The Transit Museum is located at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights.

The screening starts at 6:30 pm; doors open at 6 pm. Tickets available here.

In troubled times, both globally and personally, we rely on one factor to provide hope and establish stability: our belief in the essential humanity of man. Often, there’s another factor that provides comfort: music, and our belief in the essential humanity of the people who make and love music.

Listening to music, loving music, gives us common ground with our fellow man; it means that not only are we engaged in the special energy and beautiful empathy implied in songs new and old, but it is also implies that we understand, implicitly or explicitly, that

the sound of American music is the sound of America’s disenfranchised, empowered by song.

But first, let’s talk about War.

We have always believed in the humanity of the common man, even if we have disparaged the humanity of their leaders. We believed that when we looked the enemy in the eye, we would see men and women like ourselves; we would see our brothers, our friends, our fathers, the sons of mothers. We hated the leaders, not the led.

We believed that the “enemy” was a government, misguided or cruel, but the armies were made of men and women much like ourselves. This is the essential faith we have in humankind, the one that compels us to not just fight, but to also rebuild: we separate Hitler from the Germans, the Kaiser from his soft-faced armies; behind the uniforms, we see men who dream of football, Christmas, and girls back home. We separate the cold, didactic hysteria of Mao or Stalin from the millions who suffered underneath them; we believe these ordinary citizens dream of freedom, dream even of the tabula rasa once implied by the American dream, just like we do. We separate leaders from the conscripted, and we hold on to the truth that we are all born the same, even if the flags that fly over our cradles are different.

This kind of thinking sustains us, leads to beautiful moments of history like the 1914 Christmas Truce and the 1948 Berlin airlift. More importantly, it makes us believe that war is an atrocity, an aberration, not the standard modus operandi of man. It even makes us believe that Lynyrd Skynyrd would probably defend the rights of Rosa Parks, but more on that shortly.

However (and this is a big goddamn ‘However’): The next war will be different. The men of ISIS have a core of belief absolutely alien to us; I am not here to either delineate or condemn their thinking – I will do neither, they are men, they are born of mothers, they are victims of indoctrination, deprivation, and oppression, just like us – but I will make some assumptions about the way they think: they are serving a fundamentalist belief that lies deep in their hearts, and does not come exclusively from the well-guarded sanctum of some governmental palace or limestone’d capitol. Their belief comes from the same part of their soul that compels breath, hunger, survival. They are not conscripts; we will be fighting an army where every soldier holds in their bosom the heart of a leader. We will be fighting the Borg. This idea is completely alien to us; we associate armies with pawns; but

when we fight ISIS, we will not be fighting pawns. We will be playing on a chessboard where every man is king.

So be fucking careful out there, okay?

Next: War, the cultural kind.

We have always believed in the good intentions of our pop stars, even if we have disparaged their corporate overlords or the excesses of their stardom. We have believed that we were all on the same “side,” regardless of musical taste; I mean, whether you were into (or in) Buffalo Springfield or Grand Funk Railroad, no one wanted to get drafted; whether you were Jeff Buckley or the Carpenters or Ice T (or one of their fans), no one wanted their head bashed in by a cop. The “establishment,” whether it was personified by Reagan, Nixon, Bush, or Thatcher, was a country without empathy; we, the children of rock, stood on opposite shores, observing and jeering at the “establishment.“

When we saw other members of the Fraternity of Music, long hairs, short hairs, pink hairs, and suede heads, we intrinsically believed we were seeing others who believed in the capacity of art and music to make peace, achieve equality, empower the disenfranchised. We assumed other members of this Fraternity stood for compassion, tolerance, and equality. The occasional affirmation of a right-leaning stance from a member of Generation Rock was considered an aberration.

So, here we are, dear reader, 778 words into this piece, and hopefully comfortable in the bosom of an idea or two, which I now recap: first, our general belief in the essential humanity of the Family of Man, the framework that has guided is through the centuries of war and reconstruction; and secondly, our general belief in the essential humanity of the Family of Pop, which made us see a lover of freedom in the face of every silky-haired singer and spiked-hair guitar-slinger.

Both ideas are no longer valid. Both can no longer sustain us.

Instead, we see the face of Kid Rock, and we see the face of ISIS.

Rock has been Kid Rocked. And this has happened at the worst possible time, just when we need to temper the extremist intolerance of the coming war with compassion and empathy.

Each group – ISIS and Kid Rock — fails to recognize that mercy and compassion is a great form of justice in and of itself.

And the highest, most ideal aim of government is compassion, and the highest aim of musicians and artists is to insure that compassion is enforced.

As I have stated before, everything about our culture of American pop – and I mean everything — originated with the disenfranchised people of our country; and every moment you listen to music (and every moment you create music), this genesis must be recalled, because this reinforces compassion and empathy. From Stephen Foster’s faux-slave songs to the modified Appalachian howls of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams to the sex-calls of Elvis to the rhymes of Run DMC and all the manifold descendants of all these pioneers,

American music was the creation of those forgotten by the American dream: truck driving sons of Parchman convicts, the urban and rural poor, the immigrant Jews and Italians and Irish, all the people who had nothing and built America…they built American song, too, American pop, American rock’n’roll.

Every song you hear, whether it is the retching machinery of death metal or the most superficial EDM, contains the musical DNA of America’s bruised, insulted, exploited, poor, and oppressed.

The Buddha said that you should see the face of your mother in the faces of those who abuse you; at some point in the tumble of eternity, reaching eons into the past and unknown millennia into the future, everyone has been your mother. Likewise, every time you listen to a song, any song, you should see the faces of Ledbelly, or Big Mama Thornton, or Irving Berlin, or Lee Hayes, or Maybelle Carter, or any of the other citizens who turned their suffering into song, and translated oppression into joy.

There is zero room in the pop landscape for the racism and proto-fascist teabaggery of Kid Rock (who I will target specifically, as Ted Nugent is just a useless old windbag, grasping at the straws of the Fox News culture to sustain an income). I am tired of this shit. The stakes are too high.

We will fight the lack of humanity with humanity; we will fight hatred with the ubiquity of love; we will fight the ignorance of fundamentalist prejudice with the awareness of the common empathy of all humans of all sexes.

Jesus Christ I sound like a hippie.

And why not? We need them more than ever. Hippies, that is. Especially if they listen to Rudimentary Peni and the Mekons and not crappy jam bands.

