaranteed. So all of a sudden you don’t have those explorers, and those adventurers, in publication, because everything now is tied to the goddamn dollar. Open up publishing again. You know, stop getting fixated on just the dollar, because you know all those people that used to do those independent City Lights and all those independent little small publishers [you had] before? They were trying to survive and make a living. But they weren’t trying to be the richest person in the country, and they weren’t trying to wipe out everybody else. It’s that fierce drive for only money that’s killing it. And for like yourself, I mean, how many publishers really are going to be around, even in a couple years, to independently publish? It’s now Stephen King or nothing. So that’s brutal. And then the bookstores. You know …pretty soon with this high economy and the bars and restaurant[s], we’re forcing out all the little book stores. It’s brutal.

And a lot of us are carrying lots of debt around too.

Lots of debt, I mean, Jesus Christ, when you think about it, NYU is like forty, close to fifty thousand dollars a fucking year to go to college? I mean, Jesus Christ. I mean, what kind of family has that kind of money? And you know, the kid’s not really sure what he wants to be, and most of those goddamn degrees don’t work you towards any sort of occupation or anything. Most of them are just sort of a learning thing. So you end up spending a hundred thousand fucking dollars or more, just to give your kid a little bit of education, and there’s nowhere where that education’s really useful…? And then, you know, when I was printing “Captured,” they wanted me to pay them six thousand dollars to publish the book? And they’re like one of the richest universities in the world?

What do you mean they wanted you to pay them?

[Another company] was supposed to publish it, and then they didn’t, and then it became a struggle of how are we going to get it published? So then I got it to NYU Press, and NYU wanted me eventually to give them six thousand dollars. And I said "wait a minute, here, all you need for a university is a tree, a guy with a book and somebody listening to the guy with a book."

You mean six thousand to recoup expenses, for anything you don’t sell?

I guess so. I don’t know… All I heard was, what are you kidding me?? I mean, you’re like the most, the richest university in the world and you’re asking me to give you money, so you can publish, a book? It’s like, wait a minute, I thought universities were about books? Oh, I get it. University now, NYU’s about money, property, renting dorms. It’s not about books. So it’s like, you know, am I wrong or are they wrong? I think they’re wrong. Their fixation is money. And you see that’s my point. So instead of facilitating something –and the university actually publishing—they wanted me to give them money. The university, do you know that all those dorms are the ugliest dorms downtown, the ugliest buildings? And when you think about it, they’ve put in no architects and creative people? And they’re putting up that kind of shit? And engineers. You know they’re not even using their own goddamn people. They’re only going by the bottom line and the bottom dollar. They’re not even contributing.

So when you ask me who could contribute and how could you change it, well tell that fucking university to start hiring their own people, and get some designers, and get some architects, and get some engineers, and at least if you’re going to take over the goddamn neighborhood, make a contribution in terms of aesthetics. Build a nice building. Is that asking too much of a university, is to give jobs to their own people to do that stuff? They’re training them, they’re spending a hundred and some thousand dollars to do it, and then they’re going to continue carrying on that debt because those assholes aren’t supporting anybody. It’s like what, is that about? That’s only about money and the bottom line. It’s not that it has to be utopian. They could make a goddamn contribution. Okay, if you’re going to be the big fucking fascist and pig in the neighborhood, and take over everything, throw something back. Make a nice building. I mean at least before, universities used to, in order to kind of express themselves as great institutions, they used to build great architecture. I mean I’ve never been to Harvard, but I’ve seen buildings … where you see all that old, glorious, sort of American, early, American architecture? It was grand. When they built the White House—it was grand. So now when these places are putting out those people, what do they turn it into?

Does NYU have a fucking community newspaper that they pay people to write for? Fuck no. They don’t do anything. They’re just a bunch of greedy fucking bastards that are trying to get money and take it all for themselves, to who knows what to do with? My point is, is that, it’s not that you’re asking to criminalize somebody, or for them to be communists and give it away. Make a contribution. Create a community newspaper and pay people to write for it. Design buildings. Do something with that.

Instead you’re taking all these people and getting them to accumulate all this debt, and in the end, these people walk away with a bag of debt and nowhere to go. It’s terrible. I mean think about it. What the fuck does NYU contribute? They’re a university for Chrissake. They should be supplying doctors to clinics down here. They’re not doing fuck all. That’s the problem. They’re not doing anything. NYU could make a fantastic contribution to the neighborhood. Instead they’re just sticking debt on people, kicking them out the door, and they’re brutalizing us and taking everything away. That’s wrong.

And the university would be better for it if they’d opened up. I mean Jesus Christ, they got—think about that. Here we are, starving down here for like, you know, inexpensive lawyers, doctors, teachers, you know engineers, architects, all of that stuff. And they’re pumping them out, and those guys can’t get jobs. It’s like, whoa, wait a minute here, something, wrong, with the program. Right? I mean, don’t you agree?

I mean, look what the contribution NYU could make to a neighborhood. Fuck, they got all kinds of experts over there. Instead all they’re doing is taking money. That’s all they think about—the money, the money, the money, the money, the money—Get the fixation off the money. That’s a solution. And that’s not taking away. That’s not, asking them to build free housing. That’s asking them to do something more for themselves and for your people.

Yeah, it’s kind of like a long-term gain, versus instant gratification.

Yeah, exactly. Instant gratification and just the money thing. I mean could you imagine if they had a clinic down here where doctors they could make you go on residencies? Instead of making those fucking doctors work twenty hours in a day, at some fucking hospital, where they’re you know, going nuts at, open up a few clinics in the neighborhood, and have doctors on a relaxed measure when they’re working for a full day and taking care of kids that are sick in the neighborhood. They’d learn lots about you know, disease, and about alternative situations, in a place like the Lower East Side. And they can give something back. And then they don’ t have to work the 20 hours and go through the grind of the hospital. I’m not saying hospitals should be eliminated, but I’m just saying there’s other ways of doing it.

They could be sending teachers over here to the schools. They could be doing a lot. Architects—you know, because you have to start off, you have to get your experience. And get your experience in the neighborhood by having send new people off who just graduated. You know. This is bullshit, what’s going on.

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

The Advocates: Lambda Legal won’t give up on same-sex marriage rights.

2007-06-18T08:16:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
June 18, 2007

New York State’s constitution provides equal protection of the laws and freedom from civil rights discrimination on the basis of “race, color, creed or religion.” It ensures that no New Yorker is deprived of “life, liberty or property,” without due process.

In March 2004, attorney Susan Sommer of Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit on behalf of five same-sex couples, three of them with children, who wanted to marry in New York. The lawsuit argued that denying the couples marriage licenses violated these constitutional rights.

Lambda won in trial court, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg appealed State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan’s ruling that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry under the state constitution.

While Bloomberg personally believes “anybody should be able to marry anybody,” as he was quoted as saying in the Village Voice and New York magazine, the city’s corporation counsel felt the state constitution in its current form did not permit same-sex marriages. The matter was for the State Court of Appeals, the state’s highest, to decide, Bloomberg said.

In August 2005, the case went to a mid-level court and was overturned.

The plaintiffs appealed the decision, and in May 2006, the case reached the Court of Appeals. On May 28, Bloomberg stated that if the Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision, his administration would “begin working with the State Legislature for a new law that establishes marriage equality for all New Yorkers” in partnership with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and other elected officials and community leaders who support same-sex marriage rights.

Two months later, a divided majority upheld the lower court’s ruling, saying, essentially, that the decision was not theirs to make; whether denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples violates their constitutional rights, the judges ruled, was a question for the legislature.

On April 27, New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer proposed a bill that would legally sanction same-sex marriage, making it the second state in the country to do so, the other being Massachusetts, as reported in the New York Times. Spitzer does not expect the bill to pass, but submitted it to the State Legislature as “a statement of principle,” that he hopes will start a real discussion about the issue.

In a telephone interview, Sommer, who has been with Lambda Legal for seven years and is the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) advocacy group’s Senior Counsel, said she thinks that although New York is “in a very different place” than it was five years ago, in terms of protections for and recognition of same-sex couples, it is far behind its neighbors (excluding Pennsylvania).

Canada and Massachusetts allow same-sex marriages. Vermont, Connecticut and New Jersey allow civil unions. New York allows neither, although it recognizes civil unions and marriages that are entered into in other jurisdictions, “with just some very narrow exceptions that wouldn’t apply for same-sex couples,” Sommer said.

Civil unions and marriages offer the same protections and rights under state law, but they have symbolic and practical differences.

Sommer said the term “civil union” is itself problematic. She feels that unlike “marriage,” which conveys tradition and respect, the term “civil union” is “an insult,” that sends a strong message to same-sex couples that “they’re not worthy of the same dignity” married couples are.
One practical consequence for same-sex couples in civil unions is the possibility that in a crisis situation involving one partner who is incapacitated (a hospital is the scenario Sommer gives), attendants may not know what a civil union is, and deny the other person access to the emergency room where their partner is being assisted, when they need to be there to make healthcare decisions.

Unlike married people, members of a civil union cannot collect Worker’s Compensation or bring a wrongful death claim if their partner is killed as a result of someone else’s negligence, and they are not protected if their partner dies without making a will.

More mundane situations could involve taxes, housing or insurance rates. “When you go to just renew your car insurance policy. What kind of premiums … do you pay?” Sommer said. “What kind of coverage do you get? You get a real break if you’re married. When it’s time to file your … state taxes, how do you do it, married or not?” And landlords of rent-stabilized apartments commonly refuse to put both partners on a lease if they are not married.

Sommer, who is married (to a man), and has three children, grew up on Long Island. Her parents were hard workers, Democrats, who, although they were not “amazingly progressive,” gave their kids the freedom to form their own opinions, she said.

At Lankler Siffert & Wohl, in New York, where Sommer worked before coming to Lambda Legal, she was a litigator, and she credits that experience with preparing her for her current job. “There’s so many different kinds of issues and ways of approaching problems that are involved in … trying to advance civil rights for groups that have been historically discriminated against, and often have had the law not necessarily on their side.”

She was interested in public interest/human rights-related issues at Yale, where she majored in American Studies and then studied law, but after graduating with a law degree in 1986, she found herself “on a track,” like so many other recent law school graduates who take a job at a firm to get experience and pay the bills.

But at a certain point, she wanted “to get back to where [her] heart lay.” And one moment in particular got her doing research towards this goal and really awakened her to the issues that LGBT face.

Sommer’s first child was still an infant, and she was at a neighborhood party in Brooklyn, where she lives now. Several families were there with their kids and Sommer saw a set of twins – boys who, she said, were no more than about four years old. One was playing with swords and a shield, acting like a warrior, and the other was playing calmly with dolls.

She remarked to one of the twins’ parents about how nice their individuality was, to see that each boy was so happy playing in the way that he enjoyed. “And the parent said, ‘actually we’re really worried about,’ the boy who was playing with the dolls. ‘We’re concerned that it might mean that he’s going to grow up to be gay. And while we don’t really have anything against that, we’re just worried about the world around him … and so we’re taking him to a specialist who can try to change him.’”

Sommer had no real background in LGBT issues, but felt extremely saddened by this. It seemed to her that, rather than change their son because of discrimination that might come at him from the outside, “what we have to do is change the world around him, and let him be who he is.”

Another area New York is behind on, Sommer said, is the treatment of same-sex parents during custody disputes. If a same-sex couple has a child via donor insemination, for example, and one partner is not the biological parent of their child, the non-biological one is left without legal rights in the case of a break-up, and they cannot continue to raise their child. “This can be horribly destructive for children who are suddenly separated from the person they’ve always known to be their parent, and who … has been an emotional and financial support for them.” Through their courts, other states have created legislation to define someone who has had this kind of role as a parent. New York could do this to prevent these kinds of custody disputes, Sommer said.

Lambda Legal, which is a national organization, was founded in 1973, and was the first group whose principal mission was to fight for full equality for gays and lesbians in the court system.
But it was only able to form after almost two years of litigation: Its application for nonprofit status was denied unanimously by a panel of New York judges on the grounds that Lambda’s mission was “neither benevolent nor charitable.”

Today, it has offices in Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and L.A. Its headquarters are on Wall Street, and its legal staff includes 18 attorneys, about 80 percent of whom are LGBT themselves. All its work is performed pro bono by the Lambda legal staff or by law firms affiliated with Lambda.
Lambda’s focus is impact litigation – cases that have broader implications for the LGBT community. And over the years, the organization has handled several landmark cases. Lawrence v. Texas led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare all sodomy laws illegal, in 2003. At the time there were sodomy laws in 13 states, and some of those laws only prohibited same-sex sexual conduct. Others outlawed anal and oral sex, period, regardless of the participants’ gender.

Boy Scouts of America v. Dale resulted in several government institutions and organizations withdrawing their support for the Boy Scouts of America, and the Boy Scouts setting up separate, nondiscriminatory programs to keep some of their sponsors and affiliates, after a high-ranking member was kicked out of the organization for being gay. And all this occurred despite the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling, in 2000, that it could not use the state’s antidiscrimination law to prevent the Boy Scouts, as a private organization, from excluding openly gay people from leadership positions.

And in 2003, Lambda took on the Matter of Matthew Cusick and Cirque du Soleil, in which they negotiated the largest settlement of an HIV-discrimination claim within the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission system ($600,000), for Matthew Cusick, a gymnast who was fired by Cirque du Soleil because he was HIV positive.

Even if calls that come in over Lambda’s Help Desk do not have broader implications, Lambda can still help deal with discrimination or direct them to various services that can.

According to Lambda Legal’s Education and Public Affairs department, in the past two years, the greatest number of calls to the Help Desk have been about discrimination made on the basis of sexual orientation (80.5 percent); HIV positive status (13.9 percent); and transgender status (5.6 percent).

The top six issues the Help Desk receives calls about are workplace discrimination (22.8 percent); relationship-related discrimination (20.8 percent); immigration-related discrimination (9.8 percent); parent/child relationship-related discrimination (9.8 percent); housing discrimination (8.8 percent); and harassment and/or violence (7 percent).

Susan Sommer works on several issues for Lambda at any given time, parenting issues, relationship respect, and youth issues like the treatment of LGBT kids in foster homes, the juvenile justice system, and homeless kids who are LGBT.

Lambda educates child welfare agencies about the harassment and discrimination that LGBT youth face so often, and also tries to help them understand that LGBT adults can be very good “foster and adoptive parents and shouldn’t be discriminated against either.”

Asked whether she thinks the controversial Harvey Milk High School (for LGBT youth) in the East Village is a good thing, she said that “until we live in a society where LGBT young people are safe … in any school and … are not being impaired from getting the education they deserve … it’s our responsibility to make sure that there’s a setting in which they can learn in safety.”

Among the public misconceptions about same-sex marriage are that it threatens peoples’ religious freedoms, and that it threatens other marriages, Sommer said. If same-sex marriage is legalized, “religions will remain free to make their own decisions about who can get married within their religious tradition,” she said, “and about whether clergy will or should perform these marriages … it doesn’t hurt anybody else… All that happens is … a lot of families in the state are stronger.”

Sommer is hoping for an assembly vote on Spitzer’s marriage bill this term, but isn’t sure when it will happen. “Probably a majority or close,” to a majority of the assembly supports the right for same-sex couples to marry at this point, she said. She believes that all the litigation has created a lot of understanding and a major shift in public opinion. And she credits the attention it’s drawn to the issue with influencing Governor Spitzer to support same-sex marriage rights. Even if Spitzer’s bill is voted down, Lambda Legal will continue to “fight until it passes,” Sommer said.

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Q&A with Scott Blakeman and Dean Obeidallah: Standup for Peace

2007-06-11T07:38:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

June 11, 2007

Dean Obeidallah points out that according to a very recent Zogby poll, 90 percent of Jewish Americans and 88 percent of Arab Americans believe in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (501 Arab and Jewish Americans participated.)

Obeidallah, an Arab American and a comic, and Scott Blakeman, a Jewish American and a comic, are Standup for Peace, a comedy show designed to bring Arab and Jewish Americans together and to promote a peaceful resolution to the conflict. They will be performing their Fifth Anniversary show at the New School later this month.

Which jokes get the most laughs?

DO: President Bush has been great, a great comedy writer. Things about our upbringing. Most of our audience is neither Arab nor Jewish. They’re just there for a show.

SB: We performed at George Mason University, where they name their dorms after presidents, and I [asked], “If [you] were to live in a dorm, you’d rather live in the Clinton dorm, right? 24-hour partying, no RAs…And they also have the George W. Bush dorm, which is a little bit different; it just attacks other dorms for no reason whatsoever.”

Do you guys ever argue about the Arab-Israeli conflict?

SB: Our point isn’t, “everybody agree with us,” but have discussions. For the most part, we basically agree on all or most of the aspects of the situation.

How religious are you guys?

DO: My father [was] Muslim, my mom’s Christian. And I was raised, exposed to both religions, although I identify as a Christian. I think it’s more spiritual at this point. I pray just about every day. And it’s part of who I am.

Growing up with two religions made me more than tolerant of other religions. And I know what my father’s response was, when he would see terrorists who would say they did things in the name of their religion, how disgusted he was by that. And that’s certainly the mainstream view of Islam. I hope that the overwhelming majority of the moderate voices will prevail.

SB: I was bar mitzvah’d [and] went to Hebrew school, which was a good experience, [and] a training ground for comedy, too. The moment I decided to become a comedian, they were talking about a figure in Jewish history called Filo. And at the time, Soupy Sales had a TV show, and he had a character named Filo Kvetch. And I thought to myself, “If I say Filo Kvetch, the whole room will crack up and the teacher will throw me out.” So I pondered it, “Filo Kvetch” got a big laugh, and the teacher threw me out. But I always identified very strongly, culturally, as Jewish. To me, being Jewish means being compassionate, caring, and being progressive.

Do people ever criticize you for being overly-idealistic?

SB: Certainly we’ve come across a range of reactions. Looking back on [the Six-Day War] proves two things. The occupation hasn’t helped anyone, and as Dean said, we need a two-state solution. To me, comedians are very practical people.

DO: You’re going to have some people who disagree, but you can’t convince everybody. There are guys in Hamas that are horrible, who say they want to destroy Israel. There’s people in Israel, including one in the cabinet, Avigdor Lieberman, who advocates ethnic cleansing of all the Arabs who live within Israel. So those voices have to be marginalized and denounced by people.

Aside from each other do you (Scott), have Arab friends, and do you (Dean) have Jewish friends?

DO: I only want one Jewish friend, that’s it. I have Scott. That’s—no, I have so many. There’s no religion issues for us. The show…is [also] about fostering understanding between Arab and Jewish Americans, and Arab and Jewish Americans and non-Arab and Jewish Americans who come to our shows.

SB: Through Dean, I’ve gotten to meet other Arab [American] comedians, and just other Arab Americans. And it’s really been great for me, meeting Arab Americans at colleges.

How have audiences responded to you?

SB: Even if people disagree with us on certain things, they’re very open-minded, and it’s a light feeling there.

DO: People are laughing. A lot of times we hear, “Oh, I didn’t know Arabs were funny.” (I think everyone knows Jews are funny. I think they invented comedy in America, especially stand-up.)

We encourage people to ask tough questions.

Did you have to overcome any prejudices to be able to do this?

DO: My father used to tell us that the fighting remains there. We do the talking here. My cousin, who is Palestinian, married a Jewish American. And unfortunately for him, no one in the family but my father would talk to the guy for a period of time. He would invite him over anyway. And little by little, everyone accepted his wife, who was Jewish. But my father, making sure that they did, sent a message to me about tolerance.

SB: I came from a progressive family, but starting like seven years ago, when it just really deteriorated into much more violence on both sides, it certainly awakened me even more to how that’s never going to lead to peace. Comedy’s all about is asking questions. And that’s a very Jewish and I think, a very Arab thing, too.

Any plans to make changes to the show in any way?

DO: We’re always writing new material.

SB: We play off the audience, too.

DO: Belly dancers, we might need belly dancers, now.

SB: Well that, yes, not me, personally, but—

DO: Belly dancers would be fun. That would be, like, a fun thing—

SB: Yeah….

—Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Not If They Can Help It: Activists are mobilizing downtown to end the genocide in Darfur

2007-06-04T07:10:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
June 4, 2007

On May 29th, President Bush singled out Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and his Khartoum government for being “complicit” in the genocide that is ongoing in Sudan’s Darfur region.

According to figures made available by Human Rights Watch “at least 200,000 have died” in this crisis, and 2.5 million people are still displaced.

Sharon Silber, a co-founder of the NYC Coalition for Darfur, says that in the last three to six months, the violence has spilled over into neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic, which have the largest number of Darfuri refugees.

During his May 29th speech, President Bush announced that since the Sudanese government has been uncooperative in helping to end the “bombing, murder and rape” of innocent civilians, the United States will enforce existing economic sanctions more aggressively, and impose new ones on the Sudanese government, companies connected to it, and specific individuals inside of it that have been identified as being responsible for the violence taking place.

President Bush wants the other U.N. Security Council member countries to pass a resolution designed to make it harder for the militias committing the violence to receive arms. The resolution would impose new sanctions on individuals obstructing the 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement, which was made between the Khartoum government and the country’s largest rebel group. And it would also create a no-fly zone to keep Sudanese military planes out of the region.

Bush said he will continue to push for the already-approved UN peacekeeping force that al-Bashir still refuses to allow into the country, and for funding for the inadequate, small number of African Union forces already on the ground.

By now, a large and growing number of Americans are aware of what is happening in this distant part of the world, one that would probably be even more obscure to them otherwise, due to the amount of coverage the issue is getting. Many are aware that the violence is being committed against African farmers in Darfur by militias made up of nomadic Arabs known as

“Janjaweed” (an Arabic colloquialism that means “a man with a gun on a horse,” according to Slate’s Brendan Koerner). And many realize that these militias are committing genocide with the tacit support of the Sudanese government.

Silber says President Bush, who named two senior members of the Khartoum regime and one rebel leader as targets of the new sanctions on May 29th, needs to go further by taking action against three more individuals who International Crisis Group recommended for targeting.
Silber, 52, and others like her, are at the forefront of an activist movement that is determined to do all it can to help end the Darfur crisis, through a variety of campaigns that include divestment in companies that do business with the Sudanese government; letter-writing to governments and institutions they feel can and need to do more; media projects; Congressional visits; and arts initiatives designed to raise awareness about the issue.

The Darfur movement is drawing people from all political persuasions, ethnic backgrounds, and generations to the meetings and other events that groups like Silber’s hold. “Even though we’re working in New York with people, most often who are Democratic, and most often are liberal, there are Christian conservatives, people on the right who have responded to this issue too,” she said.

Why this is happening seems easy enough to understand. After all, genocide is not an issue with various shades of gray. And the consensus among Western industrialized nations is that genocide is what this is. “Because we’re Arabs, we’re better than these people who are black,” is how Silber describes the philosophy of Sudan’s ruling party. And Sudan still has slavery. “[They] actually say, ‘kill the slaves’ when they kill these people. How could you not respond to that?”

Every time Silber adds the deaths in the current crisis to those of genocides the Sudanese government has committed in the past (in South Sudan and the Nuba Mountains) she comes to a stark conclusion: “You have, possibly, the greatest number of state-sponsored, ethnic [killings] since the Holocaust.”

Although Silber, a psychologist, did not become involved in anti-genocide activism until she learned about the Bosnian crisis at a conference on European neo-fascism, in the early 90s, it’s not surprising that she found her way to the movement, given her background.

Silber’s father is a World War II survivor who, as a medical student in Lithuania, narrowly escaped the Nazi death camps when, in a twist of bitter irony, the Soviets shipped him to a labor camp in Siberia for being a Zionist. The Soviets still controlled Lithuania at the time. His family and all but a few people in his town were killed.

And, she says that were it not for his being sent to the front, as a doctor for the Soviets when they were fighting the Germans, it’s likely that he would have starved to death in the labor camp like so many others did.

In 1993, Silber founded Jews Against Genocide with Eileen Weiss, an actor and producer, in response to the Bosnian crisis, eventually forming a national coalition called The American Committee to Save Bosnia. The group’s work on Bosnia and Kosovo showed Silber the kind of impact groups like hers could have on world events through letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations, civil disobedience, and an emphasis on Congressional lobbying. She says their efforts “really changed U.S. policy.”

Her work continued with East Timor and then South Sudan, before she turned her energies to Darfur.

Jews Against Genocide began working with other Darfur groups, notably with what was then NYU’s STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur) chapter, which Isaac Rowlett, an NYU student, set up in 2005. (Now that group is called STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition).
And in winter 2006, these groups formed the NYC Coalition for Darfur

Silber wants to take a much stronger Congressional initiative this fall. She plans to meet with Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan), among others, whose district includes Soho, Greenwich Village, Tribeca and Lower Manhattan. The largest number of coalition members lives in Nadler’s district. She hopes to get Nadler and other area Congresspersons to fight for increased pressure on the Sudanese government and divestment legislation.

Shin Inouye, Nadler’s communications director, writes in an e-mail that Nadler, a member of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, “is very passionate about the [Darfur] issue.”
Silber is encouraged New York State may divest its pension fund of companies that do business with Sudan. She is less encouraged, so far, that the city will follow suit with its pension fund.

One major campaign is taking place on Wall Street, and it involves putting pressure on mutual funds to divest themselves of companies that do business with the Sudanese government. Chief among these offenders are Chinese oil companies like PetroChina, China’s largest oil company.
PetroChina is the publicly traded subsidiary of China’s state-owned oil company, CNPC. And the Genocide Intervention Network calls CNPC “chief among Khartoum’s corporate sponsors,” in a report by its Sudan Divestment Taskforce.

On April 24th, the coalition held a protest against Fidelity Investments, which then held $1.3 billion worth of PetroChina stock, according to the group Fidelity Out of Sudan.
300 people stood in front of Fidelity’s Boston headquarters, and coalition members went around Wall Street handing out leaflets urging divestment.

On May 15th, Fidelity sold most of its shares of PetroChina and SinoPec, another Chinese oil company, on the New York Stock Exchange, and announced it the next day. But it neglected to mention that it still has shares in PetroChina and SinoPec on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Susan Morgan, spokesperson for Fidelity Out of Sudan, says, in a telephone interview, that Fidelity’s divestment on the NYSE is “good news, but it is only a first step.”

In an e-mail, Vincent Loporchio, a Fidelity spokesperson, wrote that “Fidelity does not tell its fund managers how or when to buy or sell any given stock. Each fund manager makes that decision based on his or her individual assessment of the stock’s value in their holdings.” He also mentioned that Fidelity offers several funds, through its FundsNetwork program, for investors who want to avoid putting their money “in companies operating in certain industries or in certain parts of the world,” that while not illegal to invest in may conflict with their “personal social or ethical values.”

With specific regard to Sudan, Loporchio writes that “Fidelity complies with all applicable laws when we buy or sell securities on behalf of the Funds, including those the U.S. Government has put in place that effectively prohibit U.S. investors from investing in companies that are owned or controlled by the Government of Sudan or any instrumentality of the Government of Sudan. Were our government to decide to enact new laws or regulations to broaden restrictions on investments, the Fidelity funds, of course, would comply with those laws as well.”

Morgan says that her group wants to meet with Fidelity, but Fidelity is not willing. She adds that Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company, is the largest American investor in PetroChina with approximately $3 billion in stock. One shareholder proposed divestment in PetroChina at a Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting on May 5th, but the proposal was voted down.

Berkshire Hathaway directed an inquiry from this reporter to Marc D. Hamburg, listed as Vice President and Principal Financial Officer in Berkshire Hathaway’s first quarter report for 2007. Since he did not answer the first of two voice messages, this reporter sent an e-mail with a list of questions to Berkshire Hathaway’s general e-mail address. (The receptionist who answered the phone would not provide Mr. Hamburg’s direct e-mail address.)

After calling a second time, the next day, and hoping to refer Mr. Hamburg to the e-mail, this reporter was transferred to Mr. Hamburg’s voice mail, and left another message, which Hamburg did not respond to by press time.

“To his credit, Warren Buffett has been very open and willing to engage in dialogue on this subject,” Morgan says. “And Mr. Buffett did not need to include it in the meeting agenda, but he chose to because he felt it was important to have a dialogue. Unfortunately he does not agree that he has an opportunity to influence the situation in Darfur.” Morgan hopes to continue talking with him, and convince him that he does.

In the coming weeks, quarterly filings will be coming in from a wide range of American mutual funds and Morgan’s campaign will be looking them over carefully.

The Public Theater played host in April to “In Darfur,” a workshop production, written by Winter Miller. $3 of every ticket sold went to “Darfur Beneficiaries.”

Miller is New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s research assistant, and not surprisingly, the play is about a New York Times reporter, a Darfuri woman and a Western aid worker, who end up together in an internally displaced persons camp. “The Darfuri woman is just trying to survive, the aid worker is trying to … make up for something that happens on his watch that he’s somewhat responsible for, and the journalist is trying to get a front-page story, almost no matter what the cost,” so that Darfur will get coverage, Miller explains in a telephone interview.
Miller won a playwriting competition that required her to outline a play that she would write in association with someone from outside the theater world.

She did all the actual writing, but chose Kristof to help her with the research.
Of all the topics Kristof writes about for The New York Times, Darfur interested Miller because it “was the one that was entirely preventable.”

After she won the competition, she spent the next few months convincing Kristof to take her with him to Darfur. And in March 2006, she accompanied Kristof on a trip he was taking there. She stayed for a week.

They were along the Chad-Sudan border, and despite the fact that Miller was in the mountains of Laos about four months earlier, the poverty was like nothing she had ever seen.
“There weren’t enough resources, people were unsafe. We were driving past ghost towns, and people were completely unprotected … the land was just pretty unforgiving.”

At one point, Miller felt unsafe, herself. “We were talking to a man, and he was pointing to where his son had been bayoneted by the Janjaweed, and thrown to the ground … where they had sort of made a makeshift burial. And then he looked up and he said, ‘They’re watching us. They’re in the trees.’ So at that point, we kind of gathered ourselves up and got in the car, and drove away.”

She says the show has two elements, entertainment and theatrical value, and education and promoting awareness. “It’s not a history play. It’s meant to be done now. It’s meant to encourage people to go home, learn more about it, and do something about it. And that’s what’s particularly galvanizing about Darfur itself, is that it’s highly preventable.”

On April 29th, NYU’s STAND chapter, the coalition and the Jewish Council on Public Affairs hosted an event in Washington Square Park called “Global Days for Darfur.”

Essentially, it was a letter-writing event, but it also featured speakers and live music.
By the day’s end the crowd had produced almost 1,000 letters to congresspersons, senators, President Bush, Warren Buffett, and Fidelity Investments.

They also wrote three giant letters on behalf of the 1,600-plus destroyed Darfuri villages, which were reproduced for Fidelity, Warren Buffett and the President.

One package of letters was returned, from the Chinese embassy in Washington. “They opened them, they looked at them, and then they sent them back to us. So, we actually sent those on to [Save Darfur, in D.C.], hoping that they’ll try to re-deliver them,” Silber says.

To hear him tell it, Isaac Rowlett, who created NYU’s STAND chapter during his freshman year, was an unlikely candidate for human rights leadership and even activism. In high school, Rowlett, now 20 and a junior at NYU, wasn’t particularly political, and not especially concerned about keeping up on current events. He planned to study creative writing, he says in a telephone interview. But in an instant his focus shifted. It took place on a trip that he took “on a whim,” during his senior year.

March of the Living is an educational program for Jewish teens from around the world, that takes them on a walk from the Auschwitz to Birkenau death camps in Poland on Holocaust Memorial Day, and then to Israel to celebrate its independence and observe its memorial day. For Rowlett, who is focusing on Genocide Studies, Human Rights and Sustainable Development in The Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, the sharp change in course came during a visit to the Majdanek Death Camp, in the city of Lublin.

According to figures made available by The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, an estimated 95,000-130,000 prisoners, at a minimum, died in the Majdanek system (Majdanek had subcamps), between November 1941 and January 1945.

Standing in front of a mausoleum that was filled with ashes, Rowlett and the other kids were listening to a survivor speak. The man pointed to a group of villages on hills, just outside the camp, and said, “They saw everything, and yet, they did nothing.” Rowlett couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and seeing. “I was just so indignant. I couldn’t believe that people could’ve just stood by, seeing what was going on, and done nothing.”

When he got back to the U.S., STAND’s national organization was just getting started, and he left its second ever conference, in Washington, D.C., feeling really inspired, and decided to start his own chapter. Rowlett is also STAND’s National Advocacy Coordinator.

He emphasizes that while the situation in Darfur is deteriorating, the situation here is getting better, because the U.S. government is feeling more pressure from the activist community. “It’s really important that we just keep that volume up … because it’s really going to depend on the United States government.”

Asked what it is about this that’s grabbing hold of so many people, Rowlett says he thinks that “it’s an emotion … an experience … There’s this moment of realization, whether it’s from a book, whether it’s from a photo, whether it’s from a film, et cetera. That moment, for many people, soon transforms into a moment of ‘what am I doing?’ And at least in my case, it’s often, ‘what will I tell my children?’ … When you look back at the Holocaust … even more recently, in 1994, with the Rwandan genocide … the question we all ask is ‘how could this have happened?’ And when I look back ten years from now at Darfur, people will be asking the same question, and I want to make sure that I have an answer.

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Q & A with Larry Siems, Director, Freedom to Write and International Programs, PEN American Center

2007-05-25T07:48:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
May 28, 2007

In 1921, two years after the First World War, British writers (C. A. Dawson Scott and John Galsworthy) founded the first PEN (poets, playwrights, essayists, editors, and novelists) center (then called “The P.E.N. Club”) in London. Scott believed that an international consortium of writers could eventually heal the enmity between nations around the world. The next year PEN opened an American Center in New York.

Today there are 144 PEN Centers in 101 countries, and PEN is an influential force in bringing writers together, defending them from censorship and protecting their basic human rights.

From the PEN American Center’s Soho office, Larry Siems, 47, directs the Freedom to Write program, which is PEN’s human rights arm, and its International Programs division, which connects New York to the other PEN centers around the world. (There is also a Los Angeles location.)

What are some of the biggest threats to freedom of expression in general and press freedoms for writers right now?

Let’s start on the international front. I’ll just give you two examples. One, the landscape has really shifted in the last 20, 30 years since say the collapse of the Soviet Union. The kind of old model of, even of PEN’s work, involved PEN’s advocacy of a writer in a Soviet country. And they were usually a poet or a fiction writer who was in jail because of ideological crimes that sort of went against the general vision of history or political realities that the government was trying to project. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, really, the battleground has been not ideology, but information. So the person in jail is much more likely to be a journalist than a poet. And a lot of that is struggle over information about corruption, about institutions of power that aren’t necessarily official state institutions. We look at countries like Mexico, like Russia and Philippines, where journalists are getting murdered at quite alarming rates. And often it’s for reporting on organized crime, relationships between organized crime and the state, or independent organized crime – narco-trafficking, things like that. And that’s a big challenge, because in the old days you knew exactly who to address your complaints to. They were states, they were held accountable to international treaties, to some extent. And now, the sort of matrix of oppression has become much larger and much more complicated.

At the same time, there is a kind of a new rise of, kind of ideological cases. Writers are now getting in trouble for – I mean a real battleground, sort of intellectually, is around the area of religious defamation. There are a couple of resolutions that have been passed in the United Nations in the last couple years that we’re looking at with some concern, that would urge states to make it a crime for people to insult people’s religious beliefs, sort of in response to, you can think of the Danish cartoon, and this controversy is the leading example of this. It’s being driven within the international community by a sense of, there is this kind of alarming rise in Islamophobia, in particular, that there’s targeting of or misrepresentation, mischaracterization of Islam, and the nature of Islam, and it’s sort of fomenting a kind of prejudice and hatred in the world. And certainly PEN, which is an organization which, along with human rights, it’s other principle focus is on promoting international dialogue and understanding, takes that very seriously, and we certainly see an issue there. But we do see very, very serious problems with trying to legislate protections for religions, which we believe are systems of thought and belief that should be subject to criticism, investigation. Traditionally, rights inhere in individuals, they don’t inhere in groups. As an individual you are entitled to be free from discrimination based on your religious beliefs, but to move to laws that protect what you believe, the system of your beliefs, that’s moving into areas that I think is really threatening to freedom of expression. And you’re likely to find writers who are getting in trouble for it. Under these laws, something like the “Satanic Verses,” controversy for example, would be multiplying around the world, and there would presumably be writers imprisoned for writing books that satirize religions or challenge religious orthodoxies.

Does PEN advocate for documentary producers or broadcast journalists?

We debate these questions a lot. Well, Theo Van Gogh is a case where, we were involved in it to the extent, there was a script for the movie that he shot, which was by Ayaan Hirsi Ali who wrote the script of the movie. And so in that case, we think of documentary, for example, or film in general, as a written art…We tend to, just because of limited resources, focus on print rather than on broadcast media. But we also understand that in many countries, broadcast media are the main means of disseminating information, so we might not be advocating on behalf of specific media personnel, but we would be challenging media laws that would restrict broadcasters, for example.

And not to say, you were talking about issues, talk about issues in the United States, challenges to journalists and free expression in the United States, certainly as far as what journalists are facing, they’re facing a much more difficult climate since 9/11. And at PEN we sort of identify three main areas of threat to freedom of expression since 9/11, three kind of trends that are threatening free expression here in the United States and around the world. The first is, sort of an increase in big government surveillance, penetration into people’s private lives. So, the example on which we’ve done a lot of advocacy along with booksellers and librarians, is the provisions of the Patriot Act that allow the FBI to get your bookstore and library records, for example. The idea here is, and the Supreme Court has recognized, that the First Amendment protects not only your right to speak, but your right to get information. And to get information privately, this is how free minds are allowed to explore and test ideas. So we’ve been working with the booksellers and librarians with this campaign for reader privacy, to challenge these Patriot Act provisions.

So, you have increasing surveillance of people’s personal space. At the same time, the people have decreasing access to information. The government is much more secretive than it has been. And here’s where journalists are getting into trouble in the United States. They’re subpoenaing journalists to reveal confidential sources, while the more secretive government is, the more the press has to rely on confidential sources or privileged sources, to get information that ought, perhaps, to be publicly available. And now they’re vulnerable for it. So within the last couple of years, you think of the major stories that The New York Times, and The Washington Post has broken about CIA secret prisons, and about the NSA surveillance program, about the monitoring [of] financial transactions. And every time those stories broke, there were public calls by some political people to prosecute those reporters under the Espionage Act, for example. So that’s a real threat in the United States.

At the same time access to information, the government is even making it more difficult for the U.S. to hear a wider range of voices. So they’ve blocked, for example, international scholars from coming to the United States. They’re afraid of what they’ll say. So, the resurgence of what we call ideological exclusion. So, for example, the Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, who was offered a post at University of Notre Dame, had his visa cancelled, and has yet to be able to come to the United States. PEN has filed a lawsuit along with the ACLU and some other academic organizations, to challenge this practice of – I think it’s really of trying to deprive the United States citizens of their First Amendment right to interact with people from around the world.

So, increased surveillance, decreased access to information, and then the last area is just that the U.S. is abandoning its commitment to basic human rights protections, that it’s long promoted around the world. So if you think about due process protections that require fair and speedy and open trials, versus arbitrary detention like Guantanamo and secret prisons,where you get tortured. These are things that routinely, writers around the world are prosecuted and jailed, arbitrarily detained or tortured into confessing for crimes, and are locked away after faulty legal processes. And for years, PEN has been, we protest from the United States. And also, the United States government has been an ally with us in those cases, saying you know, ‘these are abuses.’ Well now our government is committing those same abuses. And so, the failure of the United States to protect these basic standards in the United States is endangering not only people in the United States, but writers around the world.

Our position is that the failure to abide by prescribed standards here, threatens the due process around the world, and writers are bound to fall afoul of that, because we have long been able to argue effectively internationally against these kinds of abuses, partly because we have the strong support of, or, an ally, in the United States government.

And so, if you look at, for example, Uzbekistan, a case where writers are routinely tortured, hideously tortured, into confessing to crimes – and Uzbekistan, which has gone through sort of a parabola of friendship with the United States, where shortly after 9/11 it was one of our major allies in the War On Terror. And during that period, when it became very difficult, the U.S. was making clear compromises with the government of Uzbekistan. I think they were even rendering terrorist suspects to Uzbekistan, for example. And so, there was a corresponding spike in just, domestic abuses in Uzbekistan. And they just sort of lost that check. Now, maybe because of the massacre in Uzbekistan, about a year ago, the relations have become somewhat chillier. But it’s that kind of relationship that’s dangerous.

You mentioned The New York Times controversies. What do you say to someone who argues that national security trumps a good story?

PEN supports a federal shield law, federal shield protections for journalists. And there’s a bill now in the House and the Senate. And that bill, has, an exception for national security. It’s not a blanket privilege. It does say that journalists can be compelled to reveal confidential source material when there’s a national security issue. So, there are, I suppose, a limited number of cases where there will be national security issues and information. But the press is remarkably effectively self-policing on these things. You could look at the fact that The New York Times, for example, held information for over a year on [the] surveillance program before it published the information, and was in constant conversation with the government during that time, about whether or not it should publish that information. Many people in the public as a whole think that The New York Times withheld the information for far too long. I mean, the press is cognizant of national security issues, but the decisions rightly belong in the hands of editors, not in the government. Governments, historically and universally, misuse the notion of national security to guard secrets, to guard information that bears most often, on just government failings, the kind of things that ought to be open to public scrutiny.

There are probably a lot of people who feel they have the right to know if the government is listening to their phone calls and reading their e-mail. But what about the SWIFT banking consortium? Do we have the right or the need to know that the government is trying to monitor terrorists’ finances, in Belgium?

It’s an interesting case, and I don’t know enough about the technical details of money transactions, to know of what level the technical information was revealed by those reports. But I will say, in the general consensus that I’ve read, and in the community as a whole, is that, those who were transferring money for terrorist support, were long cognizant of the fact that their international financial transactions were being monitored. It was well-publicized -- all the legislation, the Patriot Act and all these things. The fact that people were being prosecuted in the United States for material support for terrorism based on financial transactions – I mean, I don’t think it was a secret that the U.S. was at some, whatever level available, surveilling international financial transactions, and have been for drug trafficking and money laundering for a long time. So, the real question, I suppose, is always, the only question is, in a case like this, has the divulging of this information compromised the ability to accomplish whatever the law enforcement goal is. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the law enforcement is compromised, because I believe that people who were dealing with here, had long since made alternative arrangements for transferring their money. That would be my guess.
If I’m an imprisoned reporter in some less-than-democratic nation, how does my case get from my cell into your hands? And what kinds of things can you do to improve my situation?

We hear about you through any number of methods. It could be we know you already. Many of the people we deal with in countries are people who have long been working with independent newspapers that have been in constant battles with the government. So we will know you or your colleagues, or your family, so somebody will get in touch with PEN. If not, it’ll be organizations in those countries, with whom PEN is contact, or human rights organizations in our countries, in England, where our main research office is based, or here in the United States, will contact us. And we get information and we immediately start investigating what’s happening to you. And we have a primary response system, which is called Rapid Action Network. So when we learn of your arrest, a bulletin will go around to 70 PEN centers around the world who are part of this network. And we’ll all immediately write letters to your government expressing concern about your arrest, letting the government that we know you’re detained. And that very often, immediately, will lessen the risk that you would be tortured, lessen the risk that you would be killed, in early days of detention, that they would just sort of disappear you, because the government’s aware that we know that they have you.

Because they’re afraid of things like sanctions?

Governments hate to be publicly exposed as human rights abusers. That’s the bottom line. And the longer that you’re imprisoned, the more we try to make our contact, not only with the government – we’ll send letters directly to the prison. And prison officials who know that they have somebody in their prison who somebody knows about in New York and in Berlin, and Buenos Aires, or wherever the PEN centers are writing from, they’re bureaucrats, they don’t like trouble for themselves, so they don’t want you to die because people are going to ask, them, questions. So, you try to keep a steady attention, letting people know that we’ve got you, and then we start looking at sort of what the international mechanisms are for advocacy. So if you’re detained without charge or trial, PEN has affiliation of the United Nations, we’re a UNESCO umbrella organization, we have U.N. member status. And we will take your case, for example, to the U.N. Working Group On Arbitrary Detention, and get the U.N. to review it, and declare that you’re arbitrarily detained, so you get international documentation of your case.

Here at PEN American Center, we give an annual Freedom to Write Award that draws international attention to a particular case. And it’s just a sort of constant stream of attention. One thing PEN does that I think is pretty unique among organizations is that we do, in addition to issue-based work, we do individual, long-term casework. So, your name gets on our case list, and we’re going to be working on your case until you’re out. We have a group of volunteers at PEN, one of whom will take up your case, correspond with your family, be in touch with you, find out if you need anything, your family needs anything. And we’ll work it and work it and work it until you’re out.

Do you ever pay for legal representation?

Yes, we do. We have an emergency fund. So if somebody, the honorary members, we call them the cases that we’re really focusing on, which at any one time is around 20 or 25, if any of them need financial resources for legal help, or just for sustenance, we are able to provide that.

Do you get involved with disappearances, too?

Sure. And you send letters, and you send protests, and you hold the government accountable for -- any government is responsible for the safety of its citizens. So, often times, you’ll get a situation, if you look at, maybe not a disappearance, but a murder. A journalist is murdered in Mexico, probably by a drug cartel. And the government, on the one hand, sort of says, ‘wasn’t us.’ But, on the other hand, what is the government responsible for? Well, the responsibility of the government in that case is to investigate the crime, and to prosecute and punish the people who are guilty. So, one of the leading issues PEN faces is the issue of impunity, internationally. Countries where those who abuse writers, kill journalists, suppress freedom of information, freedom of the press, are not punished for it. And so it’s sort of an open season. And so the governments are responsible for investigating and prosecuting crimes. You disappear, and your government is responsible for investigating your disappearance, and solving your disappearance, prosecuting somebody for it. So the advocacy is directed at that level.

Was there ever a case you felt particularly attached to? How did it pan out?

The one that made sort of the biggest mark on me emotionally, happened not long after I started working at PEN, which was the case of Ken Saro-Wiwa, in Nigeria. Ken Saro-Wiwa was a very, very well known Nigerian writer, quite successful. He was a novelist and a playwright, and then he went on to write, it was [an] incredibly popular, satirical TV series that was the most popular television show in Nigeria at the time. And he, I guess, probably in his late fifties he must’ve been, sort of left his writing to take up causes, social activism on behalf of his indigenous group, called the Ogoni people and they live in the Niger River Delta, which is an oil exploration area. And he was protesting the impact of oil exploration on his community, which had not enjoyed any of the benefits of the enormous wealth that was generated on their land. And he was a leader of a protest movement, and he was targeted by the government, he was arrested several times, and ultimately, he was arrested on trumped up charges of murder and sentenced to death. And, the incredible thing was that he was somebody with whom PEN had had a fairly long relationship. He had come into the PEN office in London some years before to say, ‘I’m being followed. You should know.’ And so we followed his case, he corresponded regularly, I had an intern in my office who wrote him a letter in prison, and he wrote a letter back. And it was just a beautiful letter about sort of the responsibilities of a writer in Africa versus a writer in the United States, saying that in the United States, you have the luxury of just, you can just write. But here, you have to be in the streets, you have to be part of this social justice movement. And we were part of an enormous international campaign on his behalf. And that ended, unfortunately, with his execution. The world was shocked when the government went ahead and hanged him, in a kind of hideous and botched hanging. But, the interesting thing was that the PEN in Los Angeles, where I was working, sort of refused to let that lie, and conducted a long investigation of the involvement of international oil companies, in suppressing free expression in the oil producing regions in Nigeria, and had considerable discussions with Shell, which was the company that was directly implicated in that particular area, and fought on and I think, were successful in getting some of the international oil companies to recognize that international corporations have human rights responsibilities. And so, it was both extremely discouraging because we lost somebody who we thought we were having a conversation with, and was well-known enough that we thought was probably immune from execution. So it was a lesson that this is a serious, serious business, and governments will do whatever it takes sometimes to protect their interests. But at the same time, during that time, I met many Nigerian writers and journalists who were fighting the good fight against a very repressive military dictatorship. And three years later, the dictatorship ended, and democracy, a democratic government, came to Nigeria. And I was invited to Nigeria to celebrate with Nigerian writers and journalists. So there was despair, but there was also, you saw the incredible courage and perseverance of the people who were working in these conditions, and the fact that it really does make a difference in the long run.

Has the explosion of the Internet changed PEN’s job at all, or presented new issues?

Yeah. It’s sort of the classic mixed blessing in a way, that the Internet has brought an incredible amount of information around the world, including information about basic human rights and how to advocate for basic human rights. So it’s been a really, really valuable tool for the human rights community. And it’s just speeded up the exchange of information. So if you get arrested in some small town in some remote country, we’ll still find out about it, very quickly. At the same time, because the struggle is for control of information, now the control of the Internet is posing problems for [writers] as well. So Bloggers and Internet writers are among the most endangered, in several countries around the world. In China, there are many, many journalists who really have been working exclusively on the Internet who are in jail. Vietnam. Tunisia is a country that’s been particularly hard on the Internet. So, countries where the government is trying to control ISP’s, monitoring Internet cafes, for example, and trying to control the political discourse that happens on the Internet. And the whole technology that’s sort of developed around that, for filtering the [text] included, raised questions, I think, for U.S. Internet service providers and software manufacturers about, again, what corporate responsibilities are when dealing with these kind of governments. One of our most vexing cases right now is the case of the Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who’s been jailed for, he leaked information about, basically government orders on how to control the media during the anniversary of the Tieneman Square massacre. And he was prosecuted, partly because the government got information from Yahoo!, personal information that was used to convict him. And so, one of the things that we’re supporting is legislation that’s been introduced in Congress that would bar U.S. Internet service providers from developing the kind of software, participating in the kinds of censorship regimes, that can be used to jail Internet journalists and writers around the world.

And what’s your most pressing, your top priority right now?