I’m currently job hunting, and while writing resumes that no one will read is really exciting, I’ve decided to also take this (hopefully brief) time to do the things I wouldn’t normally have time to do if I had a job. I don’t have a particular agenda, just wherever the mood takes me. Perhaps you and I both will benefit from this. (Just don’t bet the house on it.)

So here’s my first quest, inspired by a conversation I had with my friend, Liz—learn about the Native American trails that once served as the major arteries through Brooklyn. (I knew Broadway had first existed this way, but didn’t know about any in Brooklyn.) I went to the Brooklyn Historical Society, where a helpful librarian located this map, “Indian Villages, Paths, Ponds and Places in Kings County,” published in 1946 by then-Brooklyn Borough Historian James A. Kelly.

Since this is the Brooklyn Heights Blog, I wanted to concentrate on this neighborhood; however, I couldn’t help but notice the label “Indian burial ground” next to the tepee located in Boerum Hill. It raised a few interesting questions in my mind:

• Does the tepee cover the exact place where the Indian burial ground exists? (If so, it is directly over Wyckoff Gardens.)

• Do all the tepees represent Indian burial grounds, or just the one that’s labeled? (This map has no key; the librarian thought all the tepees were also burial grounds. I, however, think they just represent the settlements.)

• If all the tepees are burial grounds, then that means there is one beneath my building in Brooklyn Heights. This would perhaps explain the plumbing issues.

Interesting to see some of the trails that exist today as major thoroughfares, like Fulton Street, Flatbush Avenue and part of Atlantic Avenue. I have yet to uncover any information on the Ihretonga, which is the tribe listed as living in Brooklyn Heights. I did, however, learn that the Werpos village of the Indian burial ground had a twin village located around today’s City Hall.

One other site I noticed was a park extending from Columbia Street to Smith Street, and from Atlantic Avenue to Kane Street (and labeled as “Sassians” on the map). I guessed it was park of today’s Van Voorhees park, and indeed nycgovparks.org has more information.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Since I’m Not Working: Native American Edition, where I travel one of the Native American trails, and also try and get answers to the above questions. And now I’m off to the 8-4 for the police blotter. See you there.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/72961

He lived to recall the pre-atomic radioactive shadow of Jolson.

Baby faced in Ballrooms actual and imagined, he had been bitten and beamed at by Banjo Eyes and found his one true church:
Wintergardens where the sacrament was the croon and cry of immigrant America, slippery with Yiddish and leaping with long Italian syllables.

And this was his world, the world created by Jews and minstrels and men of gossip and kings of jazz. On shellac and magic Philco, they were more perfect to the heart than sloppy reality. Life in Newsprint was always better than the newsprint-colored world, and what truth, sepia sad, could compete with the cartoon curve of a Dagmar’s hip?

When the winter-white bathtub-colored sky above his city hummed with terrestrial television waves (and the bunny ears bent to catch them), the pictures from the Motorola fluttered and hissed and he knew: there was no love, no laughter, no tears greater nor more authentic than those we would find when persistence of vision fooled our eyes and made us think the flicker was real.

When his city was full of Robert Moses modern, and the Zenith was tube-heated and so sexy-warm to the touch, and in the TV Guide there was a big C next to the talk shows and summertime fun hours; when the children sat Indian-style in Great Neck dens and overheated Chinatown flats and Grand Concourse kitchens and Captain Jack taught us, all of us equal in his eyes whether we be belly-full or belly-empty, about Hal Roach and Moe Howard.

And behind a desk and a cool, Canada Dry he reminded us, like a Buddha, that everything old was alive in the new; and that Tony Pastor knew Weber & Fields and Weber & Fields knew Lillian Russell and Lillian Russell knew Ziegfeld and Ziegfeld knew Fanny Brice and it went on and on and eternally returned to the beginning and the middle and it could not be more beautiful.

When his city hummed with the slap and jaw of the three Card Monte men in a Times Square shattered and burst and smelling of ammonia and weed, everything yellow like old Scratch’s stucco and the vials crunching crisply underneath hurried feet, he insisted we make time for King Vidor and Johnny Ray and a self published author from the Tuckahoe, and it could not be more beautiful.

I looked through a window in his building once (true), a building full of Bialystocks and tragic hopefuls and hope-nots huddled by dairy-creamer creased coffee machines, and I squinted through wire’d windows, dark with soot at any time of the day, out to the Deuceland below; and if you looked through half-closed/half-happy eyes you could see his city, as he saw it, clocks clicked back and El Morocco black and white, a pigeon-colored world turned at dusk to Roxy Rainbow light fogged by camel smoke rings and a Canadian Club just within reach.

I looked into his eyes once, true, and saw Phil Silvers and Cantor and even sweet Veronica Lake in the shark’s teeth tick of the sassy iris.  Pass me your world, dear friend of so many nights, of every age of my life; give me your century, your hungry, sassy Jews, your prat-falling Irish, your Midwestern Cleopatra’s and Neopatras curved of plenty, your crooners, your jugglers, your tin pan beggars and boastful losers, your soon to be’s and once weres; give me your century, the last century, when the arc lights were high and the overture started at 8:05, sing me the song of your century, give me the paint with which you touched up tense reality and made it tender and alive with song and silent film.

And he is the last of this world, and I love him so.

And to love him without irony is to love the hope felt when you were a child and you lost a breath when the blue lights caught the star on stage.

Joe Franklin March 9, 1926 – January 24, 2015

Suis Generis

And apropos of nothing/everything:

http://youtu.be/Gv0jE8fYrWM

I will admit that the rough lines of the story don’t look especially good.  But I want to say this: 

There is not a single white American who has ANY idea what it is like to spend FOUR SECONDS as a black man in America.  Repeat:  if you are white, all your wisdom, empathy, indignation, and activism does not qualify you to be an ANT standing in the SHADOW of the CHALK OUTLINE of the actual experience of being BLACK IN AMERICA.

So unless you are an African American, and SPECIFICALLY an African American descendent of a slave, do not even freaking open your gob.

I knew Darius Rucker, and YOU, no matter HOW full of IRE you are about Eric Garner or Michael Brown or ANY of the horrors inflicted by white America on people of color, ARE NO DARIUS RUCKER.  He is the real fucking deal and he shall NOT be crucified because of his success within the halls of white America. Darius was born and raised on the low-end of socio-economic spectrum in the U. S. of Inequality, and just because he fought his way out and achieved great successes on stage in front of (almost entirely) white audiences and made a hefty living off of the white man’s dollar DOESN’T mean that he HASN’T been made aware, constantly, in ways noxious and obscene, of his race.  I have seen it with my own fucking eyes; I have seen this princely, talented man be gruesomely harassed and harangued because of the color of his skin, I have seen dull, thick white manatees wave rebel flags in his face and I have seen him refused service, all because he dared to be a black man in a white man’s world.  So as far as I am fucking concerned, Darius Rucker can get on stage at the Chabad Telethon and sing “Mysterious Coon” (very cool old medicine show blues recording) and he would be ABOVE even ONE whispered syllable of criticism by ANY white man, because NO white man knows DICK about what it is to be a black man in America, even what it is to be a RICH SUCCESSFUL BLACK MAN IN AMERICA.

A moment from the Chabad Telethon.

As valuable as these protests are, as acutely necessary as the awareness of these crimes are, as wondrous as it is to see young people actually CARING about something other than Iggy Fucking Azalea and The Desolation of Flipping Smaug, I STRONGLY feel the following:

Until the voices of dissent and protest, young and old, can LINK the crimes of police and grand juries with voting rights, grotesque inequalities in available public education, and access to health care and social services for the poor and non-white, this ain’t a “New” civil rights movement.  Absolutely, as it stands it is indeed some long over-due noise about an important cause, and it might be the ROOT of something, but it NEEDS to coalesce into something more:  AT THIS VERY MOMENT, as I type these words, operatives of the Republican Party, LOADED with money and organized tighter than a Steely Dan rhythm section, are planning ways to keep POOR PEOPLE and BLACK PEOPLE and other outcasts from “their” version of the American Dream AWAY from the polls in the next Presidential election in 2016. 

FIGURE OUT A WAY TO LINK TODAY’S OUTRAGE OVER THE MURDERS OF ERIC GARNER, MICHAEL BROWN, TRAYVON MARTIN, et al with the plot to keep the blacks and the poor from voting in 2016; figure out a way to link it with the CHASM between public education available to the inner city poor and private education available to the scions of the white and wealthy; figure out a way to CHANNEL that outrage into creating reasonable options for healthcare and social services amongst America’s disenfranchised, and THEN you can call it a “New” Civil Rights Movement.

Seriously, let’s start here:  All you people at those beautiful and moving Die-Ins? STAY STRONG, STAY ORGANIZED, GET MORE ORGANIZED, AND GO TO STATES WHERE POOR VOTERS AND VOTERS OF COLOR NEED THEIR RIGHTS PROTECTED AT THE POLLS.  Because the next Presidential election is going to be decided based on YOUR ability to stand in the way of the Republicans very well-constructed plans to keep America’s disenfranchised OUT of the election booth.  Make plans NOW to use your new desire to “make a difference” and your ability to use social media to organize and GET YOUR ASSES TO THOSE STATES WHERE THE BLACK AND POOR ARE GOING TO BE STOPPED FROM VOTING. 

THEN you can lay a legitimate claim to being part of a new Civil Rights movement.

And leave Darius Rucker alone.  He is the real fucking deal.  However, Darius, if you’re reading this, I recommend the following:  GET SOME OF YOUR WHITE COUNTRY SUPERSTAR FRIENDS TO HELP PROTECT THE VOTING RIGHTS OF ALL AMERICANS IN 2016. 

And Sting is a tool.  

Also this week in The United States of America: It was announced that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is going to be presented, posthumously, to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

First, here’s what I think of the whole Kardashian Kerfuffle:

50 years ago, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner went to the American South to protect African Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. They were 21, 20, and 24 years old. Although the American Civil War had technically ended 100 years earlier, in 1964, most descendants of slaves living in the American South were still prevented, by law, by intimidation, and by force, from voting; and virtually all descendants of slaves living in the American South did not have anything remotely like equal access to education or jobs. In one of the final, most important, and most violent battles of the American Civil War, Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman, ages 21, 20, and 24, were tortured and murdered by people who wanted to continue to deny African Americans the right to vote and equal access to jobs and education, and who resented these brave young men’s efforts to peacefully address this equality.

Unless Kim Kardashian is photographed digging up the corpses of the men who committed these crimes and pissing on their bones, I do not want to hear her freaking name.

Unless Kim Kardashian makes it her personal mission to find the surviving men involved in this crime and personally accompany them to Washington to see a black President present the Medal of Freedom to the survivors of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, I do not want to hear her freaking name.

Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.

We know no heroes like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who died, without touching fame, at age 21, 20, and 24. Fame was a foreign country to them, and they had no desire for a passport; they only wanted to peacefully address a savage inequality that existed in America far, far longer than it should have. They did not want to sacrifice their lives to re-address this abomination, but they were willing to. Ask yourself, who do you know who would be willing to sacrifice their lives to change something that did not necessarily effect them personally? Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman could have stayed in college, listened to music and drank cheap beer and had clumsy sex with supple college girls and gone on to live rich, productive, and rewarding lives without choosing to risk their lives to protect the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. But they did. And they were tortured and died doing so.

What would Bono die for? What would Kim Kardashian die for? What would Dave Grohl or Michael Bloomberg or Joni Ernst die for?

Do you know what groups of people are generally willing to die for someone else? Mothers. Mothers are almost always willing to put the lives of their children before their own lives. Mothers will, most frequently, be willing to die for their children.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner are the Mothers of American Freedom. And we Americans should honor Mothers, and that kind of sacrifice, not fame.

Another grinning, gigantic-assed abomination

Lyndon Johnson, the President who ended the Civil War, no matter what your schoolbooks said

The Civil War effectively and realistically ended in 1964 and 1965, when Lyndon Johnson, responding to the better angels of his nature, the weight of history, and the highly public murders of people like Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voters Rights Act, thereby announcing that, for the first time in the Nation’s history, there would be genuine Federal accountability for anyone or any system that prevented an American from voting; these actions also initiated the still-brewing battle to provide disenfranchised Americans, especially the descendants of slaves, with an equal shot at decent education, housing, employment opportunities, and the American dream. Johnson did what Lincoln, and every President since him, had been unable to do: End the Civil War and announce that the Federal government had a responsibility to honor its’ constitution and provide African Americans with the chance to partake in the American dream. It really sucks about Vietnam, because without it, Lyndon Johnson would have gone down as one of the greatest Presidents on American history, and even with the deeply troubling and murderous error that was America’s involvement in South East Asia, the steps Johnson took to finally end the Civil War probably merit him that honor.