Actually, today, one of the most pressing, top priorities is that we’re working on, extremely urgently on behalf of a group of Iraqi writers and journalists who are, whose lives are in constant and imminent danger. And we are working very hard to get people resettled, finally, outside of Iraq. I mean, it’s depressing to say so, because you’re talking about sort of the backbone of civil society, the kinds of writers — they range from poets and literary critics and university professors, to journalists, to people who are specializing in just translation – people who, when you thought of – dreamed of a democratic Iraq, you would imagine that they would be central characters in the building of that kind of society. And unfortunately, most of them have been targeted for death and are now living so perilously that it’s impossible for them to live inside of Iraq. So there’s a group of them who are now living in Syria. And PEN has resettled seven Iraqi writers and translators in Europe, so far, and mostly in Norway, and also, I think, in Germany. And now, perhaps, one is going to Italy. But we’re working very hard to get the United States government to resettle Iraqi writers and translators in the United States, because we consider it a basic, moral imperative for the United States to resettle some of those who have been just dislocated by the violence that the war has engendered.

Iraq could be an anomaly right now, but how protected are Americans working as foreign correspondents?

Well I mean in Russia, you know Paul Klebnikov, who was an American, who moved to Russia and was [editing] the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was murdered. You know, you’re not exempt. I mean – Daniel [Pearl], but it could be because that’s sort of within the conflict zone of the Middle East. And I know it from speaking with American correspondents in China, you are constantly reminded of what your limits are, but you would be threatened with expulsion, would be the consequence in China, and in several other countries too. But, I mean, generally, I think, my own experience, and you know, the experience of all Americans who travel a fair amount abroad, probably holds for journalists too, which is that there are some built-in protections to being an American. I mean there are, basically. Everybody understands that particular difficulties will come, and also because everybody understands the power of the American media. So, in countries where people are struggling for a voice, struggling to have their story heard, there’s nothing more valuable to them than having their stories covered in the American media, or the Western media in general. European media counts as well. So there’s a kind of a privilege that comes both from governments recognizing that you have a powerful institution behind you, and from people understanding the power of the voice that you represent. So, I think the bigger issue is simply access to countries. There are places that [are] very difficult for American journalists to cover, cover well. And, so that’s the way control, I think, is really mostly exerted. I mean, can an American journalist get into the country? And then, how fearful are the people there about talking to you. And that’s the other thing, is that you may not be personally in danger, but everybody you talk to may be in danger because they’re speaking to you – you walk with a very large footprint, a very dangerous footprint in different countries. And so, that works too, as a real measure of control as well.

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

The Block: Reade Street between Greenwich and Hudson

2007-05-21T08:08:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
May 21, 2007

It’s the last week of classes at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), which is within walking distance, and the crowd sitting under the awning of Morgan’s Market looks to be composed entirely of students. At about 11 a.m., they’re either having a late breakfast or an early lunch, and they don’t seem to have any pressing business to attend to.

Next door, in front of DEKK Restaurant, an Asian couple around the same age is on a bench, feeding each other, and kissing under the kind of leafy green foliage that’s scattered along the block.

The insistent, unsentimental sound of power tools issues from the higher floors of two buildings across from one another, one on Reade, and one on Chambers. And on Greenwich, and especially the Hudson intersection, there’s constant traffic and street noise, threatening to interrupt the relative calm.

But it’s a near perfect day, there’s a gentle breeze, the skies are clear, the nannies are out, and it’s warm enough for a short sleeve shirt and jeans. And this block, which leads up to Washington Market Park, feels a world, or at least a time zone away.

What Happened Here

Greg Bonsignore is Managing Director of Hudson Development, which sold 144 Reade, a townhouse, in 2000. In a telephone interview, he says that the buildings on this block were originally warehouses that stored hot dog carts and housed rental car facilities, and that the block has undergone a “really beautiful metamorphosis,” over the past 10-15 years. He quotes Mike Hickey, a bartender at Reade Street Pub and Grill who called this block “the Madison Avenue of Tribeca,” because larger, nicer buildings have replaced the smaller structures.
Tribeca’ s Community Historian, Oliver E. Allen, finds this block particularly interesting because, since 1991, when the landmarks commission drew up the Tribeca West Historic District, it’s been both inside and outside the protected area. The district runs from Hubert Street down to Reade, and is bordered by Greenwich to the West. But only the north corners of this section of Reade are protected because the district’s southern border juts up and in towards Duane, leaving out most of the buildings on the block.

Number 156 was designed and inhabited by the late architect John Petrarca, and his family. The six-story townhouse, which served as his office as well as his home, is most notable for its green construction.

As Alanna Stang and Christopher Hawthorne note in their 2005 book, “The Green House: new directions in sustainable architecture,” Petrarca’s construction protocol for the townhouse was inspired by his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer after college. It was during this time that he developed an interest “in finding creative solutions to local problems,” they write.
Among other innovations Petrarca devised for the house is a geothermal pump 1,100 feet underground that “uses up to 75 percent less energy than conventional heating systems.”
According to Allen, Petrarca designed four other buildings on the block.
He died of lung cancer in 2003, at 51.

Renting

121 Reade Street, a.k.a. Tribeca Abbey, is owned by Abington Properties. The four one-bedrooms listed on their Web site (representatives were not available for comment over the phone), are available from $2,395 to $3,350. A studio, which will be available in June, is listed for $2,295.

Buying

Hudson Development sold the townhouse at 144 Reade Street in late 2005 for $8 million.
Andrew Melnick, an Associate Broker at Tabak Real Estate (located right on this block), says there are currently no sale properties, in a telephone interview. 138 Reade is a new condo building with commercial space on the ground floor, and Melnick says the average price per square foot would have to be “at least $1,300.”

Amenities

A good old-fashioned “BAR” sign denotes the Reade Street Pub & Kitchen below (135), and of course there’s Morgan’s (13 Hudson). For the health conscious, there’s Kiva Café (139 Reade) and a New York Sports Club (151) on the corner of Reade and Greenwich. DEKK (134) is a Mediterranean restaurant that features live jazz. There is also a handful of women’s boutiques and the Lotus Salon (141).

And in addition to BMCC, some of the best New York City public schools, P.S. 234, P.S. 150 and Stuyvesant high, are in the neighborhood, which probably explains, in part, why so many strollers are on the sidewalks here.

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Book Review: "Absurdistan" by Gary Shteyngart

2007-05-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

“Absurdistan”
Gary Shteyngart
Random House
New in paperback ($13.95)
333 pp.

Our Town downtown
May 14, 2007

It’s hard to describe just how imaginative Gary Shteyngart’s sophomore smash is and put it in context without working in a term like “ridiculous” or “unbelievable” or worst of all, “absurd.” But, that is exactly what most of it is. That.

Something of a post-Cold War, Jewish version of Ignatius Reilly with better social skills, more maturity and a whole lot more money, Misha Borisovich Vainberg, or “Snack Daddy,” as his classmates at Accidental College in the Midwest nicknamed him due to his fondness for rapping and eating, is the obese son of an oligarch (“the 1,238th richest man in Russia.”)

His story takes the form of a “love letter to the generals in charge of the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” and to his recently deceased father, and to his Hispanic girlfriend from the Bronx. Actually, Rouenna is “half Puerto Rican. And half German. And half Mexican and Irish,” but raised “mostly Dominican.”

Earlier, when they meet at a Hooters-like bar in Manhattan, Rouenna is smitten. And for Misha, with his bachelor’s degree in Multicultural Studies, his ample helping of class guilt, and keen awareness of her curvaceous attributes, the attraction is mutual.

But when Misha’s father calls him back to Russia for a summer visit, he gets stranded there, and by the time he begins telling his story, he’s been there two years, and the U.S. embassy’s denied him his visa nine times, because shortly after he arrived, his father killed a businessman from Oklahoma “over a 10 percent stake in a nutria farm.”

Once his father is assassinated by rivals, things fall completely apart, and Misha is left with a large inheritance, but no way to get back to America and to Rouenna.

Misha is an altruist and a glutton. He wants to use his vast inheritance to improve the lot of impoverished children in his country, and yet he can’t stop stuffing his face. (The eating and sex scenes are, fluid, to say the least.) He is sophisticated in the way that you’d imagine members of his class would be, but he constantly allows people to take advantage of his good nature. And though he has no interest in worldly affairs, since he’s “a sophisticate and a melancholic,” trouble always seems to pop up to around him, wherever he goes.

You may notice that “Absurdistan,” the country, has not appeared yet. And it doesn’t for 100 pages. This fictional republic, which takes its name from a term used during the cold war to describe communist societies, notably by Vaclav Havel about what was then Czechoslovakia, is where Misha goes to meet a Belgian diplomat so he can buy Belgian citizenship and finally get out of Russia. He might not be able to go back to the States, but at least he can have Rouenna flown in, once he gets to the continent.

When he gets to Absurdistan though, a civil war of sorts breaks out in the dilapidated Caspian nation, a nation in which Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), the Halliburton subsidiary, plays a powerful role.

He learns that his late father is famous in Absurdistan for having once tricked KBR into buying “an eight hundred kilogram screw,” for five million dollars from him. And if Misha thought it would be easy for him to fly low, into and out of Absurdistan quickly, he was mistaken.

It’s definitely possible to follow the convoluted storyline, but much in the way that you don’t have to be able to follow the thread in “The Big Lebowski,” to get the big picture, appreciate the characters and laugh at the jokes, the events here are less important than Misha and his commentary.

It may not be that original these days to suggest that wars, like our current debacle, are often accompanied by unsavory private interests (in this case, Halliburton). But the satire here is perceptive, and once in awhile, laugh-out-loud funny. The West’s often superficial love affair with all things multicultural, and the identity crisis that many young Jews and citizens of formerly communist countries experience in the West are a few of its targets.

Between Misha, “a deeply secular Jew who finds no comfort in either nationalism or religion,” his father, who is acutely aware of the anti-Semitism prevalent in Russia and insists that his son will never be an American, but always a Jew, and the Brooklyn Hasids, who circumcise Misha at his father’s insistence – at 18 – Shteyngart plays out the multi-pronged tug of war that takes place between generations of Jews over things like observance, assimilation and to an extent, marriage.

One of the funniest gags is a deadpan jab Shteyngart takes at himself and carries on throughout the book. Misha pays Rouenna’s Hunter tuition, even while he’s stuck in Russia, and he worries that she “may be the quarry of” one of her professors, the “émigré writer Jerry Shteynfarb,” who wrote “The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job.” (Shteyngart’s first novel was “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.”)

Misha is well-acquainted with this Shteynfarb: “he had been a schoolmate of mine at Accidental College,” (Shteyngart attended Oberlin College), “a perfectly Americanized Russian émigré … who managed to use his dubious Russian credentials to rise through the ranks of the Accidental creative writing department and to sleep with half the campus in the process and is now playing the professional immigrant game.”

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Q & A with Joe Encarnacion, Co-Founder, The Chowdown

2007-05-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

May 14, 2007

Adding food to the videos we rented in our sleepy suburb on weekends seemed like a decent way to enhance the experience, in high school. Bruce Lee met takeout from Happy Wok. “Donnie Brasco” was accompanied by plates of pasta. But it didn’t last beyond the second of such two-dork film festivals.

But The Chowdown, a food-media event with a slightly higher profile, had several runs before friends and co-founders, DJ/designer Joe Encarnacion and Flavorpill editor Anna Balkrishna, brought it East with them when they moved here.

The first New York Chowdown took place last month at APT in the Meatpacking District, and paired Little Owl chef Joey Campanaro with DJ Brennan Green.

The second Chowdown brought Kampuchea chef Ratha Chau together with DJ James F!@#$%^ Friedman, for a night of Cambodian street food and back-alley New York electro and techno.

How did you come up with this concept?

A little over a year ago, we started having a dinner party in my apartment [in San Francisco]. It was mostly just an excuse to hang out with a lot of our DJ friends out there, and to record their mixes. I’m kind of a music hoarder, so I like to collect a lot of music and things that are specifically mixed for certain occasions. It was pretty quaint back in San Francisco. It was a very intimate vibe. It was a dinner party and us just kind of bullshitting on the mike. But, when we posted the mixes online and started kind of promoting it, we had a really great response, you know, hundreds of hits a day. And people really liked the mixes and the vibe we were going for – this impromptu kind of radio show, dinner party thing.

So, when I came out here, Justin Carter from APT happened to get a hold of me through The Chowdown Web site, and he said ‘hey, let’s get it going here. And let’s boost the production value. Let’s bring in some good chefs.’

Can you compare it to San Francisco in terms of music?

In a lot of ways they’re similar. San Francisco, the only difference is it’s like a small town. There’s a lot of [kinds] of different music out there, but it’s very similar. There’s hip hop DJs, there’s electronic DJs. In San Francisco, I was definitely more immersed in the electronic music scene. It just so happened that all my friends out there spun that type of music. Out here, you get a way larger city, a lot more diverse kind of tastes.

What types of DJ music are popular here, right now?

The New York fixtures [are] like from the DFA [Records] camp and pretty much anything coming out of France right now. But the point of being a DJ is to develop your own sound, and when you’re just paying attention to what’s popular, it’s very hard to do that.

How do select the type of music and the chef for a Chowdown?

I think, in general, electronic music, dance music or DJ-type music is you know, a little bit of a stretch if you try to pair it with food. But then again, these are two of the things that kind of seemingly go together, just because people obsess about both of these things, constantly, like me. So we try to do a regional theme or like, let’s say Chicago house and Chicago old school acid classics. Next month we’re having a kind of dirty south, soul food pairing. And maybe, I don’t know, German techno versus German foods, schnitzel (laughs) or whatever. It’s all in good fun. We’re not trying to really push the theme that much. But any kind of ties we can kind of use as fodder for the little radio show is always fun.

What is the radio show about?

You can download the little podcast. Basically, we just record the whole event. It’s us hosting the thing. It’s me as kind of the MC, and Anna as the hostess, like I said, just bullshitting on the mike while these guys play music. And we’re not formally trained radio DJs. But, we can get on there and just talk about the food, talk about the DJs, talk about the tracks, just talk about the vibe. And we encourage people to get up maybe, on the mike, if they have something clever to say. But, at the same time, it’s not an open mike night. We still want to have the music be the forefront of the quote unquote radio show, the podcasts.

Are the chefs preparing things that wouldn’t ordinarily appear on the menus of their restaurants?

Generally we pick the musical theme first and then see if the chef is into it. And if they are, we have a good event. Generally, it’s good because both food and music are an easy sell to DJs. We can get DJs to come in easy, because like ‘hey, free meal,’ you know?

Do the chefs get paid?

We pay the chefs a little bit. It’s nothing substantial. We give them a fixed budget for themselves and for food. Truthfully, we’re not making any money. This is just all for the fun.

—Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Inside the Margins: St. Mark’s Bookshop has staying power. Here’s why.

2007-05-07T08:46:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
May 7, 2007

In the matter of Barnes & Noble, Astor Place, it would be all too easy to conjure up yet another hackneyed David and Goliath image: Corporate behemoth opens bookstore down tree-lined street from quaint independent bookstore. Bookstore is labor of love for bespectacled literary type that runs it to support Jane Austen habit. Corporate behemoth gobbles up independent and spits out bones. Burp! Will other independents survive beast or end up in belly? Tune in next week.

It wouldn’t be accurate either, because where the Astor Place Barnes & Noble is concerned, Goliath would be the skyrocketing New York real estate market, not the mega-chain itself.
In April, the Times reported that the store will close at the end of the year because, according to a Barnes & Noble spokesperson, “the rent has become too high” over its 13 years in the East Village location. The spokesperson quoted, Mary Ellen Keating, confirmed this in an e-mail.
In the windows of the vacant street-level space, under the shop’s top floor (formerly Astor Wines & Spirits), there are large signs heralding an incoming Walgreen’s. Directly across the street, there’s a Kinko’s. And at the East end of the block, there’s a K-Mart, steps away from a Starbucks, one intersection away from another Starbucks, and even closer than that to the Chase Bank on the ground floor of the luxury high rise directly across the street from the Astor Place cube.

Writers of classics and bestselling pulp don’t have to worry about convincing booksellers to carry their work indefinitely. But for mere mortals, shelf life in most bookstores is on a very short-term lease.

Naturally, author Lynne Tillman was delighted to learn that Barnes & Noble plans to stock her new novel “American Genius: A Comedy,” in several of its stores around the country for “at least a year.”

And though Tillman, an East Village resident, finds the chain less personal than smaller shops, and its vastness overwhelming, she thinks it’s a valuable addition to communities that don’t already have bookstores.

Tillman said, in a telephone interview, that the Astor Place Barnes & Noble “did try to do some good stuff in the community,” like a reading series that she read for a few times.

But “her” bookshop is the St. Mark’s Bookshop on St. Mark’s Place and Third Avenue. She goes there almost every day to browse and see which new titles are out. It’s where she buys most of her books, and thinks it may be the only store in the city that carries her back catalog. “I think they do support and display writers’ books, those who live in the neighborhood. So there’s a sense of community they have, which is excellent,” she said.

In “Bookstore,” which Tillman wrote about the now defunct Books & Co. on the Upper East Side, and described using the soon-to-be-shuttered store as a “fulcrum,” for a “literary, cultural history,” book selection was referred to as “curating.” Tillman thinks that good independent stores are curated in this way, and that St. Mark’s is a prime example of that tradition.

The dark vestibule of St. Mark’s Bookshop, which is the commercial tenant of a Cooper Union dorm, is stocked and papered, tidily, with various off-the-map publications, and advertisements for events and products of interest to those who would probably be happier curled up with Baudelaire or William T. Vollman than Dr. Phil or Nora Roberts or David Baldacci.
There’s a postcard promoting a musician named Vusi Mahlasela, another announcing a screening of an abstract-sounding film by a director named Kim Ki-duk, a card for a Jewish short film festival at Two Boots, copies of the American Book Review, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Boog City, and a catalog for the summer writing program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Inside, the store is a narrow, roughshod triangle filled with free-standing, uncluttered book shelves and wall mounted stacks.

Postmodernish jazz plays just loudly enough over the sound system on a Tuesday afternoon, and the staff doesn’t seem to express the same kind of institutional malaise a career Strand employee might.

Across from the front desk there’s a round table covered with design books and graphic novels, one of the niches the store has carved for itself since it opened in 1977.
New releases are to the left and a woman of about 40 with dyed blonde hair is thumbing through “Tales of the Sisters Kane.” In the far corner, a college-aged kid is reading what looks like a design magazine, intently. And heading to the back there are lots of literary journals. Including these and all sorts of magazines, owner Bob Contant estimates there are over 1,500 periodicals in stock.

Contant, 64, and Terry McCoy, 63, are the last remaining of five original owners who worked together from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s at Eastside Books, which was located on St. Mark’s, before opening the store.

Contant, originally from the suburbs of Washington, came to New York from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had previous experience working in a bookstore and in libraries. In Cambridge, he found book-buying to be a welcome alternative to library work, one that required creativity.

An English major in college, he had a vague notion of going into teaching, but it was the 60s “and school was not that compelling.”

McCoy, who grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, went to school in Iowa and Massachusetts, and then came to New York with acting in mind. For a time, he had worked at the Eighth Street Bookshop in the West Village too.

“In those days, you could actually live on what a book clerk’s salary was,” Contant says. The rent for his apartment on Third Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, was “under a hundred dollars a month.”

Contant and McCoy’s boss at Eastside Books was an absentee owner, the store was not doing well, financially, and with the labor they were putting into it, “we felt like we could do a better job ourselves,” McCoy said in a telephone interview. So it made sense for them to open their own shop.

It was a partnership and each member contributed $2,000. The rent at the original location, which was 13 St. Mark’s, was just $375, “and a lot of sweat equity for a couple of years before any of us drew a salary,” Contant said. All of them had second jobs during this period.
McCoy estimated that most St. Mark’s customers are under 50, but put the range between 18 and 50, approximately.

On the day I visited the store to interview Contant, the majority of customers there seemed to be college-aged. And although St. Mark’s does not stock books specifically for college courses at the surrounding universities, books on critical theory have been its “bread and butter,” for about the past 25 years, he said.

When the store opened in the late 70s, critical theory titles were usually just mixed into the philosophy sections of bookstores.

Prompted by the growing buzz surrounding post-structuralist philosophy, which influenced the writings of Susan Sontag, a longtime St. Mark’s customer, and “took over the English departments of American universities,” at the time, St. Mark’s created a section specifically for books on critical theory.

“We were just in on the curve for that. And we ran with it.” The books on post-structuralist philosophy, which was then what was going on in French academic circles, “flew off the shelf,” Contant said.

Originally these books only covered philosophy. But today the critical theory section includes books on a much wider variety of disciplines.

More recently the store has developed an expansive collection of graphic novels.

And for about the past five years the store has carried graphic design books, another specialty. “There are some niche publishers that publish very cutting edge graphic design books … And it may be a big business for us, but it’s not a big business on the whole. There are not a lot of stores that are selling graphic design books.”

The store has an open consignment policy and will hold on to anything anyone brings in for three months. If it sells, they’ll reorder it.

David Rees, creator of the “Get Your War On” series of comic strips and collections, sold some self-published books in the store that major publishers picked up, Contant said.

If there’s a guiding philosophy to the St. Mark’s Bookshop, it’s “to try to make it based on quality,” McCoy said. “It seems to me very simple. Instead of a demographic approach, or a lowest common denominator approach, or somebody else’s idea of what a bestseller’s going to be kind of approach, we try to carry the books and magazines and other items that we think our neighborhood would be interested in. And that’s all we do.”

You could say Barnes & Noble and St. Mark’s coexisted peacefully for the entire time the superstore was on Astor Place. You could say St. Mark’s survived Barnes & Noble. Or you could say St. Mark’s outlived Barnes & Noble, which is closest to the way that Contant described it to me.

Barnes & Noble did take at least one scalp in the neighborhood though. The Kinko’s across the street used to be Astor Books, a general interest bookstore. “They sort of saw the writing on the wall in terms of trying to compete because you know, what Barnes & Noble does when they open a store in a neighborhood where there are independent bookstores, is that they’ll put in, and they’ll initiate, a discount policy, which you can’t compete with until they put the store out of business, really. And then they go back to selling things at list price or they’ll have various kinds of promotional things. But, you know, they’re really kind of a predator.”

Astor Books saved them the trouble by closing before Barnes & Noble actually opened.
When Barnes & Noble opened they discounted books in this way, and St. Mark’s took a hit. But because they stayed focused on their niche areas, they remained competitive. Poetry was one section that helped them stay afloat during this time, Contant said. “We’ve always had a strong section in poetry, which is probably now the largest poetry collection of any retail store in the city. It’s very profitable for us, whereas [for] most bookstores, poetry is like a token thing. But if you focus on something and you develop it, you create an audience.”

St. Mark’s clientele has always been a more local, subject-specific clientele than Barnes & Noble’s, but Contant thinks and hopes that he might pick up some of the store’s student business.

American Booksellers Association spokesperson Meg Smith acknowledged, in a telephone interview, that maybe the David and Goliath/“You’ve Got Mail,” story described the environment for independent booksellers ten years ago, but said it doesn’t today.

Today, independents represent 20 percent of traditional bookstores. And 40 percent of books are sold in bookstores in general (with the remaining 60 percent sold through other means, like the Internet), she said. These figures come from market research conducted by IPSOS.

Bookstores are particularly hard to run, because as Contant explained, the profit margin (a little over 40 percent) is small compared to most to retail businesses. And you can’t adjust the price of a book the way you can a tomato.

To Smith, “independent bookstores [are] important for the culture of a community, and people love having [them] in a community.” But, she said “sometimes there’s a disconnect between loving [them] and actually understanding [that] that means you have to support the store by shopping there.”

Contant does think the independent book business is declining. “Bookstore sales are declining. And they’re declining here. They’ve been declining for a couple of years and this is just a reflection across the board.”

And he thinks today, large cities like New York, and college towns are really the only places where small stores like his can still exist.

Though he can’t pinpoint the exact reason, his “favorite theory” is that the book purchases people make online are less of a factor than the time people spend online period, rather than reading. And he thinks book culture is declining on a national level.

But at least where the Internet is concerned, his industry doesn’t face the same challenges as the music or video business, he said. “People can access books online, but the book itself is the best kind of format.” Whereas you can listen to music or watch a movie on your computer, people are unlikely to read entire books on a monitor. And with many New Yorkers living without the luxury of a doorman, going to the post office to pick up a book purchased online can be a hassle. He notices that people are impulsive, too; they’ll see a book they like and buy it on the spot, rather than saving some money with Amazon.

With the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, the KGB and Housing Works readings and others like them, Contant believes that there is still a strong literary culture downtown. (St. Mark’s does not have enough space for readings.) He sees the strain of the Internet on reading as similar to the advent of television, and thinks that while it probably will not improve, it will probably plateau.
“Every big event that makes use of peoples’ free time has its impact. But you know, reading a book is still a solitary experience. And it’s still unequaled by any other kind of involvement. And there will always be people who respond to that.”

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Q & A with Terry Wiederlight, Owner, Fountain Pen Hospital

2007-05-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
April 30, 2007

The Fountain Pen Hospital, takes its name from a time before ballpoints and roller balls existed. Before the 1960s, fountain pens were standard, and people came to this shop, founded by owner Terry Wiederlight’s father and grandfather 61 years ago, for refills and repairs. Today repairs account for “probably one-tenth of one percent,” of Wiederlight’s business. Once fountain pens began to fall out of use, the shop’s focus shifted to stationery and office supplies. But in the 1980s fountain pens became “trendy.” By the 90s, limited edition pens began coming out and Staples became a major contender in the office supply business, so Wiederlight decided it was time to concentrate on pens again.

What’s the appeal of pens?

It’s jewelry. Pens [are] jewelry today for the man, especially [for] the men. You know, they don’t wear chains—a nice pen is something you can pull out in a meeting, it looks really impressive.

What determines the value?

Probably brand awareness and rarity. Like, have you heard of Montblanc?

Yeah.

Have you heard of Krone? No. So people will go to the name that they’ve known. Most of the people. Or, some of these companies have very, very unique limited editions. You know, very different.

Who typically stops in to buy the pricier pens?

We deal with a lot of high profile people.

Like?

Bill Cosby, Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jerry Bruckheimer was a big customer. My father, years ago, used to sell to Duke Ellington. Giuliani always used to come in here.

What kinds of items did he buy?

He used to come to buy refills for his pen all the time. He had Montblanc.

How many of the pens are massed produced and how many are individually made or made on a smaller scale?

“We probably have the largest selection of limited editions worldwide. A lot of the companies will make one limited edition a year. Like Montblanc will make one or two limited editions per year. And they sell very, very, very quickly. [We’ve] seen a skyrocket in the way they’ve gone up in value.

How many pens do you have that historical figures actually used?

We don’t get into that. We have a display upstairs—Krone, he has his own display of that stuff, but [there’s] not much of a market for it. Rarity and limited editions are a very, very big aftermarket. A lot of people sell them back to us, and then we resell them. Krone does a lot of historical stuff. Like, they did [a] Babe Ruth [pen]. They bought portions of his bat and they put that into the pen. They did 288 pens. And it sold unbelievably fast. We sold out in a week.

What are some others?

The John Hancock [with a piece of the desk he practiced his signature on in the clip], The Wright Brothers – there’s part of the plane [its wing fabric, in the clip]. I mean, all very, very unique. It’s got a special niche. You got to be different today.

Believe it or not, [Krone’s] first pen that he came out with has Abraham Lincoln’s DNA.

What is it, like blood?

I don’t know what it is, but it’s stripped, (points to a photo of it in the Fountain Pen catalog) it’s encrusted in this part right here, his DNA. [According to the Fountain Pen Hospital’s Web site, this DNA was reproduced using authenticated strands of the 16th President’s hair and embedded into an amethyst on each cap.]

Abraham Lincoln’s DNA …

Yeah, isn’t that sick? It’s crazy. But the fucking pen sold out! It was unbelievable. It’s different. It’s unique. Mount Everest, had part of the mountain, you know, just, all these different things: Shakespeare, [authenticated pieces of his famous mulberry tree, inset into gold and sterling silver relief]. Houdini, [powdered fragments of his actual escape keys mixed with sterling silver]. They do a certain amount and they throw away the mold.

Montblanc does a writers and a Patron of the Arts series every year. Does that mean these are the same type of pens each of the writers used?

No, no, basically using his name on it, and [the] story about it. [There’s] Fitzgerald. And the first one they ever did, [Lorenzo De Medici], it came out at $1,600. Now the pen’s worth $7,000. The Hemingway came out at $600. Now it’s up to $2,800. So a lot of these have really, gone, crazy in value.

So as far as value is concerned, there’s brand awareness and rarity. But what about the construction?

Well every pen is different. I mean, you have some encrusted with diamonds. It all depends – some who use sterling silver, some use resin, some use celluloids. It’s all different materials. See years ago they didn’t have plastic, so they used celluloids. And a few of companies today came out with the celluloids because you can do very beautiful things with celluloid. The colors that you can produce in celluloid is remarkable. Like Visconti and Omas, they’ve done a lot of things with celluloid.

Also, in a fountain pen, if it has a gold point, a gold point makes it a better writer, a solid gold point, on the pen. They also make steel. Obviously the gold points, on fountain pens, they tend to sell for a lot more money, but the gold one’s going to tend to write a lot smoother.

So if people are buying these high-end pens, are they using them or keeping them in showcases at home?

Some do. We tell our consumers ‘you buy it, use it.’

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

The Sharecroppers: Community Supported Agriculture will bring neighbors and farmers together this summer

2007-04-23T07:35:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
April 23, 2007

Kevin Walter and his sister-in-law, Adriane Giebel, are shareholders in a growing enterprise. But the broker they’re registered with doesn’t do business on Wall Street and they will not see a return on investment until June, when the season for New York’s CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture) groups begins.

As shareholders in the Stanton Street Settlement CSA, Kevin and Adriane will head every week after June, for about the next six months, to M’Finda Kalunga Community Garden in Sara Delano Roosevelt Park, to pick up fresh produce, fruit and flowers, made available according to season, and delivered there by the farmer who planted this harvest just for them.

(A rent increase forced the Stanton Street Settlement to move recently. The Kalunga garden is a new drop-off location.)

Kevin and Adriane’s vegetable yield may include ordinary items like carrots or lettuce, less immediate ones, like parsnip or kale, or things they may be completely unfamiliar with, like
Swiss chard or daikon. But even if they are intimidated by odd sounding (or looking) bounties of this season’s harvest, they will be able to learn how to put them to good use through workshops, demonstrations and recipe swapping among the various members of the group, which formed in 2005, and which Kevin says has “sort of doubled in size,” about every year so far.

Even though the selections for a given week will arrive before they get to the park along with instructions for distributing them, Stanton Street members will get to meet their farmer, Ted Blomgren, in New York City, and be able to get their hands dirty at his farm, Windflower Farm in Valley Falls, New York, at least once every season.

Like members of the other 49 CSA’s in New York City neighborhoods, Kevin, who is one of Stanton Street’s “core members,” or organizers, and Adriane, are able to buy very affordable, unusually fresh produce, by paying a lump sum their farmer works out with Just Food, the nonprofit (or “broker”), before the season starts. They also get a chance to meet their neighbors, “in a way oftentimes one doesn’t in New York,” Adriane says.

The opportunity to support local farms, which Just Food defines as those within a 250 mile radius of New York City, is another selling point for CSA groups.

By joining CSA groups, members get to learn about seasonality too – “that they’re not going to get tomatoes during their first distribution in June, because tomatoes don’t grow in June in the Northeast,” Paula Lukats, who manages the Just Foods CSA program, says. But in “August and September, the tomatoes are going to be amazing. And they’re actually going to taste like something. And they’re not going to be those pinkish, red, hard, rock things that you get in the grocery store.”

Lukats says the CSA’s do not want to compete with places like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods and other organic markets in the area. “They appreciate them being there at all,” and also because they have items not available at the CSA’s.

Adriane still goes to the greenmarket and to the grocery for things like milk, spices, oils and flour. And she loves going to the greenmarket for the same reasons she supports CSA’s, but says the CSA’s are cheaper.

For farmers, working with CSA’s takes a lot of the risk out of growing. “It’s a wonderful way to start the season off with a bank full of cash,” Elizabeth Keen says in a telephone interview. Keen runs Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts, one of the country’s first ever CSA farms (the other being the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in New Hampshire). “That’s always an issue with farmers … They need spring start-up loans in many cases. And we don’t need that because the CSA’s are fronting us, you know, our seed money.”

CSA members tend to be health conscious and concerned about the environmental impact that food production can have.

And groups typically create special fee structures so that lower-income members can join. Stanton Street has a subsidized plan, priced on a sliding scale, an installment plan and also accepts food stamps.

Just Food currently works with 18 farmers for “the primary vegetable share” each CSA group receives, Lukats says.

Three of the farms the organization works with grow exclusively for CSA’s. Each group works with one farmer, and each farmer works with up to six groups.

There are 20-30 other providers for meat, eggs and dairy.

All but one are organic or certified organic, which basically means that the farmer doesn’t use chemical pesticides or fertilizers, that they didn’t use chemicals to fertilize the soil before planting, and they didn’t spray pesticides on crops after they were planted.

Getting certified as an organic farm involves a fee, paperwork and an on-site inspection process.
Lukats says the farm that is not organic, Cranberry Hall Farm in South Jersey, which supplies food to the Staten Island CSA group, is making the transition to organic. For now, it will be “using integrative pest management,” or in other words, using chemicals only when it has to.
When the CSA farms don’t get certified it either means that they can’t afford to, or feel the certification process is too lengthy and involved, Lukats says. And it makes sense for farms that grow exclusively for CSA groups to skip the process because they don’t have to advertise as organic.

But some of the uncertified farms even “go above and beyond,” the official organic growing standards, she says.

The first CSA group in New York formed in 1991, when a group of New Yorkers concerned about the lack of access to good, nutritious food in New York City and the loss of family farms in New York State, began working with Roxbury Farm in Kinderhook, New York. Just Food, which runs other food programs, saw this as a model, and began organizing Community Supported Agriculture in New York City by holding a conference for local farmers and city residents in 1995. The result was six new New York City groups in 1996.

All the New York CSA groups have a vegetable share and most do a fruit share. One, in the East Village (Sixth Street CSA), works with a fishery in Alaska and has a fish share.
Lukats says that since fruit is very hard to grow organically in the Northeast, it is usually purchased from a neighboring farmer by a CSA group’s regular farmer (so that the vegetables don’t get sprayed with the pesticides, for example, intended for the non-organic fruits).
The other downtown CSA’s are in Chelsea, the West Village and Washington Square.

The CSA movement goes back to the 1960s and has roots in Europe and Japan, but it didn’t reach the United States until 1986. According to Keen, which was exactly the first CSA – Indian Line Farm or Temple-Wilton Community Farm – is a bit of a contentious bone for certain members of the CSA community. A 2004 study on CSA’s available on the USDA’s Web site however, calls the formation of both farms in 1986 “simultaneous but independent.”
Indian Line Farm was originally turned into a CSA by Robyn Van En, a woman who learned about the concept from community organizer Jan VanderTuin, according to Keen. VanderTuin had observed CSA communities while traveling in Europe.

Van En died suddenly of an asthma attack in 1997, and shortly afterward, Keen and her husband Alexander Thorp took over Indian Line.

There are “perhaps 1,700” CSA farms in North America today, according to Indian Line’s Web site.

The model that dominates conventional agriculture is focused on the “monocroppings” system, in which huge, single-crop farms produce on a large scale, and very often, ship their crops from far away.

This method “is efficient in some ways, but really limits … a lot of the kind of ecological and environmentally sound practices that a farmer can use,” Lukats says.

The transportation of food is another issue CSA advocates are concerned about, since it can affect the quality of produce and it has ecological implications. “Our farms can grow varieties that aren’t chosen for their shipping value.”

Of course, some things will always have to be shipped to the Northeast, pineapple for example, “but there are so many things that we do grow here, that still get shipped in, and it just doesn’t seem to make much sense,” she says.

Ted Blomgren, who began growing for New York City CSA’s about seven years ago, compared the CSA system to conventional farming, in a telephone interview. “It does run counter to the really big scale farms, whether they’re local ones or they’re California farms because you know, that’s all about anonymity. You don’t know who they are. You don’t know anything about how they farm.” There are some big organic farms in California though, and those farms supply his shareholders in the winter, he says. “And I’d sure prefer to see them become big organic farms rather than big conventional farms out there.”

Unlike farmers who grow for groceries or even green markets and tend to specialize in five to ten crops they’re good at cultivating and which are profitable for them, CSA farmers grow a wide variety of crops over the course of a season. Blomgren says he grows over 150 different crops, and his wife Jan, who runs Windflower with him, grows the flowers that get shipped to CSA’s and to a few farmers markets and florists near his farm.

He doesn’t think that big conventional farms will always dominate, because of the increasing amount of attention the world is paying to global warming. He expects that as new economic policies go into effect to address global warming, fuel costs will go way up. And because it will cost more to transport food, doing so from 3,000 miles away will become much more expensive.
And alternative energy sources, especially ethanol, will drive up the cost of animal feed, since ethanol can be derived from corn. “And so if the cost of feed for livestock goes up, the cost of food generally is going to go up,” Blomgren says.

Kevin says, “The quality of the stuff is incomparable,” in a telephone interview. “And it sounds hokey, but when there’s that much nice food, you actually look forward to preparing it.” When the week’s share is delivered to the drop-off site, he and his girlfriend think about menus. People get very comfortable with the system and are not always prepared for it to end, he says. “[They] really experience withdrawal at the end of the season. To see the stricken looks on the faces of the members when they’re coming down to their last week, cause they get so into a rhythm with it … it’s hard to adjust when the share stops.” Environmental friendliness, supporting local farmers and saving money are all things that Adriane appreciates about belonging to the Stanton Street CSA.She lives on First Street between A and First Ave, with her husband, and says in a telephone interview that the excellent quality of the produce notwithstanding, there’s been so much of it that they’ve been almost overwhelmed.

She also likes that it’s put her in touch with other people who enjoy preparing their own food since “New York isn’t necessarily a city of cooks.” She cooked a lot before joining, but says this has given her more ideas and she cooks even more now since there’s just so much more food around. “In fact, the supply of produce has been so abundant that I find that I have to refrain from going out because otherwise I’ll have produce rotting in the fridge … If I had a couple of kids, it would probably be easier to get through it all, but as it is, I almost never buy any vegetables anywhere else, and I often am giving vegetables away to friends.”Does her husband share her fondness for cooking? “No. We haven’t gotten to that point yet.”

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Q & A with Ben Popken, Editor, The Consumerist

2007-04-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

April 18, 2007

In 2005, a man living in Budapest named László Szily started a Web site called Tékozló Homár ("Wasteful Lobster" in Hungarian) about shopping.

Inspired by the conversation it started online, Szily's friend, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, decided to add a title to his Soho-based blog network that would empower consumers. Denton launched The Consumerist that same year.

Ben Popken has been editing The Consumerist since February 2006. At one time, he was an aspiring copywriter, and was putting together an ad portfolio. Could he ever write copy knowing what he knows now? “It might be a little hard for me to fit in to that—you’re lying to everybody!” he jokes, as we sit in Brooklyn, eating burgers not far from where he lives.

How can people avoid getting ripped off?

The first thing you want to do is research, research, research. That’s your best friend. One of the ways you can protect yourself is by conducting your transactions over credit card because you’re afforded a lot of protections in the event of a disagreement. The other way is when problems do happen, go directly, go right back to the source and complain.
I think kind of a general stance of being proactive about your situation can go a long way, both after a problem and before a problem, because say there’s a sales agent and maybe he’s looking for a weakness in whatever general way. [If] he sees that you seem pretty aware and alert and you know what you’re doing, and you’re asking questions, [then] maybe he won’t take advantage of you. You know what I’m saying? People, even unconsciously will try to do stuff.

Are there any consumer issues, locally, that Consumerist is particularly concerned about?

There’s one—IDT Energy. What they are is an energy resaler. Con Ed encourages using these companies. However, this one company, IDT Energy, is going to peoples’ doors and saying, “Hi, I’m with Con Ed. I need you to sign this so you can save money on your bill.” So, they’re misrepresenting themselves. [You] can save money. It’s just false advertising. That’s the central problem. They came to my door. It was great—I’ve been writing about these guys, and all of a sudden, one shows up [at] my door. And after he left, [laughing] I called the cops on him.

What are some newer scams going on in New York?

Well, a huge scam that’s going on right now in a lot of the boroughs is a form of identity theft where you go to a cell phone store, and you have to like give them all your info so they can do a credit check on you. But then, they’re using the info to sign up their friends for free cell phones using your information. They’re selling it to other places.

Speaking of phones, who’s the best provider out there?

A lot of people don’t like Verizon, but I think it’s a pretty good deal. Of the major carriers, we receive the fewest complaints about T-Mobile, and they’re said to have pretty good customer service. So, I don’t know whether that’s Catherine Zeta Jones’ influence…

Of the rip-offs reported to you, which one has been the most costly to your readers?

Buying a car, especially used cars with a trade-in. You can get really screwed on the financing, and there’s all these games they can play. We had a great post a few weeks ago that was written by a previous used car salesman. And he broke down all the different ways—there was this one thing he called “the four-square.” It’s this sheet, and you put the used value, and the interest, and what’s gonna be the deposit, and how much you’re gonna get for the car. And they use it like a three-card monte system to confuse you and rip you off.

Also banks, they invent all these different kinds of fees. And the problem is—a fee should be to recover a cost. It shouldn’t be, “Let’s make up some rules that are gonna trip you up, because that could be [an] income stream for us.” That’s just dishonest.

Ever been pressured by a business you wrote about?

We did have a case with a Wal-Mart PR rep who met me for drinks [at the Brooklyn Inn] last spring. His first question is, “We’re all off the record, right?” And—I haven’t seen the sunlight in weeks, I’m not trained in journalism or anything—so I’m like, “Uh, yeah whatever,” not knowing that it’s kind of a big deal.

And so then his second question is, “Well, what can we do to get you to stop writing about our companies?”

Did you ever write about it on the site?

I didn’t talk about that meeting. And then the guy, Mike Krempasky, would sometimes e-mail me.

And one time, I saw in our traffic stats that they were using this like corporate-grade blog monitoring software to see what we were saying. And so I kind of made fun of that. And then, he sent this kind of jabby e-mail. And I sent it back to him. He was being kind of a bitch.

Then, I got interviewed by this guy who hates Wal-Mart and I felt like telling him the story. It was a small podcast.

And then, after that came out, Mike came back and he said some more bitchy stuff. And I was like, “You know what? Fuck this. F this disclosure agreement. I gotta come clean,” Cause I didn’t feel comfortable, not telling my readers that I had had this meeting with him.

—Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

(To read more about the Wal-Mart incident check out “Walmart Is Mad At The Consumerist”: http://consumerist.com/consumer/walmart/walmart-is-mad-at-the-consumerist-203652.php walmart-is-mad-at-the-consumerist-203652.php;
Mike Krempasky responds: www.bivingsreport.com/2006/consumerist-vs-wal-marts-edelmans-really-krempasky)

The Block: 20th Street between Broadway and Park

2007-04-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
April 9, 2007

In the spring of 1865, Theodore Roosevelt, then six years old, watched through an upstairs window of his grandfather’s house near 14th Street, as Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession reached Union Square.

And if the future president slid the window open, he would have heard historian George Bancroft delivering Lincoln’s eulogy.

Although the speech is said to have been lackluster -- as William C. Harris writes in “Lincoln’s Last Months,” Bancroft concentrated on politics and didn’t even mention the recently-assassinated president until page 26 -- it’s possible this spectacle was one of the earliest inspirations for Theodore Roosevelt’s own career in politics.

Roosevelt was born to Theodore Sr. and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt in 28 East 20th Street in 1858, and the reconstructed brownstone is now a National Park Service historic site where you can take guided tours of the building Roosevelt lived in through his early adolescence. (The family left for Europe in 1872, and moved uptown when they got back.)

Roosevelt, who later became known as a conservationist among other things, once said that “playgrounds should be provided for every child as much as schools,” and “must be distributed over the cities in such a way as to be within walking distance of every boy and girl,” and would likely have approved of what’s been done with Union Square in recent years.

And it’s likely he would have been pleased to see that the general look of buildings like the Goelet office building (developed by architect Stanford White’s firm, and possibly designed by him), on the southeast corner of Broadway, have been preserved over the years.
But it seems pretty safe to say he wouldn’t yell “bully!” if he saw the parade of delivery vehicles and cabs that bumble down this street to get to Park Avenue everyday.

The other buildings on this slice of 20th may not be quite as notable as the “Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace,” as the Parks Service calls it, or the Goelet Building with its Chicago School design, and which New York Times reporter Christopher Gray once called “one of the most elegant commercial structures ever put up in New York,” in his Streetscapes column. But street level retail, with an emphasis on furniture and food, has been integrated with them rather than imposed on them, and there are no glass-covered, banker bunkers in sight.

What Happened Here

In 1879, Arthur Sullivan and writing partner W.S. Gilbert already had drafts for the first act, and some of the second act songs, for their next operetta, “The Pirates of Penzance.” But when they arrived in New York that year to present the authorized version of “H.M.S. Pinafore,” Sullivan realized he had left all the first act drafts in England. He was staying at number 25, then a hotel, and it is thought that he rewrote them there, partially from scratch and partially from memory.

Buying /Renting

The majority of the buildings are “older commercial buildings,” which is why New York Living Solutions’ Don Dascoli thinks that while technically in Gramercy, it is has more in common with the Flatiron Disrict.

Only five of the buildings on the entire block, townhouses whose first two floors are commercial, are residential. And because of their convenient location, size (Dascio describes these units as 900-square-foot, “loft-like” one-bedrooms, with bath and kitchen), and their relatively low price (around $50 per square foot, or around $3,750 a month), they rarely turnover. At the moment there is no inventory.

Comparable apartments in the area go for around $4,500 per month, but that’s because usually a 900-square-foot apartment is a two-bedroom, with less elbow room.

Amenities

At one time there were more home furnishing and bath shops in the area, Dascoli says, and there are still some remnants. But the restaurants look far more inviting. One of those restaurants is Danny Meyer’s famed Gramercy Tavern (just in case you feel like a bowl of soup for $17.50, but then again the dish in question is listed as an entrée on the menu posted outside so maybe it’s kiddie pool size.) There are Japanese, German, Greek, Mediterranean, “New American” (trans: a $76 prix fixe dinner at Veritas), and Thai places. And there’s also La Pizza Fresca, one of only two New York restaurants that are members of La Vera Pizza Napoletana, an international trade organization that certifies true Neopolitan pizza makers and sellers. (The other is Naples 45 in The MetLife Building.)

And if you’re thirsty, there’s Flute, a champagne bar, and No Idea, where you can drink for free, from five to eleven, if your first name is randomly posted online. (Today is April 7th. Have fun, Victor.)

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Movie Review: "Reign Over Me"

2007-04-09T07:39:00.000-07:00

Playing at: AMC Loews 7; AMC Theatres 19th St. East; Regal Battery Park Stadium 11
Runtime: 124 min
Rating: R
Written and directed by Mike Binder

Our Town downtown
April 9, 2007

This is going to sound redundant, but I’m going to say it anyway. Man, is this September 11th-themed drama a downer.

Now that’s not to say the performances aren’t any good. As Charlie Fineman, a 9/11 widower and grieving father whose post-traumatic stress disorder has reduced him to a video game-addicted, adolescent-like rock and roller, who hides behind headphones and has a seriously short fuse, Adam Sandler is so good he’s, at times, even hard to watch.

Charlie has become so adept at avoiding anything that remotely reminds him of his wife and daughters, that he has in effect, alienated everyone he ever knew. His loss was so devastating, that he’d rather float around with his eyes closed, listening to Bruce Springsteen and The Who all day, than interact with anyone or anything.

As Alan Johnson (screenwriters are still infatuated with generic names, it seems), Charlie’s long-lost roommate from dental school, and a man who has his own, less obvious, set of communicative problems, namely an inability to stand up to his business partners, and be more assertive with his wife, Don Cheadle is believably frustrated, likeable, and insecure, and then strong when it counts.

The two run into each other on the street by chance, and at first Charlie doesn’t remember Alan. But they start hanging out, and Alan quickly becomes Charlie’s only friend.

It’s not like “Reign Over Me” is without any comic relief. A subplot involving a mentally ill, but picture perfect female patient (Saffron Burrows) who is determined to lead Dr. Johnson astray, is pulled off with just the right amount of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-esque awkwardness to be tense and ridiculous at the same time. And as Dr. Johnson’s no-nonsense receptionist, Paula Johnson manages to lighten things up every now and then.

That said, if you recently split up with your significant other, or your doctor told you he found a lump, or the sure thing your supposedly best friend convinced you to go in with him on lost you your house – you might be better off buying a ticket to “Meet the Robinsons,” or “The Hills Have Eyes 2.” And this is coming from someone who once counted “Apocalypse Now” among his list of favorite movies. Mel Brooks may be able to write a musical comedy about Nazis and keep audiences coming back for more. But it seems, as was the case with Ken Kalfus’ comedic 9/11 novel, “A Disorder Peculiar To The Country,” that striking the delicate balance between chuckles and sobs against the backdrop of 9/11 is still a tightrope walk.

Binder manages to escape that potential pitfall though, because “Reign Over Me” is not really an attempt at comedy or even comedic drama. And to his credit, he manages to evoke the aftermath of the 2001 attacks in New York, with very little in the way of news reels, radio broadcasts or re-creations of the events themselves. He doesn’t try to argue that everyone who ever put on any kind of uniform is a superhero with a cape that flaps behind them in the wind, or that the terrorist attacks, horrific, and vicious as they were, were worse than tragedies that have taken place all over the world, throughout history, and have resulted in as many or more deaths.

Charlie and Alan end up in a sort of symbiotic relationship. They complement each other; Charlie needs to be stable again and make contact with other human beings again, and Alan, who finds himself deferring time and again to his wife, Janeane, (Jada Pinkett Smith), and his business partners, who don’t mind using him as their doormat from time to time, needs to get back just enough of the childish angst Charlie is drowning himself in, so he can become more of an actor and less of a passive recipient in his life. You can’t blame Janeane for growing impatient with Alan’s increasing number of late nights out with Charlie, at places like Webster Hall, where Charlie is seen drumming on stage with a hard rock outfit, or Cinema Village, where they are exiting a Mel Brooks marathon when she calls him for the millionth time to tell him his father has just died.