The last and fiercest battles of the Civil Wars were fought in the early and mid 1960s by Americans who loved peace, who didn’t fight back, and were willing to die so that other Americans could vote, go to college, and have equal opportunity in the workplace. Americans like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. They died for the constitution, as if they were the mothers of the constitution.

Kim Kardashian, what battle did you fight today? What battle will fight tomorrow? Kim Kardashian, how did you honor the Mothers of Freedom today?

A long time ago, I learned that everyone has their own New York City, and everyone’s favorite New York City is their New York City.

If you are a young person arriving in Manhattan for the first time, those first weeks, months and years of awe and discovery will always define your Manhattan; that Manhattan will always be yours, and you will be convinced it is the only Manhattan worth knowing. Whether it was 1978 and you were 16, or it was 2007 and you were 22, or it was 1961 and you were 19, that New York City is forever frozen in your mind as the New York City. You will compare every city you have ever known or visited to your City. And you will, especially, compare other Manhattans, belonging to different ages and eras, to your Manhattan.

And your Manhattan will always be the best Manhattan.

But there was never one Manhattan.

And that’s not a problem. All cities change, and the cities that don’t wither and die. Any drive through the broken and boarded-up cities of upstate New York will boldly illustrate that cities were not meant to be static animals. Virtually all major North American cities are transmuting into radically altered versions of themselves (Vancouver and Las Vegas, to name two, would be literally unrecognizable to someone who hasn’t visited either place for 25 years).

East 5th Street between B and C, 1980

We must resolve ourselves to the idea that it will never be “our” city again, the one you loved, the one you boasted you were from, the one whose angles and corners and alleys and bodegas and rooftops and pizza joints thrilled you and defined you.

It will be someone else’s city. And you can’t say, “They’re not a real New Yorker, their New York isn’t the real New York,” because it is the only New York they ever knew. It suits them. It is defined by their age, their income and their interests in much the same way “our” Manhattan was defined by our age, income, and interests.

My New York was: the humid, gassy smell inside of long, narrow, parchment-brown apartment stairways; Glass always crunching underfoot (crack-pipe glass the size of sea-salt crystals, the slightly more musical pop of syringes, green beer glass, thick, fractured streetlamp glass); door-less entryways of Eldridge Street tenements lined with smashed mailboxes; the ominous gray-blue chill and silence of Union Square long after midnight on the walk back from Max’s; the warm neon lights of Dave’s on Canal Street after a loud night at the Mudd Club; late-night shuttered Soho, lit golden and spare; West Village streets on a perfectly hot summer night, swarming with strong men, smiles, and sideways glances; the thrill-rush of terror you felt when you walked past the lot on the south east corner of 42nd street and 8th avenue, across from Port Authority, smelling of piss and weed and ammonia and shoeshine polish; a downtown full of narrow stores where we spent hours dirtying our fingernails as we flipped through used records; the perfectly centered image of the twin towers through the Washington Square arch as Winter gave up the fight and sighed into spring.

Taylor Swift is an easy target right now; personally, I am not particularly negatively or positively disposed to her – I simply don’t think about her much. But I do know she is probably sincere. She probably sincerely loves New York. And her New York is an utterly different city from the city I loved, which was a pretty different city from the town Patti Smith fell in love with, and that was a pretty different place from the city Alan Ginsberg loved, which was, I am sure, a very different island than the town Joseph Mitchell fell in love with, which in turn was an inconceivably different place than the city Walt Whitman or Herman Melville fell in love with. In fact, I would be willing to bet that Peter Stuyvesant once said “New York City isn’t what it used to be,” and I am quite goddamn sure that the Lenappe Indians just wouldn’t shut up about how much their Manhattan had changed.

The fact that Taylor Swift’s New York City is almost nothing like my New York City really doesn’t matter. Do I hate her? God, no. Do I hate “her” New York? Absolutely not. New York City is a work in progress, it will be until the day a comet or an extinction event eliminates the very idea of New York City and all trace of its’ memory. New York City is like an artist who makes some very good albums and some very bad ones. New York City is like the third Velvet Underground album and Lou Reed’s New Sensations.

Who knows, New York City could be like “my” New York City again. If that happens (and it’s certainly possible), it won’t be pretty: the Bloomberg-dream of populating Manhattan with Russian billionaires and Taylor Swifts and eliminating the middle and lower class could lead to the shuttering of all businesses due to high rent and no consumers, and the collapse of the city from the inside. Bloomberg’s dream was to turn Manhattan island into Bahrain, with the extremely wealthy zipping out of razor skyscrapers without any interaction with the underclass; that’s happening now, but all it takes is an economic downturn, a terrorist attack, an Ebola epidemic, the disappearance of any middle class to patronize shops and restaurants, for the whole thing to cave in. Any of these factors – or, more likely, the collapse of a tax base (many of Bloomberg’s super-rich don’t have New York as a primary residence, therefore they don’t pay taxes!) could lead to a ghost town, which, in turn, could see us back into the Beame-Times in no time!

But even if that happened, New York City would still be defined by it’s newest residents, be they the young who now populate the newly exclusive Manhattan, or the young who would populate a future hell-town. In either event (or any scenario in-between), Manhattan would become their Manhattan. It will never be ours again.

And that’s okay.

Every place you ever loved will close. It’s called impermanence.

You have your memories, and the friends you shared those memories with, and the people who weren’t there who you can regale with these unique impressions of your New York City. That’s all any of us ever have, because of impermanence, the gift that gives (a world that doesn’t turn is a world that cannot sustain life) and the gift that takes away (everything we ever loved will close, everyone we ever loved will die).

We need a true form of musical activism. We need artists willing to risk everything to expose the cultural atrocities and mammon-driven careerist lies spread by the wheezing rock’n’roll machine.

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Jon Langford: Role Model

Foo Fighters were harmless enough when they were just churning out reasonable Husker Du imitations, but somehow they got it in their head that they were the God-appointed Czars of rock’n’roll and keepers of the punk rock flame; so now they have to make this really big dramatic music with lots of quiet parts and loud parts and even SWEAR words in it because THEY ARE SO FUCKING PUNK ROCK, though really it all just sounds like a track leftover from BÖC’s Imaginos plus a hefty dose of Hagar-era Van Halen bombast filtered through one of those frightening Billy Steinberg songs Cheap Trick recorded when they were desperate for a hit EXCEPT THE DIRTY WORDS IN THE SONG MAKE US IMPORTANT AND MAKE US REBELS, MAN, BECAUSE WE ARE SO PUNK ROCK.