Watching Alan and Charlie interact, brings to mind how hard it is when someone you care about repeatedly tests your patience with their erratic, inconsiderate, sometimes over-the-top behavior (Charlie); you want to insist that they accept responsibility for their actions, but you can’t because you know being destructive is more a manifestation of their illness, rather than the result of their own bad intentions.

Charlie’s antics inevitably land him in legal trouble, with Alan, and the Templemans, Charlie’s former in-laws (Robert Klein and Melinda Dillon) who he wants nothing to do with, sitting behind him in a courtroom as a judge (Donald Sutherland), ponders his fate.

Charlie’s circumstances are really all that make him odd. There is no reason to believe that before his losses, he was anything other than a sane, law-abiding, nonviolent and well-meaning number in the crowd. What Binder seems to be asking is, how would that anonymous office worker, swimming through the midtown chaos on his way to work or during his lunch break, find the way back to the person he used to be?

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

The Block: Sullivan Street between West Houston and Bleecker

2007-04-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown
April 2, 2007

Alright, let’s get this out of the way: about two and a half weeks ago, a crazed gunman took the lives of two unarmed auxiliary cops on Sullivan, and on the next corner, MacDougal and West Houston, a bartender.

But as tragic as this incident was, it is likely to become a footnote to history.

On the other hand, Sullivan Street, between West Houston and Bleecker, is a compartment of local and national history that has stood the test of time. It’s more likely to remind you of shots fired in triumph than in desperation or cowardice.

From the white-haired Legionnaires playing cards in the darkened post room in the basement of number 179, to the row of townhouses with their colonial roots on the other side of the street, to Sullivan Street itself, which gets its name from Revolutionary War hero Major General John Sullivan, this half of the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District (the other being on MacDougal) flies in the face of those culture warriors who would have you believe real Americans are the folks who got goose bumps watching a pre-meltdown Mel Gibson gallop around in a three-corner hat with a musket in his hands and that downtown is the exclusive domain of bed-wetting atheists who read Howard Zinn and only listen to NPR.

It would be hard to argue that the row of Greek Revival townhouses on the east side of the street, painted in muted solid colors, like a giant-sized stack of Crayolas pointing skyward, are not the main attraction.

Behind their walls are not only multimillion-dollar residences, but private gardens, and a communal garden in the center that only residents have access to. Viktor Ivezaj of Landmark Real Estate, which is located on the street, had a chance to visit, as the guest of a resident, and says it’s “one of the most beautiful, well-kept” parks in the city. If there is one drawback to this block, which also boasts a good view of the Empire State Building, it’s that despite the tranquility, it’s bordered by Bleecker with its NYU, bar-hopping hordes, and main thoroughfare West Houston Street to the south. It could really benefit from some soundproofing.

What Happened Here

The parcel of land that these townhouses, said to be inhabited by Vogue’s Anna Wintour and Richard Gere among others, are built on dates back to New Amsterdam, and it was part of Dutch settler Wouter Van Twiller’s farm.

He sold it to banker and state assemblyman Nicholas Low in 1796. Low was also a member of the New York State Convention, which ratified the Constitution. Rather than kick out the Italian immigrants living there, demolish their homes and build tenements, as was the trend at the time, Low’s heirs chose to let them stay, but let their homes fall into disrepair.

When they sold it to a corporation called Hearth and Home in 1920, the company president, William Sloane Coffin, seized the opportunity to take the buildings down and replace them with “moderately priced housing for writers, businessmen, artists, actors and musicians,” according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

In later years, 181 was the Sullivan Street Playhouse, home to New York’s longest running play, “The Fantasticks,” until 2002, when the theater closed. In 2005, the building was converted to luxury condos. Its new glass façade is admittedly sleek and stylish, but would probably be a better fit for central Tokyo. According to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, local residents say the building was once a speakeasy run by Jimmy Kelley, “a longtime Greenwich Village Democratic Party boss.”

179, a Greek-Revival rowhouse, is representative of what the entire east side of Sullivan looked like in the 1830s. It is also the former residence of robber baron Jay Gould. Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia was born at 177.

Buying

“Things rarely turn over,” Knickerbocker Village New York’s Dean Mills says. 175 Sullivan, a former parking lot, is now a luxury condo building that “started at $1,300 to $1,400 per square foot,” Mills says. But it’s been sold out for the last two years.

Condo lofts in 181 (which housed the theater) are listed on Triumph Property Group, Ltd.’s Web site from $2.25 million for a 1,530 square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath to $4 million for the penthouse. The New York Times reported that Anna Wintour paid $1.4 million for her townhouse, but that was 15 years ago.

Renting

Mills says that the 1-bedroom duplex in 179 rents for $8,500 a month. The parlor, which was made into a studio, rents for $4,500.

Amenities

You can get a tasty omelet that isn’t greasy for a reasonable price, at the Sullivan Diner, even if it’s a little too cool to have me as a regular. And there are two Mexican places, Florencia 13 and Bamboleo on the corner of Sullivan and Bleecker, and of course, on Bleecker and West Houston, all the bars you can stand.

-- Matt Elzweig

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com

Mean Streets: Getting hit is still a downtown problem

2007-03-19T09:49:00.000-07:00

Our Town downtown

New Yorkers, the ones who like it anyway, love to celebrate their “walking city.” It’s so much better than cities like L.A. where cars are essential and fatties are everywhere! It’s so much better than the suburbs, where you have to pile into a station wagon and drive for five minutes just to get a gallon of milk. And what a rarity it is: this city allows you to smell the roses and exercise while you approach your destination! Right?

Perhaps. But why is it, then, that the simple act of crossing the street here often resembles a bad game of Frogger?

According to Transportation Alternatives, the pedestrian and cyclist advocacy group, seven pedestrians were killed and four were injured by cars on city streets between the weeks of February 25th and March 11th.

These crashes, and a crash earlier in February, in which a Hummer hit and killed 4-year-old James Jacaricce in Brooklyn, prompted the group to hold a pedestrian safety rally at City Hall on March 4th.

Over the past several years, there has been an average of 160 pedestrian crash deaths and 10,000 injuries a year. Amy Pfeiffer, a program director for Transportation Alternatives, says the current figures for 2007 are “sort of on track,” with those rates. And she acknowledges that with the re-engineering of problem intersections and streets like Queens Boulevard, and quicker first-response times, there has been a significant drop in the number of pedestrian crashes over the past ten years. But she says these improvements came only after years of public outrage, and safer though the streets are, they aren’t safe enough.

Pfeiffer mentions, and Streetsblog reports, that the Department of Transportation (DOT) had a redesign plan for the intersection in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn where Jacarrice was hit, in 2004, but never implemented it.

To get the DOT to put its already existing plans into action and to create what Transportation Alternatives is calling a Pedestrian Safety Action Plan were the principal demands the group made at the rally, with the overarching goal of reducing the number of annual pedestrian crash injuries and deaths by 2,000, in two years.

Pfeiffer and other advocates like her say the city does not recognize these deaths and injuries for the problem that they are or give them the attention that other, equally serious issues get.
“The city … doesn’t say anything about these crashes. Like, if three people had been shot this weekend, the city might say something about [it]. But three people are killed by cars and they don’t have any response.”

Two yuppies in a shiny black Nissan Armada are on Bowery at Delancey Street and the light is yellow.

They’re only about seven blocks from the intersection of Essex and Delancey, which Transportation Alternatives’ most recent figures for pedestrian crashes identify as downtown’s most dangerous location.

“Come on. Please, please, please!” The passenger side window is open and with his arm on the door and his head sticking out, Yuppie Number Two is begging the traffic cop standing on the other side of the light to let him through.

She lets him go and the Armada zips ahead, disappearing into the depths of Bowery.

Moments later, another traffic cop nearby helps a cement truck, its tank painted like Old Glory, make an awkward right turn out of the Williamsburg Bridge-supplied mess that is Delancey, onto Bowery.

On Essex between the northeast and northwest corners of Delancey, an elderly man pushes a cart with a small pet container as he crosses slowly, and a woman with a pronounced limp does the same. A biker going west on Delancey waves her hand to let the bus directly behind her know she’s about to lean left, into the next lane.

During the Giuliani Administration there was an office set up to deal specifically with traffic-related issues, and there were more related committees, Pfeiffer says.

In 2006, the city put out a bike safety action plan, which identified the most dangerous places around the city for bicycle crashes. It was significant, she says, because it was a rare collaboration of the DOT, the police department and the department of health.

Still, Mayor Bloomberg has not made these issues a priority. “I wouldn’t say either mayor has been particularly great on this issue. It’s just that Giuliani saw it as something … The City of New York, they don’t refuse to see it as an issue. But they don’t acknowledge [it] as severe a problem as it is.”

She says some inexpensive things the DOT could do to improve traffic conditions for pedestrians would be to give them more time to cross the street; give them exclusive time to cross the street (“exclusive time” is usually a five or six second but preferably nine or ten second walking period when there is no green light for drivers in either direction); and install bollards, the steel posts all over the courthouse area for example, at curbs.

Transportation Alternatives has an uneasy relationship with the DOT. “It’s a reactive organization,” Pfeiffer says when I ask her whether they are responsive to the concerns of pedestrians and bikers. “Our main sort of mission is to watchdog the DOT to make sure they’re actually using monies the way they’re supposed to.” She describes the relationship as one in which the DOT responds to requests, but only after ignoring activists for a long time on a given issue.

She understands that DOT money needs to go into rehabbing bridges, but thinks that they could make more “piecemeal changes, like changing one intersection at a time.”

The idea of introducing some form of congestion charging, which London introduced in 2003, obviously intrigues Pfeiffer. “Their asthma rates were incredible … their fatalities have been down significantly … If you had congestion pricing in New York City you would see an immediate drop in injury and fatality, you would see an immediate drop in rates of asthma … it would be just amazing.” She also thinks it would “generate a lot of money for the city.”

A city official close to the Mayor’s Long Term Planning and Sustainability Office confirmed that the office is “considering” congestion pricing.

The World Health Organization has called road traffic accidents, including pedestrian crashes, “a public problem requiring concerted multi-sectoral prevention efforts.”

Michael King, an architect with transportation consulting firm Nelson/Nygaard, says pedestrian crashes are a public health issue. This is why he doesn’t refer to them as “accidents.”
“There’s so many incidents, and they’re predictable, that it’s hard to call them accidents … Epidemiologists don’t look at cancer … or broken bones or things like that as ‘accidents.’ They look at them as predictable occurrences with measurable outcomes.” To look at pedestrian crashes in this way, he says, is the first step to really reducing them.

When talking about what needs to be done, he alludes to the “Broken Windows” approach to policing that the NYPD adopted during the 1990s and says that in order to fix the crash problem, the city needs to focus on the “equivalent of turnstile jumping with drivers,” which would be “something like” not yielding to pedestrians at crosswalks, then find the locations where it’s happening most often, and flood those areas with countermeasures.

To do this he suggests signal timing changes – “turning the walk light on first, five seconds ahead of the green light” a.k.a. a “leading pedestrian interval”; narrowing the roadway near playgrounds, like Washington Market Park, for example, so kids and nannies can reach the end of the crosswalk in less time.

“The little things … that’s where you’re going to start to [see changes.] And fatalities for pedestrians have been cut in half for the last fifteen years in New York City … But there’s no reason why they couldn’t go even lower.”

King also thinks that the questions the DOT asks need to be reframed. A typical DOT study would ask something like “how fast you can drive from 1st to 12th Avenue at 55th Street,” he says. This could be useful for bus drivers or drivers of commercial vehicles, but “is it really fundamental to the health of the city?” He suggests changing the “performance measure, something like ‘buses going across midtown or going across downtown, or … getting from

Battery Park City to Chinatown faster than walking … it’s always in the question you ask … is it the bane of existence to facilitate traffic between the Holland Tunnel and the Williamsburg Bridge?”

The DOT has done some good things like widening Broadway at City Hall, and widening the sidewalk on Chambers Street to the back of the steps of the current board of education building, King says. But their work won’t be done “until there’s zero fatalities caused by traffic,” which he compares to the NYPD’s mission. “I don’t think the police will ever be happy until there’s zero murders, or zero rapes” … “Are they [the DOT] trying to set a progressive agenda? It could be more progressive.”

After repeated attempts to get someone from the DOT on the phone to discuss these issues, Downtown received an e-mail from Ted Timbers, a spokesperson for the DOT. Asked what the DOT’s position is with regard to the demand for a Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, he writes that “though 2006 was one of the safest years on record for pedestrians in New York City, in the wake of several tragic accidents it is clear that more needs to be done and DOT is committed to taking further steps to make the streets as safe as possible.”

About the possibility of increasing signal times at crosswalks, Timbers says that there are 147 “leading pedestrian intervals,” which give the walk signal 6-10 seconds before the parallel movement of traffic gets a green light citywide. He says there are approximately 75 “Barnes Dance” intersections, where traffic is stopped in all directions and pedestrians can cross on every side of an intersection, citywide. And there are approximately 43 “split phase locations,” which are “where we separate the turning movement from the parallel pedestrian crossings with a right or left arrow signal display,” so pedestrians can cross while “the parallel movement of traffic is held with a red arrow signal display.” But all of the split phase locations are in Midtown.

According to Pfeiffer, seniors, who make up 13 percent of the population, account for 30 percent of pedestrian fatalities and injuries each year, citywide. Because seniors who get hit by cars often die in hospitals, there’s a lot of underreporting, and there are probably a lot more fatalities among seniors than the statistics reflect.

They often have trouble perceiving the crossing distance and knowing how much time there is to cross the street. So, very often, Pfeiffer says, they step into the street and are overtaken by the rear wheels of a truck or bus as it jumps the curb. They also tend to be on the short side so it’s harder for truck drivers to see them in their mirrors. But she says there are simple things the city could do to prevent them from getting hit as often as they do, like extending these curbs and putting bollards on them.

It is a problem, particularly in Chinatown, where there is a very high concentration of seniors, including a large number who are very elderly. Because so many of them like to spend their days outdoors they are forced to contend with high truck traffic and people driving at high speeds on streets like Bowery and Canal. And because the streets in the area are so old, many of the curbs do not have ramps or cuts.

Pfeiffer thinks Chinatown is an area that “could probably benefit from street closures,” that would exclude noncommercial vehicles.

After a Stuyvesant Town senior was killed after being struck by an MTA bus on 20th Street and 1st Avenue last year, an intersection that was known to be dangerous for years, residents were able to have the city lengthen the leading pedestrian interval. Now, no cars can turn for 19 seconds. The crosswalk on 20th Street, east of First Avenue, which had been angled away from

First, was made parallel with First, and a service road on the avenue was replaced with a pedestrian friendly green street.

In a telephone interview, Councilperson Dan Garodnick, who worked with the DOT and community groups to make these changes, says he thinks there needs to be a “wholescale review of the most dangerous intersections in the city.”

The intersection of Chambers and West Street (the West Side Highway) is massive. Overhead there’s a pedestrian bridge, but underneath there are four lanes of traffic streaming in both directions, and four nearby schools (Stuyvesant High, IS 189, PS 234 and Borough of Manhattan Community College).

Battery Park City resident and Community Board 1 member Linda Belfer, who is wheelchair bound, worries about getting hit while trying to cross West Street. “Frequently the sequence of the lights is not long enough in order for someone to get across all the way to the other side in one sequence. So you get stuck in the middle, in the median,” she says in a telephone interview. “Now the problem with that is, in many instances, the median’s very narrow. And of course you’re a sitting target for any car that jumps the median.”

Belfer says the infrastructure in Lower Manhattan “stinks.” And she says the broken up, bumpy pavement in the area pre-dates 9/11. “It’s too old and you know, everything’s caving in.”
As a disabled resident, one thing that really troubles her is what she says is a lack of curb cuts, and curb cuts that are in poor condition, in places like Chambers and West Broadway, and Broadway and Fulton Street.

She’s had problems with dips in the pavement on Chambers, Broadway and Nassau. Though she now uses a motorized chair, Belfer, who has been in a wheelchair since 2004, originally used a manual chair and says she was pitched from it after the wheels hit a depression in the pavement in the Seaport area. “I took the number 9 bus and got off at Fulton … and when [my aide] went to push me across the street, we hit a ditch and I went flying.” The disrepair that a lot of Lower Manhattan’s streets are in also affects mothers with baby carriages, seniors who walk with canes and people pushing shopping carts, Belfer says.

Anthony G., who chooses not to give his last name, is waiting for a bus on the northwest corner of East Houston Street and Avenue A. He says he isn’t surprised to learn that this intersection was tied for downtown’s fourth worst, on Transportation Alternatives’ list of Manhattan intersections with high numbers of pedestrian crashes. (It shared this dubious honor with West 17th Street and 8th Avenue.)

Only six months ago, Anthony explains, he was hit by a cab on 2nd Avenue and 3rd Street at about 8:50 a.m. He was fortunate enough to leave the scene with some bruised ribs and a sprained ankle.

-- Matt Elzweig

Movie Review: "The Lives of Others"

2007-03-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

Playing at: Angelika Film Center, Chelsea Clearview Cinemas
Run Time: 137 min.
Rating: R
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
In German with subtitles

Our Town downtown
March 12, 2007

1984 is the perfect starting point for this story of a bohemian couple under full surveillance in the former East Germany, and the winner, deservedly, of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Filled with blackmailing, spying and double-crossing, it is suspenseful and thought-provoking throughout.

Its Orwellian undercurrent is anything but hypothetical; to say that this Soviet-bloc republic’s feared secret police, the Stasi, ran the show on the east side of the Wall would be an understatement. These eyes and ears of the socialist regime were known to capture the scents of citizens on pieces of cloth and store them in airtight containers in case the dogs were needed to stop them from defecting to the West. Some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed to so they could attack without warning.

When a neighbor accidentally spots the steely Captain Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) and his crew bugging the apartment of playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his girlfriend, a stage actress named Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) Wiesler informs her that if she tells them their home is under surveillance her daughter will lose her reserved place in college. Her compliance is as immediate as his blackmail technique is reflexive.

With chilling efficiency, the Stasi turned neighbors, coworkers, friends, families and even lovers against one another as informants who were intended to ensure that each and every citizen was loyal to the state.

Wiesler plays purely by the rules, not distracted at all by any doubts about the righteousness of the Marxist-Leninist post-war republic he works for.

Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), his former classmate at Stasi school, is a careerist and uses the system to his own ends. And their relationship – Grubitz becomes Wiesler’s supervisor – shows that at least in East Germany “nice guys” really did “finish last.”

In one scene, Grubitz jokes with Wiesler about how he has Wiesler to thank for his success in Stasi school. Tukur, as Grubitz, is excellent as the guy every one of us knows, the one who always happens to be around when there are pictures to appear in and important hands to shake.

Grubitz is as cynical as Wiesler is idealistic about the aims and policies of the ironically named German Democratic Republic. And if it hasn’t occurred to him from the beginning, by the time he begins his climb from Stasi school lecturer to high-ranking bureaucrat, Grubitz realizes that all the state’s ideology, and with its methods of surveillance and torture can be used to enrich himself.

The chain of surveillance and blackmail is virtually endless in Von Donnersmarck’s suspenseful, thought-provoking film.

Perched in an attic from which the Stasi watch Georg and his girlfriend around the clock, Wiesler’s soul begins to thaw, and he starts questioning whether the government’s utopian vision of society can exist free of corruption, and whether what he’s doing is right, for the first time.

Georg and Christa-Maria have major choices to make as well – Georg, whose loyalty to the party has been questioned, despite writing innocuous plays, whether to start really taking chances with his work – and Christa, whether to continue seeing a minister who has forced her into an affair that borders on rape by threatening to end her acting career.

As Georg and Christa-Maria, Koch and Gedeck show the strain of two people under attack who must do everything they can to conceal their anguish.

Ulrich Mühe is memorable as the lonely, conflicted Captain Wiesler. His slow transformation is apparent without lots of dialogue or gesturing. And with his headphones and his deceptively emotionless façade, he is sure to be associated with this part from now on.

The Stasi are brutal in measured tones. When they capture someone, bring in their prisoner, and calmly force that prisoner to choose between their own relative well-being and the freedom of someone they love, it is frustrating and terrifying to watch.

“The Lives of Others” depicts an unenviable determination victims of the Stasi had to make. In a climate where black-listed artists were committing suicide in alarming numbers, artists had to decide whether they were really alive, stripped of the freedom to create, and if they were, whether it was a life worth living.

In “The Lives of Others,” the Stasi’s focus on artists in particular is a vivid reminder of how clamping down on free-thinkers in the name of dogma is such an devastating tool for grabbing power and holding on to it.

Wiesler turns to an underling who questions his actions during a surveillance shift and asks him “you’re not an intellectual, are you??” He assures him he does not fit this dangerous designation and shrinks away, obeying the chain of command.

But hope comes in 1989 when the Berlin Wall is torn down. Postal workers leave a chamber of a
dank building presumably not knowing what to think. They are suddenly free. But there is much damage to survey.

-- Matt Elzweig

Q & A with Chico, Mural Artist

2007-03-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Chico's work is all over
the Lower East Side/ Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Our Town downtown
March 12, 2007

Walk around the Lower East Side and unless you’re blind you’ll see Antonio “Chico” Garcia’s work, though you may not realize it.

Before Chico, 43, was known as a legendary mural artist, he was a kid on the Lower East Side, angry at the world because, among other reasons, he could not find employment on the West Side; in the 70s, employers were wary of hiring Lower East Siders, who, according to Chico, were written off as criminals and lunatics, or both.

After some brushes with the authorities, he realized he didn’t want to end up like a lot of the other kids in his neighborhood. So he stopped bombing subway cars and buses with his spray cans, and decided to cover vandalized walls with murals instead.

His talent even took him overseas for projects like the Jimi Hendrix memorial he painted in London. And his work has appeared in movies like “The Super,” “I Like It Like That” and “Beat Street.”

What makes your murals unique?

In the graffiti world, they call me ‘The Messenger.’ They call me ‘The Headliner.’ Always making headlines. Murals, I think it’s my life. Like if you notice I even do basketball courts. I mean I do everything that I can get my hands on, anything to beautify, make the neighborhood much, much cleaner.

Any favorites?

Princess Diana was one of them, on Houston Street and Avenue A. I also done one with the Pope there. Somebody kept throwing paint on the Pope. Probably people didn’t like him, but I think he was a great man. I think that was one of my best ones, of the Pope, just to say goodbye. Also, right now, if you go over there you have like a Dominican bachata [band], so it’s kind of an advertisement. Sometimes you gotta make money. But I don’t advertise anything bad.

What about the memorials?

I’m the King of Memorials. Now, I don’t do them anymore. But, the last one was a little girl who passed away [Nixzmary Brown]. I don’t know. I’m touched. I’m an artist and something gets inside of me when a tragedy—I could be anywhere and when I feel something needs to educate the people, I need to put it out there. I think that was educational for the people about that little girl. Also Selena, people like that. Mother Teresa. I painted all those people for a reason. These are good people and the little childs are getting killed or whatever. It was like to let people know ‘don’t let it happen again.’ You know, ‘maybe the city should do something about this.’

How do graffiti artists get those complex designs on the sides of tall buildings and overpasses and stuff?

I mean that’s not my style. It’s a rooftop thing now. And they’re not really Hispanic these kids, or blacks. They’re Europeans. They’re white, these kids. You don’t see Spanish names up there like ‘Gonzales’—all you see is ‘Skippy,’ ‘Johnny.’ But you think some Puerto Rican kid’s gonna get up there? You gotta be out of your mind. That’s some white shit. I’m serious, man. You’re risking your life. Also, you could get arrested for it. And not only that, you’re vandalizing. And that’s gonna make the building [owner say] ‘after I painted, you think you’re gonna come by and deface my $30,000 paint job?’ If you go around, you can see. I mean they’re not doing anything beautiful. I know a couple of kids around here—their family got money. Lawyers. And they’re out there, vandalizing, doing graffiti, selling weed, doing all kinds of crazy shit.

How is your apartment painted?

I’m an artist. I gotta change my shit every time. Now for a year, my apartment, I made bricks, like in my kitchen. The other side is almost like a gray with [a] marbled kind of look. I have almost like a wood kind of frame around it. It gives you the kind of look to relax you, cause I cannot deal with a blue room or a burgundy room.

Do you get permission from landlords?

Back when my neighborhood was a trash heap neighborhood? Never. So I still consider, I’m still living in those old days. [I was] like Spiderman. Just [walked] in. I just painted it for the community. But now things are changed. Now they want money. Now they don’t want it up. I had paintings in every corner here. And believe me, a lot of them got primed over—the World Trade Center that I did on 14th Street. You have those advertising people coming now. Everybody wants to make money. They don’t wanna see beauty no more. They don’t wanna see murals.

You got any future projects in mind?

Not quite. Not quite. I think I’d rather keep that to myself right now. But, some of them would be messages. I mean we got cancer, and it’s killing people. And nobody’s doing anything about it. We got diabetes. All that the government’s doing is giving you more pills. And they’re killing you more. I mean we gotta do messages that will alert people and wake up the public to reality.
I don’t know, when I come out with something, it just makes noise. And whatever happens, it happens. It’s what happens in that moment. It’s spiritual. And it just happens, you know? Boom! Sometimes it’s like I’m coming back from 1905. Sometimes I feel like I’m Picasso. I really wanna do canvasses. That’s my dream. My dream is for the mayor to give us an opportunity. There’s thousands of graffiti kids out there, and they’re gonna continue doing graffiti. You cannot stop that. And I remember—1990—I said, ‘in the year 2000, there’s gonna be more graffiti on the subways than people wearing three-piece suit[s].’ And it’s happened. I think in the year 3000, there’s gonna be more graffiti than Chinese food.

And some of these kids, they’re on the edge. They need to be heard, man. They’re gonna continue to vandalize. It’s gonna get worse. Cause they keep closing programs. If I could work with these kids to beautify the community, and do artwork, I think there won’t be that much crimes in the street or that much graffiti going around.

-- Matt Elzweig

The Far East: It still feels like Loisada out here.

2007-03-05T06:56:00.000-08:00

Photos by Andrew Schwartz.

Our Town downtown
March 5, 2007

Although Tompkins Square and the neighborhood that runs across Avenues C and D are often lumped together as variously “Alphabet City,” “The East Village,” or “The Far East Village” by real estate brokers, it’s a place that feels at a remove from the St. Mark’s’s, the NYU’s, the Starbucks’s and the boutiques of the East Village.

There is public housing on C, but it doesn’t dominate, the way it does on Avenue D where the Jacob Riis and Lillian Wald houses have been since 1949.

And even though a good number of bars, lounges, and coffee shops have popped up over the past seven years or so on C, when you leave Tompkins Square and walk onto C from Houston, you get the feeling you are entering a context that is separate from the rest of the “East Village.”
Old men hang out on street corners and people greet each other by name here. Giant murals by a street artist named Chico cover walls. Every now and then Caribbean music or hip hop bounces out of passing car speakers, and the Spanish language is everywhere.

The cars on the FDR produce a whisking white noise because the flow of traffic is steady this afternoon and mercifully, no one is honking their horn.

From here, the farthest point East on this part of Manhattan, and the backyard of the Riis and Wald houses, there’s a clear view of industrial Queens and a partially blocked view of the Williamsburg Bridge.

It’s a Wednesday and sunny at about 3:30, but it’s not quite warm enough for the kids milling around Avenue D to shed the puffy black winter jackets so many of them are wearing. One is unzipped and an oversized t-shirt with an airbrushed portrait of a young man is visible underneath it: “RIP Gerlin.”

It refers to Gerlin Collado, 20, who was stabbed to death on February 25th, three days earlier, while waiting for the L train on a platform in Brooklyn. The New York Times reported that he lived on East Fifth Street and was
a deli worker who was studying to be a mechanic.

In front of the Boys & Girls Republic on East 6th, Evelyn Jimenez is waiting for her granddaughter’s school bus to arrive.

Jimenez has lived in the Lillian Wald Houses for 35 years and grew up in the neighborhood. She has two daughters and she had twin sons, but they are both dead. One was killed, stabbed by another student inside Junior High School 25, in 1993, during a fight. The other died in a car accident two years later.

According to NYPD reports, overall crime in the 9th Precinct, which polices the East Village, is 70 percent lower than it was when her son was killed. Crime is 65 percent lower than it was on the Lower East Side at the time.

She acknowledges that crime isn’t the problem it once was, and says when something happens in the development, the 9th Precinct, which recently moved to Avenue C, arrives “like, in seconds.”

Though the wave of hip-ness that has swept over A, B and parts of C hasn’t yet reached D, rents across the street from the Wald and Riis Houses have increased and forced out businesses that were there. There are still bodegas with bulletproof glass for nighttime customers, but there’s also an H & R Block (with a memorial mural for yet another young man on one of its walls) and a Rite Aid.

Crime may not be much of an issue anymore for Jimenez, but being kicked out of her home, not having anyplace to shop or to park nearby all worry her.

“All you see is bars and clubs, and bars and clubs. That’s all they have on Avenue C, Avenue B, Avenue A. All that. This used to be pizzerias and all that, and everything closed down.”

She says “bar people” park at the housing complex. “They even come down here to park and then they gotta walk all the way down the avenue to go to a bar … And we that live here, we don’t find no parking.”

Like many of her neighbors, she is worried that a private developer is going to buy the Riis and Wald houses from the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), which owns them. “I ain’t going nowhere cause you ain’t gonna find no cheaper rent than here. All these apartments … are so expensive that where the hell are you gonna go, you know what I mean? That’s all I know.”

If you ask local business owners, tenants of the houses and other residents in the area you are sure to hear this rumor, which often involves Donald Trump.

But they are “not for sale,” according to Howard Marder, a NYCHA spokesperson who spoke to Our Town downtown in a phone interview. Marder says he doesn’t know if NYCHA’s ever been approached by a developer about buying the houses.

Aurora Kessler, a spokesperson for The Trump Organization, writes in an e-mail that “the Trump Organization is not looking at property in this area.”

In fact, NYCHA has never done this before, and though it could choose to sell and privatize housing projects, it has been adamant that it won’t.

The rumors could possibly be fueled by common knowledge that NYCHA has a huge deficit. (Last year it was $168 million. Now it is thought to be closer to $165 million.)

Tenants could also be looking at Chicago, which is tearing down public housing.

Lance Holmes, a resident of the Wald Houses for 52 years, believes the rumors, and points to repair work being done on the projects as evidence. “They’re buying them already … If it was still low income they wouldn’t be fixing them.” Holmes thinks Avenue D is going to look like A, B and C “within two years. They done bought up everything over there. So they … gotta move their way back towards the water. This is as far to the water you can get.”

Holmes says, “People down here are very lazy. They don’t wanna go to tenant meetings... [Before] there was more unity down here than it is now.” This kind of apathy is helping the transformation, he implies, to happen so quickly.

He wants to move out and says a lot of other tenants are planning to move out too. But he doesn’t know where he’ll go yet.

Jimenez says people in the community don’t want to participate in tenant patrols anymore. “Nobody wants to get involved no more.”

Whether the transformation will ever really spread to D is a lingering question since the projects take up an entire side of the street.

One person who thinks it’s already taking place is Mike Diaz, who manages the Pioneer Supermarket on D between 6th and 7th. The store is only a year old and he says that a condo building is going to be built on the adjacent lot, which is vacant.

Diaz views the changes as progress and says that people who aren’t happy with them are people who “wanna stay in the same [situation].”

“See, public assistance is good, but to help, so you could fix your situation … not stay on it all your life.”

At least one city housing analyst who chose to remain anonymous doesn’t “think housing projects have ever been a problem for gentrification,” and points to Fort Greene and Clinton Hill in Brooklyn as “arguably” successful examples. “There are numerous projects there and while they’re not back to back with gentrification, property values in Fort Greene are quite high along the park and projects sit on one side of the park.”

The shops around Tompkins Square Park serve a clientele that appears to be largely young, college-educated and fairly well-off. Members of this crowd frequent places like Life Cafe for lunch, Alt.Coffee to check their e-mail, and Plan B, a late night meat market, to dance and drink. At night and on the weekends, they come to the area from other neighborhoods, boroughs and from outside the city too. The park itself is now easier to associate with baby bottles and laptops than riot gear and needles.

Pamela Huson, an agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman, says this area around the park is especially popular with young people, and the real estate values reflect that. “A client of mine had a property on the East side of the park. They needed a sort of valuation three years ago, and I gave them a figure that was in the high sixes. And they sold it last November, and it went for $1,150,000. So that’s the kind of dramatic changes that have happened down there. And I sold it in the first day.”

Four years ago, Manny Garcia opened Cafécito, a Cuban restaurant on C that stands out among the grimy Chinese takeouts, the delis and the through-the-partition liquor stores in the neighborhood. He thinks the development will continue on to D, but that it may take a little longer than it took on A, B and C. Garcia estimates that half of his customers live on B & C and the other half come from outside of the immediate neighborhood.

“Four years ago it was very different here.” Zum Schneider, the German beer garden, was already open, but other than that there were just “a couple of bars.” Most of the development, he says, has taken place in the past two to three years. “The last two years they built three buildings on 11th Street … Now a fourth one. Three buildings in the past two years.”

You can eat lunch for about ten bucks at Garcia’s restaurant. Garcia made the prices cheap so residents who already lived in the neighborhood could afford to eat there.

The buildings that have gone up recently are residential, he says, and “people who’ve been here for a long time are pissed because they’re being priced out. And new people love it.”
Even some of the newer residents are being priced out. Greg Manitsas, a senior at Parsons, is going to have to leave his “small one-bedroom” on 11th and C very soon. In two years, his rent jumped from $1,600 to $2,000. “I believe I live in poverty conditions, and pay that kind of money. I just think it’s ridiculous.”

Recycle-a-Bicycle, a nonprofit that opened up one of its used bike shops on C seven years ago, found itself in a bit of a bind, when it had to raise prices after a rent increase. “People resent that,” Rich Pinto, who manages the shop, says. “It’s just a fact of life when your rent goes up you have to charge more.”

Pinto says C was a “ghost town” five years ago. With the increase in new residents and businesses, “the balance of business in the neighborhood has gone from like businesses kind of serving you know, lower income people, probably primarily like Dominican or Latino people … and that’s shifting now to businesses that are sort of serving more like yuppie types and stuff.”
He says the stretch of stores on C between 6th and 7th streets folded due to rent increases. Joselito, a Dominican restaurant, had to move from C to D for this reason, Pinto says.

The changes will spread to D, he thinks, unless the projects pose a problem.

These days his customers are “mostly youngish white people … who’ve moved in, because they have money to spend.” He still does a lot of repair work for people from the old neighborhood though. A lot of business comes from
Europeans studying at NYU. Pinto estimates that European students and other expatriates account for about 30 percent of the bikes he sells.

Recycle-a-Bicycle has youth programs and at one time kids fluent in Spanish were running the shop. (Pinto is not fluent.) “I don’t think people in the neighborhood that only speak Spanish are as comfortable coming here as they probably [were then].”

On the weekends nightlife revelers from uptown to Long Island come to Chez Betty, a coffee shop on East 3rd owned by Shilat Erdibou. She opened it two and a half years ago and lives uptown.

There is a small housing project directly across the street. She says that even though her shop is not “a place especially for very poor people,” she tries to be friendly and respectful to them when they pass by. She’s been asked about gentrification before, and about relations between new residents and business owners like herself and the original neighborhood residents, but dismisses the notion that it’s much of an issue.

“You have to mix. We mix and match here. That’s the idea of the place. And I think if you don’t come with this idea, if you [think] that you’re gonna be just one style here—no, you have to accommodate. And you have all kinds of people here.”

On Wednesday, there’s a line of about forty of the same black winter coats popular with kids on Avenue D, some of them worn by those same kids, in front of a building on 1st and 1st. And the same airbrushed, memorial shirt is worn by one of the mourners waiting to get inside. This is the R.G. Ortiz Funeral Home, and the body of Gerlin Collado will be on display until 8 o’clock.

-- Matt Elzweig

Book Review: "The Last of Her Kind" by Sigrid Nunez

2007-02-26T08:51:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
February 26, 2007

“The Last of Her Kind”
Sigrid Nunez
Picador
$14.00
391 pp.

“The nineteen sixties were a very turbulent time in our nation’s history,” one of my college professors said in a Ben Stein-like monotone. “I’m sure you’re all very tired of hearing about it.” A vocal majority of us agreed.

But “The Last of Her Kind,” Sigrid Nunez’s story of a friendship forged during this period, avoids the usual clichés – that mythologizing of cultural figures, events and practices from the time that would have you believe Che Guevara’s face on a t-shirt was a symbol of truly progressive politics, that Jim Morrison was a visionary poet, and that sharing a joint with a five-year-old could be a good idea.

Roommates at Barnard College in 1968, Georgette George and Dooley Ann Drayton (who prefers “Ann”) have almost nothing in common, which is exactly what Ann wants.
Ann is from a Connecticut family that has help, goes to clubs and sits on boards. Georgette is from a small town in New York State, where there’s not much going on except alcoholism, poverty and domestic abuse.

And while Georgette, who will soon drop out, wants nothing more than to escape her background, nothing could be nobler or more romantic or purer to Ann. That would be, of course, unless Georgette were black. “She did not want a roommate from the same privileged world in which she had been raised,” Georgette, who narrates most of book, writes. “What she had really wanted, she said, was a black roommate. But she had not had the courage to ask.”
Georgette is understandably put off by this strange new presence in her life, but gradually she and Ann become best friends. The story spans decades, through their falling out, and through an incident that lands Ann in prison for life, and their eventual reconciliation.

It is deceptively simple to hate Ann Drayton. She is capable of being viewed from so many different angles that if you can’t feel for her, you can at least understand her.

Nunez sets the tone with Ann and Georgette’s early relationship, but also explores Georgette’s brutal rape, her relationship with her mentally ill sister who resurfaces years after running away, and Georgette’s failed marriages.

Through it all, she reveals more and more about what makes Ann tick – what is selfish and idealistic, unfortunate and lucky, insensitive and compassionate, generous and unforgiving – and where it all comes from.

Almost from infancy, the extremely thin-skinned Ann is endowed – plagued or blessed, depending on perspective – with an innate concept of the world as a place where people like her parents are the flashpoints for a chain of suffering around the world that never seems to end.
Her ideals and the radical endeavors she embarks on are built on this kind of class guilt, yet after a time she shuns Students for a Democratic Society, still committed to social justice, but thinking that she’d rather do something to achieve it, directly, than participate in internal power struggles.

It’s easy to be disgusted with the way she treats her parents, who may be dandies, but basically have good intentions – or to write off her tirades (during a family function she tells them they should pay reparations because a branch of their family once owned slaves). But her desire to heal the suffering of the disenfranchised, however misguided, comes across as sincere.

As she narrates, Georgette often looks back with the near-disbelief of someone in middle age looking at the out-of-control cultural landscape their youth took place in. “There was a copy of ‘Soul on Ice’ in Ann’s bookcase. There was a copy in at least half the college bookcases in America. It was radical Holy Writ and a national bestseller … [Ann’s friend] read aloud the passage she was looking for right away. She read aloud the passage containing [Eldridge] Cleaver’s justification of his rape of white women as a means of taking revenge on white men.”
Ann has a Joan of Arc complex, and often the exalted figures in her iconography, namely the proletariat and African-Americans, are cool to what she must see as charity, repentance and authenticity.

After Barnard, when Georgette is working at an early Cosmo-like magazine, Ann, predictably, disapproves. But Georgette realizes that perhaps not all of the early feminist tenets are sacred – that she just might long for a relationship with a man that goes beyond the purely physical, and that she doesn’t really want to reject all the girly creature comforts that delight the readers of the magazine she works for.

With an increasingly unpopular war continuing to stagnate in Southeast Asia, race relations that were still unsubtly problematic, and a generation of kids and parents who were as out of touch with one another as could be, maybe it was natural for the overreaching that took place in the pursuit of social reform and often resulted in violence, death and ruined lives.

But you don’t get the impression that Georgette is looking back on the 60’s and 70’s with a totally jaundiced eye either. She reminisces with affection, tempered with the cautiousness that comes from living to tell her own story. And while she recoils at a lot of what Ann says and does, it seems she agrees, with some detachment, that it’s better to at least have a vision for improving the world, and then chase after it, than to want nothing more than the status quo and smugly talk yourself into believing that things couldn’t be better.

-- Matt Elzweig

Q & A with Echo Danon, Program Director, Steve Cohen, Genral Manager - East Village Radio

2007-02-26T08:42:00.000-08:00

Steve Cohen (left) and Echo Danon (right), in front of

East Village Radio/Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Our Town downtown
February 26, 2007

If you walk by Lil’ Frankie’s Pizza on First Avenue in the East Village you will notice a section of the storefront with DJ’s behind the glass. This is East Village Radio, an online station created by Frank Prisinzano, who owns Lil’ Frankie’s and other restaurants in the neighborhood.
It features live broadcasts and podcasts and for Prisinzano “is like a cultural project,” general manager Steve Cohen says. “He always contends that the neighborhood was really good to him and that this is like his gift back to the neighborhood.”

Cohen and Echo Danon, the station’s program director, both have musical backgrounds, and are both part of what Cohen calls the “extended family” that started up the station in 2003.

A local, independent radio station in Manhattan. Why?

Echo Danon: It came out of a conversation that Frank Prisinzano had with a friend of his named Jorge DoCouto. And Jorge had been doing some pirate radio [in Austin, Texas]. It began with that idea, of giving a radio station to the community, which would provide a soundtrack that we thought was sort of fitting.

But then you were forced off the air.

ED: The FCC, they sent us a “Cease and Desist.” And we don’t want to play with the FCC. So we shut down immediately. Evidently we could have continued to broadcast, but there was no reason to push anything. We realized that because we had the Internet as a new forum that that would be a better route to take. And we could hopefully reach more people that way anyhow. It was just sort of a fun thing to do and it was rebellious. But we’re rebellious up to a certain point.

So far it’s all music?

ED: No, we have a couple talk shows. Andrew Andrew does one talk show on Tuesday. They have an artistic approach to their show. They’ll take certain themes, artistic or cultural, and speak about those, include music in the program. Their show is conceptual. Then we have a show called “DList Radio,” which is a homoerotic talk show. Then we also have writers from “The Daily Show” on Thursday doing comedy skits and inviting in guests.

So there’s no profit-generating part of the station?

ED: We wish there was. [When] we started out, [we] considered being a not-for-profit organization and then decided not to do that and instead run as a community corporation.
We sell ad space on the Web site and that helps to sponsor DJ’s shows. Other DJ’s who have been here for a long time pay dues to help contribute. Most of our monthly costs are covered by Frank.

Are the podcasts popular?

Steve Cohen: First of all, talk about popular, we had no idea how popular we were until we did the podcasts and the archives and saw what kind of downloads that were happening, because that’s where you get most of your traffic. Because of the convenience of being able to plug in when you want to, the vast majority of people do it just that way.

Is your format similar to college radio?

ED: As far as the programming is concerned, meaning that it’s foresworn that DJ’s can say and play what [they want]. I’m sure that college radio has more restrictions than we do. Once we get a DJ on board, we’re open to them expressing themselves. Freedom of expression is important.

Are people passing by curious about what’s going on inside?

SC: A lot of the shows look to really include our neighborhood. It’s not uncommon for people to just walk in and for a DJ to put that person on air. One time I was doing a show, and I was having a technical problem where a tape that I had prepared, I brought it in and it didn’t have the level. So I only had three CDs on me. And a fellow just happened to come in off the street. And the guy was a poet. And not only was he a poet, but he was really good. I mean, check this for a concept, he composed his poems from only information that he got in the subways.

What are your biggest goals for the station?

SC: What the station stands for is, really, a different format. When I grew up, when we had like that renaissance or that cultural revolution, it was something that was on everybody’s minds, like The Beatles, for instance. And what was so interesting was so many people went with it. Radio, it reflected [that]. It surprises me now, when I go to dig into this vintage say, psych rock, and I look back, how much of it I did hear [on the radio]. Sure, there’s tons I didn’t hear, but the fact that I did hear it says that a lot of it was being played on the radio. And things just changed after that. What we’re really trying to do, is we’re trying to say, ‘in a sense, you’ve only heard a small portion of what’s going on, in a lot of ways.’

I’m not saying that they gave up on them. Maybe there’s an arbitrary nature to how business develops and what’s happened. Everything is going ahead at a rather quick pace. There’s a tremendous amount of content—material out there no matter what you’re interested in—that’s really worth getting into. So that’s what we’re looking to share, that there’s a wider palette. The idea for us is, ‘hey, can we re-open this up? Can we redo this a bit?’ so that we can start to interest people and not look at music as just another appliance that goes along with their dishwashers and their cell phones.

—Matt Elzweig

Developmental Difficulties: Does affordable housing have a future?

2007-02-20T06:56:00.000-08:00

Independence Plaza North (left) in Tribeca was originally

a Mitchell-Lama development . New tenants pay

market rate. (Photo by Andrew Schwartz)

Our Town downtown
February 19, 2007

It’s a cold, but clear day, and from the terrace of John Scott’s 38th floor apartment on Greenwich Street, you can see the Empire State Building perfectly. You might think that in a location like this the rent is as high as the altitude, but it’s not, for now.

For the modest two-bedroom, which he estimates measures close to 1,000 square feet, he pays just $1,423 a month, but, he adds, that amount will go up soon because his landlord, a developer named Laurence Gluck, recently announced that he was going to begin submetering and adding electricity to each tenant’s monthly bill.

It may sound like Scott’s place is a steal, but he says it costs him about two weeks’ pay to come up with the rent.

Scott moved here, from Brooklyn, in 1975, when Tribeca was not yet Tribeca. It didn’t have a school; it didn’t have a supermarket; it was deserted at night and was more of a shadowy back lot to the Financial District than a place where people actually lived.

This is why World Trade Center workers, for whom this complex, Independence Plaza North, was intended, were not interested.

In response, the original owners, Duane Street Associates, enrolled the development, which was completed by 1975 and comprises three 39-story towers and 75 attached townhouses, in the government-subsidized Mitchell-Lama housing program. And in doing so, they filled its 1,329 apartments to capacity with low and middle income residents like Scott that same year.
Scott credits Independence Plaza with planting the seeds that later sprouted Tribeca, which Forbes rated as the country’s twelfth most expensive ZIP code (10013) in 2006.

The residents came together and worked to transform the area into a neighborhood, Scott says. In 1982 they were successful in getting the prices on nearby commercial spaces affordable enough that the first supermarket, a Food Emporium, could move in. They also lobbied the city so they could create Washington Market Park with their own hands, and succeeded in having the government build PS 234 (still called Independence School), which was completed in 1988. Scott’s daughter was part of the six-student class that “opened the school.”

The first signs of trouble came in the late nineties, when residents were made aware that Duane Street Associates was planning to buy out of the Mitchell-Lama program so they could begin renting out vacated apartments at market rate, and raising rents for the existing tenants.
(According to a recent report on Mitchell-Lama housing by city Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr., “the majority of Mitchell-Lama rental units that have withdrawn from the program are eligible to raise their rents to market rate.”)

Residents also started to notice deteriorating building conditions around this time, Scott says. “They started to fire the doormen. And the building … was starting to go downhill as far as the elevators were broke, the carpets were dirty. So we got involved,” Scott says.
The residents raised “a few hundred thousand dollars,” determined to buy the development from Duane Street Associates. Their plan was to make Independence Plaza an equitable co-op, and allow people who couldn’t afford to buy a co-op to stay in their apartments. “And it wouldn’t have been a for-profit type co-op.”

But for some reason, Duane Street Associates chose to sell Independence Plaza to Gluck in 2003, which tenants found out about in a letter. Just a day later, Gluck let them know he planned to leave the Mitchell-Lama program within a year.

Today Independence Plaza is no longer a Mitchell-Lama building and vacated apartments are being rented to new tenants at market rate.

The existing tenants negotiated with Gluck.
Now half of them receive federal subsidies that are determined according to their income. The other half, including Scott, are charged their last Mitchell-Lama rent, plus whatever the rent stabilization increases are for a given year. But according to Scott, new tenants are paying approximately $4,000 a month for two-bedrooms like his, and he, for one, will eventually be forced out.

He also says there is a disparity in the way these new tenants are being treated as compared to the tenants who came in under the Mitchell-Lama program.

“He’s taking all this money from the federal government and if a person’s refrigerator breaks, what he’s doing is giving you a secondhand refrigerator [that] doesn’t work well. The services, he’s giving less, but he’s giving you know, services, to the new tenants that are paying higher rents.” New refrigerators, for example.

After repeated attempts to get in touch with representatives of Laurence Gluck via e-mail and telephone, Our Town downtown was able to speak with Kathleen Cudahy, a spokesperson for Gluck, on the telephone, on the day this article went to press.

Cudahy stated that she had very little time to answer questions about Independence Plaza. But when asked about the secondhand refrigerators, she said that “under the law, you are permitted to do that.”

It’s no secret that as the housing boom continues to flourish, it’s getting harder and harder for New Yorkers of moderate means to remain in Manhattan and the city in general, with steep rents leaking into the outer boroughs, Brooklyn in particular.

Last March, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced an expansion of his already ambitious affordable housing plan, billed the “New Housing Marketplace Plan.”

His original goal was to “create or preserve 65,000 units of affordable housing by 2008,” and then that number was expanded to 68,000.

The latest figure, which he referred to in this year’s State of the City address, is 165,000.
According to the New York City Housing Authority, which is working on the mayor’s plan along with the Housing Preservation Department, the target date for the completion of this new housing is 2013.

The stated cost of the program is $7.5 billion and the mayor is calling it “the biggest affordable housing initiative ever undertaken by an American city.”

The housing initiatives of “Plan 2030,” which he announced in December, are based on the newly created Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability’s projection that the city’s population will reach nine million by that date.

“In order to welcome New Yorkers from every background we must also fix the persistent housing and land shortage that’s driven prices to record levels. Already, nearly a third of renters in New York City pay more than 50% of their income toward rent,” a Plan 2030 brochure reads.
One strategy for preserving affordable housing is the Tenant Empowerment Act (TEA), introduced by District 1 Councilman Alan J. Gerson, which would give tenants in buildings (and their supporters) whose owners are opting out of subsidy programs the right to buy their building at market value. It would also give them the right to match any offer, no matter how high, that their landlord might receive from outside bidders.