Billy Childish. Role Model.

Let this fax of the xerox of the shadow of the chalk outline of punk be combated, not with violence but with an alternative, with a new folk that sounds like howls of hillbilly cats and punk green and lean and honest. Let’s remember that the line between crispy Crass fan and crusty Burning Man daze dog is small indeed, and should be smaller; and lets unite to celebrate free music, and instead of condemning the cheapness and ubiquity of the resource, let’s celebrate this reality and utilize that ease of distribution to preach something truly meaningful. Let every song have a message, let every song have the courage to send shivers or be repulsive or even be absolute sugar. More than ever music can be rude or dumb-angel beautiful, and more than ever music can be courageous and make courageous statements and stand for something.

Steve Earle. Role Model.

Maaaaaaaan.

Seriously, this country is a total fucking mess yet full of the potential of every genius, lover, and dreamer who lives in it, so make music (or create portals alongside your music) to reach these genius, lovers, and dreamers; spread art and information, information, information, information; combat ignorance; and since you’re giving it away, give away knowledge, too. And take it away from the people who use it to pump even more fart-filled air into this ugly monster, yes, Dave Grohl, I am looking at you, because you are spewing out your ugly sub-Soul Asylum-meets-Desmond Child belch-fuel masquerading, cruelly, as PUNK ROCK… I prefer the flagrant, blatant, numbskull fakes to the vile subtle ones; any Adam Levine, proud of his Douche Fiefdom, is preferable to some half-assed watered down version of REAL.

Paul Krassner. Role Model.

Phil Ochs. Role Model.

NOISE THE COLUMN ARCHIVES

Dave Fucking Grohl read about Victor Jara who DIED for the right to make music that made a difference.

(Dave Grohl dies for the right to guest host Chelsea Lately and play drums at the CMA Awards.)

Victor Jara. The Anti-Grohl. And Role Model.

More on this subject here.

We recently went on a trip back in time at some of the restaurants in the North Heights. Now it’s time to start doing the same down on Montague Street. What was there before today’s eateries? What do the owners want you to order if you stop by? Let’s find out!

Our first stop will be Teresa’s Restaurant (80 Montague Street – Yelp! profile).

Teresa’s Restaurant. Photo by Evan Bindelglass

According to owner Teresa Brzozowska (yes, there is a Teresa!), it was a dry cleaners before she opened the restaurant in 1989.

80 Montague Street, 1967. Photo courtesy NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Brzozowska is originally from Gdansk, Poland. She came to America in 1980 and settled in Williamsburg, where she has lived ever since. She had what she described as “life experience in the food business.” She worked in delis (German, Jewish, Polish, French, and American) and, in 1985, she opened Teresa’s in the East Village (on 1^st Avenue between 6^th and 7^th). She had some customers and friends who lived in Brooklyn Heights and she found Montague to be a “nice street” and opened the second location. The original bit the dust in 2007, but the second incarnation is still going strong 25 years on. Brzozowska loves the support of the public and said being a “neighborhood place makes business very stable.”

What The Owner Says To Order:
Appetizer: Chicken soup
Entrée: Cheese and blueberry blintzes

ARCHIVE DOCUMENTS: 1988 Certificate of Occupancy | 2000 Certificate of Occupancy (PDFs)

Up next, we don’t have to go far. It’s on to Heights Café (84 Montague Street – website).

Heights Cafe. Photo by Evan Bindelglass

Buildings Department records from 1930 list the first floor as simply “stores.” As of 1940, the second floor was being used as a school. A 1976 document called the “Montague Street Revitalization” listed a York School, as well as an antique store. As of 1967m it was the Plymouth Pharmacy. For the 27 years prior to 1995, the first floor was the Promenade Restaurant, a staple of the area. It even had its own postcards!

84 Montague Street, 1967. Photo courtesy NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Eventually it closed and the space became available. That caught the eye of Greg Markman, who opened Caffe Buon Gusto up the block in 1992 (he sold his interest in it over a decade ago). Markman teamed up with Joe Secondino, who was an accountant at ABC and with whom he’s been friends with since they were seventh graders at JHS 281 (now IS 281) in Bensonhurst, and, on May 15, 1995, opened Heights Café on the corner of Montague and Hicks.
Joe Secondino and Greg Markman. Photo by Evan Bindelglass

While they run the day-to-day, Markman’s father Martin and brother Glenn (the real estate brains) are also partners in the restaurant. Greg Markman always loved the corner and said it needed “something special.” Since then (with the exception of a closure from this January to April for a remodeling and menu sprucing up), they’ve been serving “something for everyone.” “We love our customers,” he said. “[Some of them see the restaurant as] an extension of their living room.” Secondino called them “friends.”

They have had some celebrity customers. Paul Giamatti stops in sometimes, as do Jennifer Connelly and her husband, Paul Bettany. Also spotted have been Leonardo DiCaprio, Anne Hathaway, Willem Dafoe, and Susan Sarandon. Markman even got a photo with “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” star and Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.
Greg Markman with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Photo courtesy Greg Markman.

What The Owners Say To Order:
Fried Chicken at Heights Cafe. Photo by Evan Bindelglass

The Southern Boneless Fried Chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy, and coleslaw. If you are worried about boneless chicken being dry, stop. It isn’t dry and it is full of flavor, as are the mashed potatoes. It is so easy to go wrong with coleslaw, but this was very well-balanced. If you want a little extra creaminess, it’s on the bottom. The  gravy is wonderful, but everything else is so great already that you might forget to make use of it. Try to remember.

Markman and Secondino also own Dellarocco’s Pizza around the corner (214 Hicks Street – website). They opened that in 2012. In 1976, it was listed as a hair stylist and from 1981 to 2011 it was home to the gift shop Overtures.