The New York City Council passed this act “over the mayor’s veto, and now it’s in court because as expected the real estate industry is suing and we’re [awaiting] the judge’s ruling,” Gerson says in a phone interview.

Whether or not it becomes law, Gerson also wants to create an affordable housing preservation trust fund that, starting with the next city budget, would designate a “significant amount of money every year … to give to tenants a real opportunity to buy out … with the condition that if they take advantage of this fund they have to keep the developments affordable.”
Two “broad strategies” for creating new affordable housing that Gerson is working with are rezoning and building on available city lands.

He says that by enabling developers to build higher and in some cases denser buildings than current zoning allows, there would be more room for affordable units. Pricier apartments tend to be those that are higher up, so the affordable units would likely be on the lower floors of the given building. This way, the building would have more units.

Gerson says these types of developments could be built on underutilized sites on the Lower East Side, on larger streets like Chrystie and Allen, and certain parts of East Houston, and on other, smaller streets.

Both ideas are included in the Department of City Planning’s Lower East Side rezoning proposal.
Developers working in other areas, in Chinatown for example, could be given the ability to “add just two or three floors” to existing buildings and the older “apartments could be kept affordable or renovated as affordable,” Gerson says.

Michael Ragolia, who is in charge of housing policy for Gerson’s office, says in a phone interview that another of Gerson’s goals is to increase the number of affordable units in Lower East Side buildings built under the 421-a tax incentive program.

That program currently requires participating developers to set aside 20 percent of all units for affordable housing in their buildings. “Hopefully in the upcoming Lower East Side rezoning, we will get more than 20 percent affordable units. That’s absolutely our goal,” Ragolia says.

Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer also supports increasing the percentage of units in these buildings from 20 percent to 30 percent.

And on his Web site, Stringer writes that the city should make the income requirements for rent-stabilized housing more flexible.

He will host a conference to address the concerns of Mitchell-Lama residents on March 3rd at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

When the first Mitchell-Lama rentals and limited equity co-ops went up in 1955, and the prototypical two-teacher families moved into them, the city’s real estate market was vastly different. There was more space, the market was weaker, and there was a greater need for multifamily housing period, rather than multifamily housing that was affordable.

Mitchell-Lama developments built after 1973 can be bought out, enabling landlords to raise rents in those buildings to market value.

Owners of these buildings, who have taken part in a city tax incentive program designed to help them with renovation costs, are required to notify tenants about their participation in the program because it restricts the amount of rent they can charge tenants.

But in 2005, the Independence Plaza North Tenant Association (IPNTA) says it discovered that the original owners took part in the program, known as “J-51,” and never notified the residents.
“As a result there may be legal grounds to challenge [the] purchase by [the] current owner,” Gerson says.

A group of Independence Plaza tenants are currently doing this and are waiting for State Supreme Court Justice Marcy S. Friedman to issue a ruling. If she rules in their favor, they could have their rents dropped to the regular rent stabilization rate.

About recent development taking place downtown, Gerson says that “if we don’t do anything, downtown will become a ghetto for the very rich and a disproportionate amount of which will be people who are just keeping, you know, second apartments here … and other folks who are … jet-setting around the world.”

He believes “there’s a place for that, but not an exclusive place.” He says Wall Street executives are concerned about where their employees will live too, and also, that there’s an underreported lack of affordable housing for the elderly, meaning assisted living facilities.

Richard Grossman, a downtown sales director for Halstead Property, thinks that even if rent regulation were to phase itself out, it wouldn’t happen for “generations.”

In a phone interview, Grossman describes what he sees as a civic benefit to deregulation. As buildings “phase out rent regulations, I do believe the city will be able to charge more in taxes, because then those apartments will be more valuable … Taxes are figured on the income of a building. As those incomes increase, the taxes for the building go higher, and the more income the city will have as a … municipality. And we need the money I’m sure.”

He believes the city should have people at all income levels “from a cultural point of view.” And when I describe the higher buildings that Gerson mentioned, he says he thinks it could be a viable strategy.

At least some deregulated apartments will not become luxury housing, he thinks, because “newer people will be entering that housing market and sort of be redefining what middle class is … for that housing.”

He says a lot of deregulated buildings are not “intrinsically” upscale, and so they’re harder to modify in that way. The hypothetical example he gives is of a vacated Mitchell-Lama apartment, where the rent leaps from $500 to $2,500. “It’s one thing to rent one apartment for $2,500 a month, but now you have 300 to rent – I don’t think it’s as easy.”

The real estate boom is “redefining what middle class in the city is going to look like,” and Grossman sees people who were once Manhattan’s middle class continuing to migrate to the outer boroughs in increasing numbers, in the future. “People are looking at Brooklyn and Queens in ways they haven’t … for generations.”

John Scott is convinced that if the original Independence Plaza residents are forced out of the neighborhood, the services and amenities will disappear with them.

What he calls “transients” – young people who share an apartment and move after a year – have already begun moving into his building.

He believes that if deregulation and new development continue in the area in the way they has been, eventually “you’ll have a sterile white community.”

To Scott, the real estate values in the neighborhood are the result of hard work by “pioneers” like himself.

“It was us who [were] here first with the schools and volunteered; it was us with the parks; it was us with the Little League and the greening of Greenwich Street. You know, we are still the ones that water the plants and are active [on] the park board. But the rich people that are among us are not as involved as we are.”

His worries about development and deregulation go beyond Independence Plaza. At a recent town hall meeting, he stood up and spoke about new construction projects in the area that are not zoned to include twenty percent affordable units. He would like to see that, at least.

Book Review: "Paradise Travel" by Jorge Franco

2007-02-12T10:09:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
February 12, 2007

“Paradise Travel”
Jorge Franco
Translated by Katherine Silver
Picador
$14 (paperback)
228 pp.

The immigration debate is still inching along in Washington, “Babel” snagged a Golden Globe for best picture, and Lou Dobbs continues to rail against outsourcing and NAFTA on television, seven nights a week. The moment is ripe for a novel about border-crossing and illegal immigration. And Picador was either prescient or just lucky in choosing to release the English translation of Colombian author Jorge Franco’s 2001 novel, “Paradise Travel,” this winter.

Like the makers of films like “Babel,” Franco builds his story of a young Colombian couple who escape to and then from New York, through a scattering of flashbacks, though his telling is somewhat less convoluted than theirs is.

“Paradise Travel” refers to the agency in Colombia that Marlon Cruz and his girlfriend Reina hire to get them to the United States, after the embassy denies them visas. They know that Paradise Travel is really a coyote front, and that the journey will almost certainly be dangerous. But they are desperate enough to take the risks involved – Reina out of an innate restlessness and a general disgust with her country: its lack of opportunity, its rigid social stratification; and Marlon, who is more ambivalent about sneaking off – because he loves Reina and would probably follow her off a precipice and into a ravine.

But all of this is a build-up to a very unfortunate chain of events that happens almost as soon as they arrive in Queens. Marlon accidentally kills a police officer and while running from the scene, loses his way and most fatefully, Reina.

He is lost in a city he doesn’t know how to navigate, a city he can’t communicate in, and where he suddenly finds himself homeless.

Despite some clunky metaphors and plot devices (the city as a beast, its infrastructure as the guts; giving Reina different colored eyes to underscore her dual nature as loyal nurturer and striving opportunist; and some overblown scenes, like one in which Marlon has a temporary breakdown in the face of his new circumstances) “Paradise” has an emotional center that rings true, and in Marlon Cruz, a main character who is endearing and easy to empathize with.

Jorge Franco is a self-proclaimed member of the McOndo school of fiction, which takes its name from Gabriel García Márquez's fictional town, “Macondo.” These writers avoid the fantastical images and accompanying political themes made famous by García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and their peers. There are no beatific heroes with golden butterflies flying out of their mouths as revolutionary forces knock down village walls, in their books. They are social realists who chronicle a segment of Latin America that is much lesser-known in the first world, the middle class.

Yet there is something vaguely metaphysical to “Paradise.” Reina is elusive even when she’s right in front of Marlon. She is the reason he is New York, yet she is nowhere to be found.
She proves to be both his reason for living and the bane of his existence. And with time, though he remains stubbornly loyal to her, refusing to give up his search, he comes to feel tricked by her, in a way.

Orlando Tobón, a real-life fixer of sorts, for immigrants in Jackson Heights (and who played a character based on himself in “Maria Full of Grace”), appears in the book by name; it’s a minor distraction that pulls the reader out of Franco’s fictional world momentarily.

It’s more than a stretch that even an undocumented alien could just flee the scene of an accident with a dead cop in his wake and roam freely inside the country for so long. (The story takes place over about a year, and Franco never goes back to resolve the incident.) And the ending is really a question mark that borders on unsatisfying.

It’s also hard to say whether knowing beforehand that the book is a translation is really to blame, but the prose is choppy at times.

Despite its flaws though, the story underscores the personal networks that people take for granted when they’re home, and how terrifying it can be to exist without a net, especially in New York, and especially for a foreigner. Marlon’s good fortune and his undying hope aside, it’s likely that the prototypical immigrant who comes with visions of gold-paved streets would come back in a sequel as a cynic. But it’s hard to imagine Marlon Cruz like that.

-- Matt Elzweig

The New Angle: A Different Kind of Film Festival Is Coming to the Financial District

2007-02-05T07:26:00.000-08:00

Tom O'Malley (left); Luke Szczygielski (right), founders of
the ACE Film Festival. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Our Town downtown
February 5, 2007

23 is young.

This fact was not lost on Wall Street Rising’s Rustie Brooke, when Tom O’Malley and Luke Szczygielski, both 23, came to the Lower Manhattan organization’s headquarters to ask for sponsorship for a downtown film festival they were planning.

She was, in a word, “skeptical.” In a telephone interview, she described their attire that recent Thursday afternoon as “college grungy.” (O’Malley doesn’t recall what he was wearing, but says that Szczygielski tends to “overdress.”)

Yet, the two recent Syracuse University graduates were accompanied by another 23-year-old, Daniel Koffler, who was wearing a suit and who Brooke knew well. And with Koffler, who runs the Broad Street Ballroom (formerly The Downtown Auditorium) and whose father, Michael, owns the nearby Claremont Preparatory School, to vouch for them, Brooke and her executive director were willing to listen. But not without a thorough grilling.

Brooke and her executive director “quizzed them, very thoroughly,” asking them about things like who their target audience and client base were, and who they thought the filmmakers contributing work to the ACE (American Cinematic Experience) Film Festival, would be.

Szczygielski came to the U.S. from Poland in 1998 and is a freelance photographer and designer, and lives in Yonkers. O’Malley is from Syracuse and followed his girlfriend, an aspiring actress (and also the festival’s poster girl) to Manhattan after college. He is a Web administrator for a nonprofit.

Both “Transmedia” majors, they met in a 16 millimeter, black and white, film production class, their junior year, and bonded over a similar frustration with the school’s film curriculum, namely budget restrictions that created “technological hurdles” and an overemphasis on foreign films. “If we were to actually make a movie, we would never be using these Bolexes [the 16 millimeter cameras] that were used in Vietnam,” O’Malley said. “We spent a whole class talking about how they’re bulletproof. Well I don’t expect to be shot at while I’m filming.” And, “if it didn’t have subtitles, it wasn’t worth showing in class, basically,” Szczygielski said, during an interview in O’Malley’s East 29th Street apartment.

Though it was an obvious problem to them, their classmates seemed to “brush it off,” O’Malley said. “Like, if you asked them who their favorite filmmakers were, ‘oh, oh Fellini, obviously, Fellini, Fellini, Fellini, Fellini, Fellini, Fellini.’ Shut up.”

They also felt that on the festival circuit, American independents were getting lost in the shuffle amidst all the international submissions.

Neither one was eager to jump from film school into a nine-to-five grind, but the notion of creating a festival that would feature films made in the U.S.A. exclusively, to fill this void, didn’t become a real idea until they became roommates.

When O’Malley moved to Manhattan in the fall of 2006, their discussions got serious.
They didn’t want their event to be “the anti-film festival,” O’Malley said. They didn’t want to create “a monster” either – the type of festival that focuses on “how many A-List stars you have, if your red carpet’s long enough to accommodate all your celebrities, when you start to figure in space for limo parking in your venue.”

They wanted to exist somewhere in between those two extremes and create the kind of independent showcase that would be huge, but maintain a focus on promoting quality independent American filmmakers.

One of their first orders of business was finding a space in which to host the event.
They began pitching their idea to venues all over the borough, four or five in-person, and about 10 over e-mail.

Armed with a PowerPoint presentation on a laptop, they would enter places like the IFC Center and Symphony Space, and present their vision of a three-day festival with a projected budget of $150,000 that they expected would be paid for, mostly, by sponsors. Sponsors, they said, would be enticed by free advertising, a chance to help boost the Lower Manhattan economy as it strove to become a real neighborhood, and if it mattered to them, get in “good standing” with the local arts community. They expected a total of 1,800 people to attend.

When they arrived at these meetings, they were never dismissed outright. But the venues’ staffs tended to write them off as cute, and it was pretty clear the answer was going to be no. Then “it would be another two hours of telling us why this isn’t gonna happen and why this isn’t gonna work anywhere, including their venue, why we should just give up,” O’Malley said. “IFC Center, I think, quoted us way too high, just to get us out of their hair.”

But they didn’t give up, and when they cold-called Daniel Koffler, after finding the Broad Street Ballroom’s Web site, their diligence paid off. “Daniel was on board from the second I talked to him,” O’Malley said.

Originally, O’Malley and Szczygielski planned to hold the event starting on a Tuesday. So when Koffler offered to give them the room, which is inside a former bank, on a weekend, they could hardly believe it; this would cost a paying client “five figures,” Koffler said. Having it on the weekend wouldn’t be a problem because during the end of August, which is when the festival is scheduled for, there is not much activity going on at his facility.

Koffler also offered them an entire floor of Claremont Prep for basically the same reason. They plan to use it as a networking lounge for filmmakers and other attendees to hang out in between screenings. It will have a casino (with prizes), in keeping with the festival’s Western-themed décor, free catered food, and a shop selling independent DVDs and related merchandise. They are also trying to book some live bands for the space, which they are calling ClubACE.

“Once we got the venue … it started snowballing,” Szczygielski said.

By January, they had 11 sponsors, including the NY Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), to whom five percent of their ticket sales will be donated. (Koffler suggested they donate some portion of the proceeds to a nonprofit whose mission was consistent with the festival and its overall concept.)

For monetary and in-kind donations, they offered different levels of sponsorship, and launched a Web site and a MySpace page (that now has almost 16,000 friends, according to Szczygielski).
To find judges, O’Malley began by consulting directories in the back of the many filmmaking books in his personal collection. Before long, he and Szczygielski managed to put together a list of judges that includes prominent producers, directors, writers and actors.

Similar to other festivals, according to O’Malley and Szczygielski, they will screen all entries, narrow them down to the ones they want to show at the festival and then send them off to the judges who will watch them off site. The categories being judged include Feature, Short/Video Art and Student Work (including both high school and college submissions). Included within these categories are animation, documentaries and music videos.

Winners will receive an award and will be invited back to the next festival as judges. (O’Malley and Szczygielski are already throwing around ideas for future years.) But the festival will primarily be an exhibition of the selected filmmakers’ work, and the winners won’t be announced until after the event.

About a week after the submissions period began, they had already received roughly 40 entries. The judges have told them to expect 500-700 by the time the submissions period is over.

Daniel Koffler has no particular interest in the film industry, but was sold the first time O’Malley and Szczygielski visited him. “[Tom] had an idea and a vision, and he seemed totally dedicated to it” he said.

Koffler gets requests to donate the Ballroom all the time, and has gotten more selective about who he lets use it for free, since past beneficiaries left little more than a mess to clean up the next day.

“They’re not just party planners, planning the event for somebody else … These guys care. They’re doing it all the hard way, which I can appreciate.”

And although he didn’t see much to gain from the festival, at first, he figured that with August being a “dead time” for the Ballroom, it would be a way to keep busy, and would be good for the neighborhood.

He has since become a kind of informal business mentor to them, and put them in touch with Wall Street Rising and the Ballroom’s existing vendors. He doesn’t involve himself with the festival’s artistic concerns, though.

“I’m totally in love with the idea. I think it has the potential to be the next Tribeca Film Festival, if they do it properly. You know, granted, we don’t have Robert De Niro. We don’t have the money and the effort that they put into it. And that’s a phenomenal thing, what they have over there … But, I think when you match star power and money with some creativity and hard work, you can do something similar.”

Koffler predicts that the first year “serious film types” and “people in the neighborhood,” will attend, but that “the real experiment” will be the second year.

And he thinks the area needs something to bring all the neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan together, and that one day the ACE Festival could be it.

Frank L. Sonntag, NYFA’s Director of Development, said in a phone interview that thinks the biggest challenge the ACE Festival will come up against is building an audience because potential ticket buyers in the area already pay high rents.

One unusual feature of the festival, though, is that anyone who buys a ticket for one, two or three days can reenter as many times as they want.

Tim Rhys is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of MovieMaker Magazine. In a phone interview, Rhys, who just got back from the Sundance Film Festival, said that making a festival unique, getting publicity and having time for all the labor involved are the biggest challenges an aspiring festival producer faces.

To be a successful festival, he estimated that two or three people need to be working on it full-time, and the call for entries needs to be announced almost a year in advance for publicity.
“It’s not difficult to get sponsors. What’s difficult is to sustain yourself for the first couple years, before the sponsorships equal … pay for everyone involved, because they won’t for a while.”
He thinks that “for a small grassroots festival” limiting the submissions to movies made in the U.S. is a “terrific strategy,” but that to be one of the bigger festivals, it’s better to cast a wider net (by allowing international submissions).

Rhys also thinks film festivals can benefit the neighborhoods that host them. “If you can survive the first couple years, you’re gonna have a nice little business, probably. And what people are starting to realize is … they’re good little economic engines for their geographic domains.” People book hotel rooms and eat at restaurants in the area when a festival comes to town. “Service industries all benefit from active film festivals, so if you can get a film festival going, especially in an area that’s a popular destination … like Manhattan is … I think [you’ve] got a good chance.”
Ten years ago, there were only about 600 film festivals worldwide. Today there are 2,000. Even in Manhattan, they “were just a novelty,” Rhys said. “Right now, they’re considered a sort of must-have thing for a Chamber of Commerce.”

He does not agree that studio-backed films are shutting out independents from a large chunk of the festival circuit. “I think that depending on the quality … you’re never gonna get shut out … What you might be hearing about is that there’s so many new people making movies right now, that they might feel like they all deserve a place at a film festival. And guess what, they all don’t … I don’t mean to sound like a snob, because I think that everyone who makes a film that’s not really up to snuff can make a better film, and a better film after that.”

With the drastic drop in prices for video cameras over the last five years, a lot more people are out there “learning the language of film,” Rhys said. He thinks that new festivals will cater to this expanded pool of filmmakers, but that while it means more talent, it also means more films that are “not up-to-snuff” for audiences to “slog through.”

Wall Street Rising’s Rustie Brooke was “very impressed” by the answers O’Malley and Szczygielski gave her when they came to ask for sponsorship.

She made sure to ask them probing questions because they were “very young men working on a very, very, very intense project.”

She felt that their goals coincided with Wall Street Rising’s own objective, which is largely to boost the area’s economy.

Their project, “if it’s successful, [will] influence and broaden exactly what our mission is,” Brooke said.

“We don’t have a film festival downtown – not like this, where they’re catering really to young people, okay? The Tribeca Film Festival is very slick. It’s really like a small Sundance at this point. And the ACE Festival’s very different. They’re appealing to students and colleges and we like that. We like those kind of people.”

-- Matt Elzweig

Book Review: "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" by Ken Kalfus

2007-01-22T07:32:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
January 22, 2007

“A Disorder Peculiar to the Country”
Ken Kalfus
Harper Perennial
$13.95 (paperback)

What does it take to feel truly connected to an earth-shattering event? Yes, it varies from person to person, but what varieties can be held up as the general responses to a tragedy? Is there an automatic rush of emotion that you either feel or don’t feel with your degree of self-absorption taken into account? Is it something a person cultivates after meditating on something that’s happened, after reading news report after news report, and then looking at the remnants of the tragedy until it finally sinks in? Or is it something you can attach yourself to, really attach yourself to – Iraq, September 11th, fill in the blank – only if you have a deep, unforced attachment to the event in question? The loss of a loved one is probably the prime example of this.

Maybe you are like Marshall, one of two main characters in Ken Kalfus’s satirical novel about a bitter divorce, set against the backdrop of the 2001 terrorist attacks, who was actually in the Trade Center when it was hit and saw people dying just steps in front of him.

Last year, 9/11-themed fiction made headlines because several writers – Kalfus, Jonathan Safran Foer with “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” Jay McInerney with “The Good Life” and Jess Walter with “The Zero” – published novels taking on the subject. (Foer’s book originally came out in 2005 in hardcover, but was released in paperback in April.)

Critics have often wondered whether it is “too soon” for 9/11 fiction in print or on-screen. They’ve asked this now-trite question in terms of its ethical implications, much in the same way they’ve singled out people for selling 9/11-themed t-shirts on street corners. They’ve also asked it in terms of perspective; don’t you need distance, in other words, a lot of years, to write good, reflective fiction about history?

Marshall and Joyce are a couple in their thirties with two young children, who live together in a Brooklyn Heights co-op, only because they have reached an impasse in terms of who will get to keep it after their divorce is finalized. Like mismatched roommates, they avoid each other whenever possible. Marshall gets the bedroom. Joyce gets the couch. They don’t speak save for the occasional screaming match.

And from the beginning, it’s pretty clear that there’s not going to be any sudden reconciliation, no Hollywood ending where they suddenly halt the proceedings and, we assume, begin to reconstruct their damaged home after the credits finish rolling.

Joyce sees the south tower fall from her office window, she incredibly feels a “giddiness, an elation,” knowing that Marshall works there. Similarly, when Marshall hears about Flight 93, the plane that was hijacked and crashed in Pennsylvania that day, he thinks Joyce is dead, thinking, incorrectly, that she is on it.

There are two main problems. The first, which is something Kalfus probably couldn’t avoid, is that it probably is “too soon,” trite as that observation may be by now, to write fiction about September 11th. The newsy pieces of exposition, intended to give the reader context, come across instead as awkward wire report excerpts, cut and pasted onto a manuscript: “The first morning of February saw the Columbia’s destruction, after NASA’s unequivocating, hard-faced experts ignored warnings that repeated damage to the shuttle’s foam insulation made it unsafe to fly.” Maybe in another fifteen years or so passages like these won’t sound so forced.

The other big stumbling block is that we are presented with two people who, we are told, once loved each other, and now seem to hate each other with a passion, yet we have no idea why and Kalfus never lets us in.

There’s an attempt to explain away Joyce and Marshall’s lack of personal history by way of saying their mutual hostility is so rabid that no one remembers what the original argument was about anymore. But that just seems like a copout: “On the last several occasions on which they had attempted sex … they had only deepened their anger with each other – anger about the sex, but also anger about the laundry and the squalling babies and the AmEx bill and the spilled milk.”

This is closer to what’s really wrong with the book, which despite its flaws is a breezy, and, once in awhile, entertaining read.

Even if you put aside any reservations you may have about what’s in good or bad taste, and accept that you are reading a black comedy about a man who saw someone nearly decapitated next to him as he fled the World Trade Center, and as bodies hit the ground nearby – there has to be some kind of consistency. It’s believable that Marshall has bottled this experience up inside of him, and maybe suffers from some variant of post traumatic stress disorder. But who knows, really, because it’s almost never mentioned except when people at his vaguely described job in finance are awed by the fact that he is a Trade Center survivor.

There are a few chuckles to be had in this “black comedy.” These “humorous” subplots revolve around Marshall and Joyce’s often picaresque attempts to undermine each other – above all, to make the divorce negotiations as difficult as possible for each other. Marshall maneuvers to screw up the wedding of Joyce’s sister from behind the scenes, and tries to meddle with Joyce’s 401(k) over the computer, so it will become worthless. These detours are funny. Kind of.
Marshall, Joyce and the secondary characters have a kind of satirically cartoon-ish quality, but most of the “jokes” in the book, which is marketed as a “black comedy,” fall flat.

One of the worst parts of the book is when Kalfus narrates the story from the perspective of the couple’s four-year-old daughter. Safran Foer got slammed for “Extremely Loud,” which more or less employed this technique from beginning to end. But at least that book, a sophomore slump, was earnest.

“A Disorder” is as unbalanced as Marshall increasingly gets. It’s an imbalance between absurdist humor and dramatic development. And it really goes off the rails in the later scenes, such as one ridiculous section where Marshall finds bomb-making instructions on the Internet, builds one and tries to blow himself (and his family) up in their apartment. When it fails to ignite, he throws it on the floor next to his dirty laundry and cries into his pillow. Reading it, you get the impression this is supposed to be some fragment of an absurdist comedy skit, but it just comes across as a non sequitur.

If the point is that, warts and all, life goes on in the face of tragedy, that comes across. But by ignoring the most crucial parts of what could have been a compelling story – mainly the roots of Marshall and Joyce’s marital problems, and their relationships to the 9/11 attacks on a deeper, inner level – the biggest impression that emerges is of a thin, callous, uncommitted exercise. Kind of like a bad marriage?

-- Matt Elzweig

Q & A with Billy Leroy: Owner, Billy’s Antiques & Props

2007-01-22T07:28:00.000-08:00

Billy Leroy inside his tent. Photo by Lucia Di Poi

Our Town downtown
January 22, 2007

Ever wonder what that tent-greenhouse-barn thing is on East Houston Street? Formerly Lot 76, Billy’s Antiques & Props, perhaps downtown’s last true roadside attraction, was first pitched in 1986. Billy Leroy, an employee, took it over in 2003, after the original owner got sick.
Among other things the store’s got a taxidermied lion, a fortune-teller in a glass box (similar to the one in “Big”), subway signs, a Burger King sign, horror movie props made of silicone and plenty of antiques.

I didn’t always realize this was an antique shop.

The thing is, if you ask any New Yorker, ‘you know that crazy place, on Houston Street with the shit on the top?’ everybody knows it. I don’t need advertising.

My favorite type of antique is old courthouse benches, chairs, that old kind of—if you watch old film noirs from the 40s, that furniture. I see my stuff, all the time, in those movies… stuff that they used in the 30s and 40s is really good quality, and it’s solid wood, and it’s fantastic. But it has that great old New York look to it, [and] it’s the last bracket of American furniture that’s reasonably priced, that hasn’t gone into the stratosphere.

You’ve got artwork here too.

I love East Village art and I buy a lot of that. I really believe it was only a 30-year period from 1965 to 1995 where, in this area, artists flourished. And they really haven’t been showing anything like that, and I love that stuff. Cause it’s really like that hardcore—junkies, prostitutes—what this was. And it doesn’t exist. You know, the pitbull’s been replaced by the black lab. It’s totally, totally changed. And it’ll never be the same, ever. And we’re the last ones that kind of like keep that tradition going.

Are you an artist yourself?

Yeah, I went to art school [for] college, for painting and sculpture. And, I would say I loved it, I had talent, but I didn’t have the discipline. I like buying and selling. That’s what gets me going: finding [something], people appreciating it, and then selling it.

I want to start to get into representing artists of the East Village and pushing that. It’s American—it’s historical. It’s very historical. I have a friend right now who has documented the entire East Village, from the late 70s to the late 90s. And he has pictures of the Tompkins Square riots; Rakowitz, the guy that cooked his girlfriend and fed her to the homeless. He just has these documents, like so amazing, of like, what it was.

Do you see any upside to the gentrification?

Well, New York City as a whole has been gentrified. See I grew up in the 70s, on the Upper East Side. I went to prep school and all that shit. And coming down here was like fucking amazing man. It was like ‘whoa’ you know, ‘holy shit—New York really is a scary kind of dark place. And it was fun. But I don’t know about upside of gentrification. I mean, I guess the customers buy more, you know. I guess that’s good for business. But then the color of New York—I have real mixed feelings, cause I love art, I love crazies, you know. I just like it.

Are you confident you can survive it?

Well, everything has to do with my landlord, who’s really great. He’s the best. You know, he could’ve made—he could’ve made that a Starbucks a long time ago. And, the rent I give him doesn’t pay his dry cleaning bill.

Who shops here?

I have celebrities wandering in, very rich people, and I have the worst, of the bottom, that come in. Because we’re like, to someone that’s like, [a] marginal kind of a person that’s living on the street, they see this place, it’s all lit up and the doors are wide open. They walk in—and I, I welcome them, I’m like ‘yo, what’s up?’ I give out more handouts than I’d like.

I’ve been attacked. I was beaten into the sidewalk by three big guys when they were drunk [last year.] The reason is they were picking on a smaller guy. I couldn’t tolerate that. I’m a guy that, when I see that, it really bugs me, to see bullies. So then they turned on me and there was too many of them. But I didn’t get hurt that bad.

Thats must be the ‘dark side’ of the store you mentioned.

The old Bowery and the old, old New York—[our] neighborhood was full of junkies, and bums, and alcoholics. And we keep that tradition alive [laughs]. But it’s the last of the stores that really has that old feeling of how stores were 20 years ago, or even further.

In terms of antiques, all that’s in the area is exclusive boutiques—high end antiques where you just get sticker shock. Some of it kind of looks similar to mine, which is cool. Everybody should make money. But, it’s just that I’m trying to keep the old Bowery feeling alive at the store.
But it also has a fun side. Like, you come into my store—people walk in there, like ‘holy shit, what is this place?’

What about bad weather?

It’s a tent. It was a dirt lot when [the original owner] got it, and he erected a tent. And then he made it a little nicer. And it has holes and rips. We have no electrical, we have no toilets, we have no heat. We run off a generator. No fax, no e-mail. You come in, you make a deal, you know, it’s cool. And I get a lot more compliments than criticisms.

Two years ago, we had that monstrous blizzard? I cranked up the Motorhead, opened the doors, just like went for it, you know. Course I didn’t make any sales. But it’s important for people to see that we opened.

[We do a] lot of fashion shoots. One shoot [that] was supposed to go through and it didn’t cause of the weather was Penthouse. And I was totally like, I was, you know ‘yeah man, shut the doors…” I was really psyched for that.

Can you talk about the haggling?

They expect it at my store. I’ve become very good at weeding out the buyers and the non-buyers, cause a lot of people just come to bullshit. If I sense the deal—you know, say it’s a hundred bucks, I’ll give you a deal on it, you know, knock it down ten or twenty bucks. But on certain pieces that I really love, I’m really tough. Only on the artwork. On the run-of-the-mill furniture, there’s always [an opportunity to bargain], unless someone says to me “how much is that rickety table?” The “rickety table” you know? I bought it, I know [what kind of] table it is. I go “it’s more. Cause it’s rickety, it’s more.” I guess [there are] a lot of ball-busters.

What’s your Rottweiler’s name?

Kill-Joy [like the witch’s dog in “Wicked.”] So any joy you might have, she quickly terminates… The reality is when I got attacked, she didn’t do jack shit… She’s always hanging out in the corner, waiting for a rat to run by. By the way, we have rats the size of footballs because it’s a lot.

Are you actually an antique store or something else?

I think it’s more because of the location and the style over the years of the Bowery. It’s just developed into this really weird kind of—you know even my sign, it’s kind of a Western kind of—like the last outpost.

I have a lithograph from The Herald Gazette from 1881. It’s a lithograph of a guy in front of a tent like this, and it’s all paintings, and it is exactly the same dimensions as my entrance in my tent. And it’s from 1881. And the kicker is, it says “Night Scene On The Bowery.” And it’s like whoa, that’s like just Twilight Zone-type stuff.

—Matt Elzweig

Your Body for Science: Clinical trials are not just for guinea pigs.

2007-01-16T07:17:00.000-08:00

Beth Israel's Dr. Peter Homel, wearing an experimental device used to treat carpal tunnel syndrome. Photo by Lucia Di Poi

Our Town downtown
January 15, 2007

Edward Gallardo’s troubles began about ten years ago. Since then, the actor, playwright and Chelsea resident has been through prostate cancer-related surgery, multiple back surgeries and complications from both.

“This last one was for lumbar fusion. It’s been fun,” he says with a laugh, in the Hollywood Diner, across the street from his apartment.

A look at a dated photo on his Web site makes it clear that Gallardo, who says he was healthy prior to his prostate and back ailments, is a shadow of his former self. He moves the way he talks, with a lot of effort, and gets around with the aid of a cane. He can walk about two blocks, tops. Yet harsh as that may sound, he is feeling much better these days and credits his participation in one of the many clinical trials that take place at downtown research centers, with making him feel better than he has in a long time.

Gallardo has not worked in years due to severe pain, and has been on morphine since about 2004. His regimen includes one long-lasting pill, three times a day, and another short-lasting, but more potent pill, every four hours as needed.

The morphine helps, but for a long time, it had a nasty side effect, narcolepsy. He would fall asleep abruptly, without warning, even while standing, up to what he estimates was 12 times a day. This was particularly dangerous because he is a smoker. “[I] have woken up and the cigarette’s on the floor … in my apartment … more than once.” He was also afraid of passing out in the street or in another public place.

He complained about the problem to his doctor at Beth Israel Medical Center, who told him he would be a good candidate for a drug trial being conducted at the hospital’s Pain Medicine and Palliative Care unit.

The drug was Modafinil, a stimulant normally prescribed for sleep disorders. The aim of the study was to see how effective it was in treating sedation and excessive daytime sleepiness in patients on pain medications. Gallardo took it every morning for four weeks, and filled out a daily sleep chart to measure how long and how soundly he slept, when he wanted to sleep, and how many times he fell asleep when he didn’t want to.

Gallardo says the results were “astounding,” and that he knew it wasn’t a placebo within two hours of taking it for the first time. “The only time I fell out would be like when I was watching a DVD or something … And that would be, I’m sure, because I don’t sleep well.” Otherwise, he had more energy than he had had since he began taking morphine two years ago. He could walk more too.

Throughout the trial process the researchers were available to answer any questions he had and he describes the experience as “wonderful.”

The researchers told him about all the possible side effects, but he “felt very safe taking it.” And the only thing that scared him was what would happen when the study ended, since he received the medication for free while he participated.

The study ended on January 5th, and now Gallardo is trying to convince his insurance company to pay for the drug. He says he expects they will.

Not all trials are as invasive as those that involve taking a new drug or undergoing experimental surgery.

Beth Israel is also testing a device called Carpal-Ease, that was developed by a small start-up in New Jersey to treat wrist pain associated with carpal tunnel syndrome, wrist arthritis and wrist repetitive stress syndrome.

The Carpal-Ease is a small device worn around the patient’s wrist, and transmits a low voltage electrical charge that’s supposed to reduce swelling and pressure on the median nerve. The desired effects are greater freedom of movement and, more importantly, less pain for carpal tunnel sufferers.

A small study, the researchers are only recruiting ten patients for the first phase, and are working with a budget of about $30,000, which according to Dr. Peter Homel, Director of Biostatistics in the pain unit, is modest. “For like, major drug studies we’ll get anywhere from 28 to a couple of hundred patients,” he says in a telephone interview. And budgets for big drug studies are typically in the $200,000 to $300,000 range.

A lot of the studies at the pain center involve opiates. Some come from drug companies who ask researchers at anywhere from five to twenty sites to test new products.

And others are “investigator-initiated,” where doctors at the center take existing opiates like morphine or oxycodone, for example, and test out how well they work when they’re applied in new ways, or test out new formulations they’ve come up with on their own. Typically, drug companies or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are approached for the funding of investigator-initiated studies.

Study participants, like Edward Gallardo, are often existing patients, recruited through other parts of the hospital or its network, for trials that apply to a specific condition they have. But investigators also launch aggressive campaigns that utilize the media and the Internet. (An advertisement for the carpal tunnel study was posted on Craig’s List.) NYU Medical Center advertises its studies in newspapers, on the radio, on its Web site and on television. There are even ads on buses to get subjects to come in and participate in trials.

For some studies, outreach workers go into the field and recruit people cold. Project ACHIEVE (AIDS Community Health Initiative Enroute to a Vaccine Effort), a part of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, is holding HIV vaccine trials at its Union Square location. The group’s outreach workers recruit men off the streets of Chelsea, and in gay bars and clubs to participate in clinical trials.

Beth Israel’s Dr. Peter Homel says that that the number of institutions conducting research and the number of individual trials is very high, so the competition between them to get volunteers is intense, and “people are practically inundated by ads.”

For the carpal tunnel study, he put up flyers in departments that would deal with the syndrome – neurology and the pain clinic were a few – and even put them up in local health food stores. Fredda Smith saw one in the Sol Goldman 14th Street Y, where she volunteers, and signed up for the study.

Smith, who has carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists, didn’t realize until after two preliminary interviews that she would be paid for taking part. From that point on she received fifty dollars for each session. (She says the device had no effect on her.)

Typically research volunteers are compensated. “You’re asking for them to come in and give up their time … It interferes with their life, their work. It’s travel costs, all those sorts of things,” Homel says.

Beau Gostomsky, who directs clinical trials at NYU Medical Center, says that in the majority of studies research institutions pay volunteers for their travel expenses, and a small stipend if they’re going to have to stay for an hour or two.

If it’s a long-term study where the subject has to stay overnight and undergo lab tests, he or she
is usually paid per-hour, “based on time and effort,” he says in a telephone interview.

But Gostomsky stresses that despite popular notions about professional guinea pigs, the incentive to participate in a medical trial should not be money. He says that people do approach him with money on the brain, though. “We have to be very diligent … from an institutional standpoint to make sure that compensation doesn’t appear as an incentive or is not an incentive, or isn’t a coercive incentive.” And his concern about this goes well beyond his own institution. “The federal government is very concerned that a study doesn’t come through and [say] ‘listen, if you participate, we’re gonna pay you $10,000’ … That would unduly influence somebody to participate in a clinical trial.” For this reason, he says, compensation is “minimal” and should only cover “time and effort.”

Potential benefits aside, some people are hesitant to volunteer for medical research for fear of side effects. Federal law mandates that all potential side effects of a particular drug are made clear in the informed consent documents a patient signs before they take part in a study.
But Gostomsky says that the informed consent process is not just signing off on an initial waiver form and hoping for the best. And if it was, it’s not now. Informed consent is an ongoing, active process, a dialogue between the subject, the investigator and the research team, he says.
“It’s very much focused on, you know, continually informing the patient and continually encouraging the patient as to whether or not they want to be, and continue in, the trial. A patient can withdraw from a clinical trial at any time for any reason.”

And there is an institutional review board in place at most hospitals to safeguard the rights of patients, and ensure that all clinical trials are ethical.

Any clinical trial in the U.S. must gain approval from an institutional review board before it begins. According to the NIH, these boards consist of doctors, statisticians, researchers, and community advocates among others, and periodically review ongoing research after it’s approved.

A.J. Walker had heard rumors about HIV vaccine tests, but had no idea he’d end up participating in clinical trials for one. Walker, 27, lives in Chelsea and is a writer.
He was at Splash, a gay bar on 17th Street, when he was approached by a member of Project ACHIEVE’s outreach team who was looking for men of color who have sex with men. He was interested, but for a reason he can’t recall, wasn’t applicable for that particular study. But he volunteered for another one the outreach team suggested. “They interviewed me and asked me a ton of questions, which fortunately for me, I consider myself an open book, so that wasn’t a big problem,” he says in a telephone interview.

He entered the first part of the study last spring and went in for vaccinations once every two weeks at first. Now that he’s in the later stages of the study, he goes in every six months. His last visit was in August.

Walker never had any reservations about participating, although he admits that he has “friends who were very sort of neurotic, like ‘oh my God, you’re gonna take a risk. They’re gonna infect your blood’ and everything like that.” His thinking was that, having worked with HIV positive populations in the past, having done research on the virus, and considering all the modern safeguards for patients, there was “no way on earth that anything would be allowed to be operated in this day and age that had more than perhaps a tenth of a percent of risk of me being infected [with] HIV.”

He says he could only see good coming out of participating, and while he is “99.9 percent safe,” in terms of sexual activity, being a part of the study is helping him to analyze his own sexual behaviors more effectively. “It causes you to really reevaluate the situations that you’ve been in and how safe you’ve been, and how safe you could be.”

The Union Square site is one of three locations where Project ACHIEVE conducts HIV vaccine studies. The other two are at Columbia University Medical Center and in the Bronx.
The HIV Vaccine Trials Network is international and its headquarters are in Seattle.

Project ACHIEVE is in the middle of a phase II trial and currently has the highest enrollment for the trial in the country, according to John Bonelli, who supervises the recruiters and organizes outreach activities for the group.

Krista Goodman, who oversees clinic operations, describes the different stages of research, in a telephone interview. “Phase I trials are the first step of human experimental testing, which is really determining the safety of the vaccine.” Over the years they’ve conducted about 15 at the Union Square site.

“If they seem to be safe … and there’s some sort of immune response, it can move into a phase II trial.” Phase II looks at a vaccine’s effectiveness. Specified populations take the vaccine, with their likelihood of contracting HIV taken into account.

They are compared with a control group (that doesn’t get the vaccine), and if the results are promising the study can move into phase III trials. “This is really looking at efficacy, and does this vaccine work.”

Goodman says only one phase III trial has ever taken place in the United States and that the results were disappointing. “There was absolutely no difference between people who got the vaccine and people who didn’t, and the number of infections that occurred.” She estimates that it ended in 2003.

The current phase II trial is promising, “anecdotally,” but she says none of the data’s been analyzed.

Goodman and Bonelli agree that the most realistic answer to the AIDS riddle is probably a vaccine, rather than a cure, largely because of economics; though more and more medications are being developed to help people with AIDS live longer, the majority of people worldwide cannot afford them, and a cure will likely be very costly. “It’s really about preventing new infections. I think that’s where the push is,” Goodman says.

Studies like the ones the network are conducting take a long time to complete and analyze. Goodman says individual studies take four to five years to conduct, so it’s not possible to imagine when a working vaccine will be discovered. To illustrate this she mentions that the data from some of the ongoing studies were projected to be available in 2011.

The importance of studies like these, Bonelli says, is that even though findings from each one are pieces of a much larger puzzle, the science keeps advancing with each small discovery.
Speaking about the project’s work in cooperation with other network members around the globe, A.J. Walker says he thinks the project is “a case of building blocks.”

And asked whether he would have been as quick to take part in a clinical trial, before he got sick, Edward Gallardo (who took part in the pain medication study) says that if there were something he felt were important enough – he happens to mention a hypothetical AIDS vaccine – he “definitely” would have.

Recently, he read about a doctor who built a bladder out of stem cells and was intrigued, since
complications from prostate cancer have left him incontinent. He says that if he could find a clinical trial for it, he “would do it in a nanosecond.”

-- Matt Elzweig

Movie Review: Notes On A Scandal

2007-01-16T07:16:00.000-08:00

Our Town downtown
January 15, 2007

Cate Blanchett (left) and Judi Dench (right).

Playing at: Angelika Film Center, Chelsea Clearview Cinemas
Run Time: 92 min.
Rating: R
Director: Richard Eyre

There is almost no physical violence in this film adaptation of a 2003 Zoë Heller novel. But in the same way the anticipation of sex can give the act itself (depending on who it’s with) a run for its money, “Notes” more than manages to send out shiver-worthy tremors of uneasiness, every step of the way.

And sex is a big part of this tale of two teachers, one old, one new, one young, one old, both repressed in different ways that lead them dangerously close to self-destruction.

Sheba (Cate Blanchett) is the new art teacher at a boys school in suburban London and is immediately set upon by the appropriately named Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), a no-nonsense history teacher who has long ago dropped the noble ideals of transforming each and every one of her working class pupils into “gems,” during her thirty or so years in residence. She’s a disciplinarian and is unfazed by what she sees as the unduly complex, ultimately superficial efforts of her younger, more liberal counterparts. There’s that, and also the fact that she hasn’t been laid, it is implied, ever.

Though she sees herself as a “moral guardian” for the faculty, she has quietly established herself as a stalker, and seems to hold everyone around her in contempt. That is, except for her cat, Sphinx, and her most recent object of desire, Sheba.

But Barbara isn’t the only one competing for Sheba’s affection. If it weren’t bad enough to know that Sheba is married with children (to her former college professor, played by Bill Nighy, a man about 20 years her senior), Barbara learns that she’s begun a clandestine affair with one of her 15-year-old students.

To Barbara, this salacious piece of knowledge is a golden egg, and she uses it, or rather the threat of making it public, as a way of burrowing herself deep into Sheba’s existence.
Like the mythic sphinx, Sheba is very hard to read. In the way she opens up to Barbara, even before her secret is revealed, it is hard to tell if she’s incredibly naïve about the woman’s volatility, whether she’s sympathetic to her loneliness (Barbara has no other friends at school), or she’s just in denial. The great thing about Blanchett’s performance and the screenplay is that at different moments it’s conceivable that she is one of each. And when Barbara is affixing gold stars to pages in her diary (for the days that merit them), her shockingly mean thoughts pick up where her acid tongued retorts at work leave – but Dench mixes them with words, thoughts, and expressions of longing and vulnerability, bringing out all of her character’s dimensions.

In this way “Notes” doesn’t shy away from showing that like the fallout that can come from acting on impulse, the fact that human beings are often completely irrational creatures is inescapable.

In one of her interior monologues, Barbara describes the affair that led to Sheba’s marriage as the kind of “incautious, immediate intimacy” that members of Sheba’s privileged class are prone to.

Intimacy comes up again and again, and the possibility that it might just be functional, except maybe in the luckiest of pairings, is lurking around every corner. The shadows of this unromantic notion are cast on Sheba’s relationship with her husband, with her teenaged lover and with Barbara, and in their relationships with her. It’s a suggestion that most of us live in our heads and are alone, really.

This may sound bleak, but it drives the action. And it is far too suspenseful to descend into a moping melodrama with lots of forlorn eyes gazing out through windows at nothing in particular.

-- Matt Elzweig

Q & A with Michael Nowlan, Professional Organizer

2007-01-08T07:22:00.000-08:00

Photo by Lucia Di Poi

Our Town downtown
January 8, 2006

The earliest indication of Michael Nowlan’s career path was a pantry he tidied up for his aunt as farm kid in Australia. But he had no idea he would one day study feng shui, and that he would move to America. He arrived in New York in 2002.

“But you don’t do any feng shui until you’ve cleared your clutter,” he says, and “nobody in the feng shui world was prepared to go in and help you get rid of your clutter.” So there was a gap, which is more or less what inspired him to set up his business.

He says New Yorkers are wasting valuable real estate to store their junk. “You’re paying a thousand bucks a month rent for this apartment (well if you were you’re bloody lucky, it’s cheap). If you can save twenty percent of the stuff in here—you’re not using it, you know, it’s just storage—that’s 20 percent of a thousand bucks a month for storage. So you pay 200 dollars a month to store all this stuff in your apartment that you’re not using.”

“One of the things that amuses me most—you know it’s 2007 now, we live in Manhattan, it’s a 24/7 city—people will still go and live in a 300 square foot apartment, and buy a pack of 48 toilet rolls. Why? 48 toilet rolls takes up enough space for a lounge suite. You can get it on the corner at any time of the day or night. ‘Here’s a tissue.’ ‘Oh, I save money.’ Yeah. Right.”

So how do people become disorganized?

It’s not hard to collect clutter cause every time you’re on the street somebody’s shoving something in your hand, whether it’s a piece of paper, it’s an invitation, it’s a best buy, it’s a new phone, and then just, people just inherently take it. You go [to] the shops and you buy something [and they’ll] shove something else in your bag—another piece of advertising. You open your post box and it’s full of junk mail. You can’t stop it. It’s like a disease. I never take anything from somebody on the street because, I didn’t want it five minutes ago, why do I want it now?

Can you describe some of the types of solutions you come up with for people?

Don’t go out to your container store and buy … 12 plastic cups [to hold things in]—please don’t do that. It’s a waste of money.

If we can use something in the apartment for another purpose, then yeah let’s do it. You know, armchairs can be used as end tables, or ladders can be used as magazine racks, anything you can.

What are basic things that people can do to reduce their clutter on their own?

There’s no right or wrong place to start. The system that’s gonna work is the one that works for you.

One of the reasons why people become cluttered is they don’t have a specific place to put stuff. Don’t view the project as a whole. Just do one little thing. Allocate yourself time, like you would an appointment. Put the music on and keep your focus. And if you do one little thing, and then another, and then another little thing, it gets done.

At our apartment, if something new comes in, something old goes out. Don’t think about it as throwing stuff away. Think of it as more of giving it a new life. [I have] a lot of clients give stuff to Housing Works.

Tell me about some of your toughest and most memorable cases.

Well there was one situation—it was a good job, and he was a really nice guy, but I’m telling you, what’s on the surface is not what’s underneath. This apartment was disgusting. I mean I had to literally shovel stuff out of there. It was on 59th. He was a really nice guy, well-presented you know, professional person. You would never know. But he would buy takeaway food and just throw the container on the floor. Empty cans of juice or drink or plastic bags, sticky sauces from Chinese food. And newspapers and magazines and stuff. Number one it’s a health hazard. Number two, there were vermin—cockroaches and stuff like that. I had to get pest control. I did some follow-up sort of stuff with him, but he was one of these cases that no matter how hard I tried, he was gonna go back to his old ways. Some people are just born lazy, man. There’s nothing you can do about that.

Some people are obsessive compulsive; one guy had not thrown out a newspaper—for 25 years. He had a sickness and was getting treatment for it, but I saw 25 years of news in America or wherever he was from.

I love the before and after shots: I worked with a working girl, and one day we were sorting through clothes. We had to do the work gear. She had a wardrobe for herself and [another] for the working gear. So that was a funny day. She wanted to try everything on, from knee-high patent leather boots to strapless, braless, crotchless, strap-on chains, whips, whatever, you name it, like feathers. We did it all. We would go through it and see what still worked, what needed D batteries and what wasn’t doing it for her anymore. It amazes me—this woman must’ve had 17 handbags, not to mention, she had probably 25 coats. And these weren’t all because she had different reasons to wear them; these were just hoarding unnecessarily.
Some people don’t look after their pets very well. You know the cats pissed everywhere or shit under the bed. It’s not always pretty. Sometimes it’s rubber gloves and a face mask. And a very long-handled broom.

— Matt Elzweig