Dellarocco’s Pizza. Photo by Evan Bindelglass

ARCHIVE DOCUMENTS: 1930 Certificate of Occupancy | 1940 Certificate of Occupancy | 1972 Certificate of Occupancy (PDFs)

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/70104

Peter turned 18 in 1972.  That’s pretty significant, and here’s why: American males who turned 18 in 1972 were the first 18 year olds not subject to the draft lottery, the system by which young men were randomly chosen for service in the military (which at that time likely meant a trip to Vietnam).  Prior to 1972, young American men lived with the idea that only a randomly chosen number stood between them and extraordinary hardship, sacrifice, and possible death imposed by the policies of their government.

I want you to take a moment and imagine what it would be like for a young person today if the draft existed; shit, imagine what it would be like for you.  What if you were walking around today thinking “Dammit, in eighteen months I could be standing in the desert while someone I never met tries to kill me.”

Also, this week marks three remarkable anniversaries:  September 2^nd was the 69^th anniversary of the official end of the Second World War (on that date aboard the battleship USS Missouri docked in Tokyo Bay, the official Instrument of Surrender was signed by representatives of the Empire of Japan); September 1 was the 75^th anniversary of the Invasion of Poland by the armies of the Third Reich, the date usually connected with the beginning of the Second World War; and it was on that same day, 75 years ago today, that the Free City of Danzig was annexed by the Third Reich, marking the first of many foreign cities to fall under the yoke of the Nazis.

As we watch our cat videos, it seems that we are extraordinarily distant from these events.  Possibly due to the 42 years we have gone without the draft, possibly due to the overwhelming plurality and ubiquity of the media (which is to say it is everywhere, all the time, dramatically altering our ability to filter the important from the trivial), war seems like some concept that belongs to someone else, or perhaps something we relate to fantasy novels or video games. Touched by the random horror of terrorism, we are certainly aware that there is a world out there that fights and dies for religious and political beliefs; but for 42 years, we have been removed from this reality, the idea that we might have to kill or be killed to defend our way of life, or to defend the choices of the government we live in.

But the extraordinary events of the 20^th century are within spitting distance of most of our lives.  War is only one burp of history away, one incident in the Balkans away, one over-eager button pusher in the Middle East away, one click of a keyboard from some zealous cyber terrorist away.  True: we are a cursor click away from another conflagration that will re-draw our maps, define the lives of our children and grandchildren, and leave a million civilians dead.  My draft-less generation were very, very fortunate, which only means that we must work even harder to possess and maintain two very, very crucial characteristics, as individuals and as a culture:

Memory and empathy.

All other factors – education, wisdom, the ability to make a reasonable assessment of the actions of your government and the actions of other nations, the ability to see military action within the context of history, the ability to assess the human cost of military action — all stem from a strong underpinning of memory and empathy.

I was 10 years old when the draft lottery was extinguished.  My entire adult life has been led without even the remote fear of conscription, or the idea that I may be called upon, involuntarily, to fight against a foreign (or even domestic) power for the beliefs of my country.  If another military event or engagement requires conscription, I will be too old for this.  In other words, I, like others of my generation, have lived without any real idea that we were going to have to fight in a war. My deeply fortunate and ultimately unrealistic generation learned to think of war as something distant, something fought by an economic underclass, something fought vaguely “for” us and in far away places, and only representing our interests or protecting our way of life in uncertain ways.  But memory can teach us that war is real, was real, will be real, must be real; when it is real, we can have an understanding of the motivations on both sides and compassion for victims and victimizers; when we can relate, say, the assassination of the heir to throne of Austro-Hungary by Bosnian/Serbian freedom fighters in 1914 to what’s going on in the Ukraine today, or when we can relate the atrocities of Isis in Iraq to the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Empire in 1683, we are at least one baby-step closer to understanding that today’s events are part of history’s community and continuity, and not isolated episodes of cultural narcissism.  Likewise, the wisdom of awareness of the past makes us see the human cost of history, and apply this to everyday compassion.

I doubt any other generation in American history will have this privilege, to have lived with no threat of conscription.  This underlines the need to somehow establish a strong foundation of empathy and memory within our culture.  Our children and our children’s children will almost without a doubt hold weapons and be fired upon, and they will need memory and empathy to negotiate the fear, hatred, and ignorance that are endemic to war. Our children, and our children’s children, will almost certainly know war.  It may not be war as us, our parents, or our grandparents considered it; it may involve entire economies or entire electrical grids being shut down via the click of one key on a computer, it may involve shadow armies belonging to no nation threatening civilian lives and infrastructure.

But like any “conventional” war, any reasonable approach will require grounding in memory and empathy, history and compassion.

Although tortoises are not mammals, humankind should remain in awe of the achievement of Bek and Lek, two tortoises who circled the moon on September 18, 1968.

This is not fantasy: In 1968, the Soviets Russians were frantically attempting to beat the Americans and the Apollo space program to the moon.  They launched the Zond 5, with Turtlenauts Bek and Lek on board, to see if living creatures could survive a trip to the moon and back.  They did, and our two shell-back friends became the first living creatures ever to reach the moon.   The Soviet’s plan to follow up Lek and Bek’s pioneering adventure with a manned flight was abandoned when it turned out the Apollo program was much further ahead of schedule than the Soviets had imagined.

Yes, I said Turtlenauts.

Recently, I asked myself the following question:  What if Bek and Lek returned from space as fully sentient creatures, but Soviet secrecy and the equally obfuscating bureaucracy of the post-Soviet Russian governments prevented them from leaving the grim lab in the Urals where they had been ensconced for 45 years?  When finally exposed to the daylight of the modern world (having been freed by a quirk of the very same bureaucracy that had imprisoned and forgotten them), what kind of questions would Bek and Lek have that I, a noted pop-culture and music authority, could answer?

Bek & Lek:  Tell us about the fabled American Beauty, the Mayim Bialik.
Tim Sommer:  She inspires great men to stirring deeds. In this sense, she is like Zipporah, the wife of Moses, or Jolene Brand, the wife of Laugh-In producer George Schlatter.
B & L:  I know of this show Laugh In!  “Sock it to me,” and suchlike hijinks.
TS:  Yes.
B & L:  Tell us a little about this band, The Replacements.
TS:  Every musician must recall that at any given show, perhaps 80 or 90 percent of the audience is seeing them for the first and likely only time.  Whether they are playing in front of 8 or 8,000 people, a performer needs to treat their audience as the only audience they will ever play in front of, the best audience they will play in front of.  Therefore, an artist must never throw away a show, and no band, not even the freaking Beatles, is better than the worst show they play. Personally, I saw the Replacements play five times; I guess I saw five “off” nights.  If they were a truly great band, and I understand a lot of people feel that way, the band simply didn’t feel that every audience was important enough to know that, and that’s just horrible.  Also, the alternative music fanbase in the 1980s was largely made up of geeks and the bullied (myself amongst them); I think the Replacements fulfilled a certain need we may have had to believe there was a Van Halen-esque licentiousness and devil-may-care attitude within each of us, when really, we were just people excited about finding out-of-print Lyres 45s and over-paying for Echo & The Bunnymen import 12-inch singles because they had non-album b-sides.  The Replacements are also romanticized for a few over-sensitive ballads, but I can show you a dozen artists from that period who did that sort of thing far better, or at least as well, and they did it without despising their audience and abusing the extraordinary privilege of being able to play original music in front of people for money.  I mean, start with Chris Bailey and the Saints, listen to their fucking ballads.

(Two Sentient Soviet Turtles now know The Saints are infinitely superior to the Replacements)

B & L:  Tell us about Joe Ely.
TS:  Excellent question. Joe Ely, Joe Strummer, and Bruce Sprinsgteen are all essentially the same artist, and that’s a beautiful thing.  Each has attempted to channel Woody Guthrie via Sun-era Elvis; each wants to tell the story of the American experience via the character of a muscular guitar-slinger, sensitive but with sand in their teeth.  Each wanted to simultaneous wear Dylan’s wise-ass bookishness and Marlon Brando’s muscle-tees, each wanted to feel the world through the boots of the workingman yet see the world through the owlish-eyes of Ginsberg.
B & L:  That’s a very impressive description.
TS:  Yes, I thought so too, thank you.  If you want to turn that trio into a quintet, add Patti Smith and Paul Sanchez, each of whom have a very similar worldview and ability to translate that vision into extraordinary art.  Patti adds some shady, shadowy art to the mix, Paul adds some hot sauce.
B & L:  Speaking of “devil may care,” Is there a God?
TS:  You are sentient, talking turtles that have been to the moon.  Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?
B & L:  No.
TS:  Well, there is Abba, and there is Nick Lowe’s production on his Jesus of Cool album — these may be a sign of some higher power.
B & L:  Who are the quintessential American artists?
TS:  I’d have to go with Louis Armstrong and Phil Ochs.  Each told the story of rich, troubled century, spotted with joy and tragedy.  Each spoke in an essentially and exclusively American vocabulary, discarding the frippery of England or San Francisco. Here, you should listen to the Ochs’ song “When In Rome.”  It tells the story of America, a place of hope and disappointment, through the eyes of one deeply troubled troubadour, a once optimistic man that experience has turned cynical.

B & L:  But it’s 13 minutes long.  Are you going to make us listen to that whole thing?
TS:  You watched eight straight episodes of American Horror Story Coven last night, I think you can spare 13 minutes.
B & L:  We’re not sure.
TS:  Tell you what:  just listen, at your leisure, to Ochs’ Rehearsals For Retirement album.  It tells the story of the death of idealism in America.
B & L:  Gee, that sounds like fun.
TS:  If you want fun, listen to Slade or BTO. By the way, “Hey You” by BTO is an extremely satisfying song, plus it is essentially the template for all Nirvana and Pixies songs.
B & L:  If we only have time to listen to one song right now, what should it be?
TS:  “Where Were You” by the Mekons. It reduces rock’n’roll to its absolute essence:  two chords and thwarted desire.

B & L:  I count four chords.
TS:  I am not counting those passing chords between the verses and I don’t think you should, either.
B & L:  We have to go to lunch, and then someone is going to show us how to set up a Kindle account and explain to us the cultural context of the British “Carry On” film series.
TS:  Don’t bother buying Ulysses by James Joyce just because you think you should.  You’ll never read it, or much of it, anyway, and if you want to feel smart yet still be entertained, you are far better off reading Rushdie or William Gaddis.
B & L: — Before we go, Tim, do you have any final words of advice?
TS:  Whenever even the most cursory examination is applied, one finds that the self is made up entirely of non-self elements.  Seriously.  Remove the word “I” from any idea, or dialogue — especially a self-dialogue — and very remarkable things happen.  That’s because there is no “I.”  There is no homunculus sitting somewhere in our brain consistently infusing some consistent or permanent idea of self into all our actions and decisions.  There are just an infinite number of ever-moving, ever-changing parts adding up to the constant reality of dependence arising.  As Chandrakirti said, “Afflictions and faults arise from the false view of a transitory collection.  Having understood that the object of this is self, negate self.”
B & L:  Homo-what-culus?

In order to be engaged in the world around us, and in a more localized sense compelled by the art and music we are exposed to, we must be startled.

As my friend, Dr. Jennifer Brout, has articulated, in order to maintain our attention the music we listen to must be filled with elements of harmony and melody, but it also must contain components that keep us engaged with the proceedings and alert our attention; otherwise, we are likely just to drift off of the road and run over a monkey, and none of us want that to happen.  This would be especially tragic if the monkey was dressed in a Mad Men-style business suit and wearing a fez.  Perhaps the monkey had wandered away from a film set where someone was shooting a Mad Men parody featuring monkeys, because, as we all know, nothing is funnier than a monkey in human clothing.  Now, you may ask, “If the monkey was dressed to resemble a 1960s’ advertising executive, why then would the monkey be wearing a fez?”

The often beautiful, but just as frequently frustrating ubiquity of modern music requires more harmonious instability than ever.  We are all wandering in the desert, a Sinai of sound that is free and everywhere, and we need an Artful Moses to lead us into the promised land: a Canaan full of music that shocks and soothes and is ripe with myth, mystery, and rumor.  This Moses must be confident – nay, even arrogant – in his or her ability to unify the disparate masses of music listeners (casual and avid), via charismatic confusion; with a firm grip they must metaphorically carry Michelangelo’s David up Escher’s stairs, or failing that, bravely and adamantly announce:

“In one hand, I hold the Spear of Destiny, and in the other, I bear a puppy who personifies all the hopes and vulnerability of failing humanity; and with my monkey-like tail, which I borrowed for this occasion from my friend The Lord Hanuman, who may or may not be an incarnation of Shiva himself, I firmly grasp a mono copy of the Sgt. Pepper album, because it is essential for the world to understand the extraordinary, inarguable superiority of the mono mix of Sgt. Pepper.”

For the sake of this discussion, let us presume that it is I who is standing on the Mountain and god, or someone who sounds a lot like Carl Wilson or Tim Buckley, has whispered in my ears the un-spoken name of the Lord of Redemption via Confusion, and here I reveal those names.

By no means am I claiming to be Moses, or even Mo Howard, or even Frank Howard, who is the sort of 1960s/70s power hitter who looms large in my memory, like a cross between the Golem, Paul Bunyon, and Burns and Allen sidekick Harry Von Zell.  Fearsome as he was, I imagine Frank Howard as someone who would be kind to children and would, perhaps, even drive his car into a tree in order to avoid hitting a Fez-wearing monkey.  Regardless, I am no Moses, though he was married to Zipporah (who circumcised Gershom with a sharp stone, to which Gershom said “Jesus Christ!  Did you sanitize that stone first?  Or even maybe wipe it down with some Purell?”), and I knew a girl back at Great Neck South in the ‘70s named Zipporah Friedman, and she was a fox, let me tell you, she would come to Social Studies class wearing a peasant blouse with nothing underneath, and you would, indeed, think you had seen The Holy Land.

Where were we?

Although I am not fit to stand in the shadow of the chalk outline of Moses (nor his 20^th-Century manqué, Tom Carvel), I have seen the future of music as a unifying and provocative force for positive social and political engagement, and here it is:

I want to form two completely different bands called YOUR AVERAGE GOAT and NOT YOUR AVERAGE GOAT.

Both will frequently be confused with each other but both will be completely independent and autonomous acts.  In this respect, I am taking a cue from two bands from the Krautrock movement, Amon Duul and Amon Duul II.  Notwithstanding the rather acute similarities of nomenclature (and the fact that they existed both simultaneously and in close geographic proximity to each other), Amon Duul and (the far superior) Amon Duul II were completely different bands.

Despite being completely independent acts, Your Average Goat and Not Your Average Goat will both record concept albums about the Five Holy Wounds of Christ. It will all be an intentionally over-complicated and difficult to execute attempt to sow confusion.  In order to add further okra to this gumbo of puzzlement, at least one member in each group will be masked.  When you read that, it is likely that in your head you are seeing Mexican Wrestling style masks; as amusing as that might be, that’s not what I have in mind.  The masks I foresee (one being worn by a member of Your Average Goat, another different one to be worn by one, perhaps two members of Not Your Average Goat) will be accurate facsimiles of Presidential Death Masks.

To further complicate this picture, Your Average Goat will insist on releasing their album one audio channel at a time — first the left channel, then the right channel — and Not Your Average Goat will do the same, only in the reverse order.   In other words, although each artist will record their albums in two-channel stereo mixes, they will only release one channel at a time (I am uncertain, however, if the released albums will feature that single channel spread across both left and right speakers/audio channels, or if the released version will only have music coming out of one channel/speaker.  These are details that can be worked out later in consultation with the performers).

And although each album will be completely different, each complimentary channel can be played TOGETHER compatibly (i.e. Your Average Goat’s RIGHT audio channel can be played TOGETHER HARMONIOUSLY with Not Your Average Goat’s LEFT audio channel).  That is to say, if you play just the left channel of Your Average Goat’s debut release SIMULTANEOUSLY with just the right channel of the debut release of Not Your Average Goat, the listener will hear an entirely new and original piece of music.

Also, even though both Your Average Goat and Not Your Average Goat’s debut albums will concern themselves with a musical description of the Five Holy Wounds of Christ and the manner in which these notable and historic wounds were inflicted and received, when played together in the left/right format which I have just described, an entirely new theme and concept will emerge:  when played simultaneously, the co-joined work will detail The Four Seals of Buddhism, namely

All Composite Phenomena are Impermanent
All Contaminated Phenomena are Unsatisfactory
All Phenomena are empty and devoid of self-existence
Nirvana is True Peace.

However, if this left/right dyad is not accurately synced up, who knows what will happen; the entire English-speaking world will be lousy with differing interpretations. “I believe they are singing about the Two Darrins,” someone will suggest.  “Ah, an inspiring paean to Emperor Constantine’s vision of the cross before the battle at Milvian Bridge!” someone else will say.  “This is a touching homage to the Lonesome Death of Tommy Cooper,” another person will offer.  “But Tommy Cooper died on live television,” a friend of the third person will counter,  “What could be less lonesome than that?”  “Ah, but you’re wrong,” their friend will say, with a sagely nod. “What could possibly be more lonely than dying on live television?”

Millions will become obsessed with this confusion, and inspired, endlessly, by the potential for its’ resolution. This confusion will be the balm for the modern world’s generalized despondency.

As for the specific musical genre(s) in which Your Average Goat and Not Your Average Goat will operate, that can all be worked out at a later date, though I somehow suspect that Not Your Average Goat will be a very good band, and Your Average Goat, well, not so good; and by “not so good.” I am not talking about Nickleback, Kansas, or Creed levels of suckage, but a subtler Atlanta Rhythm Section or Toto level of crappiness, with a certain Skafish, Wazmo Nariz or early-Devo quality of herky-jerky mixed in.  In regard to Your Average Goat, perhaps we will start simply by saying “Give me something that’s a cross between Toto and bad Pere Ubu” and take it from there, but don’t get all Primus-y on me.”  That should confuse the musicians suitably.

Because in confusion, we will find resolution.

For God so loved the world, that he gave the world Monkeys wearing Fezzes and Betty Rubble, that whosoever believeth in non-self and emptiness should not perish, but have everlasting life considering why Betty Rubble and Fred Flintstone have “normal” eyes with pupils and whites but Wilma and Barney have eyes that are all-black/all-pupil (except in certain episodes where Barney’s eyes are just circles with nothing but skin-color inside them, which is really, truly disturbing).

Dedicated to James Lyons and Dean Johnson, two extraordinary artists who I somehow associate with Wazmo Nariz. 

Back in May, the city let it be known to tourists and others inclined to leave “love locks” on the Brooklyn Bridge to cut it out. While the totally ridiculous practice of leaving a gym lock fastened to a public place as a sign of a couple’s devotion has roots going back 100 years, it’s been deemed a nuisance here and other locations around the world.

Just when we thought the world was safe from lovers defacing the Brooklyn Bridge, blogger Jen Jones notice they’ve adopted a new practice:

WYSK: So as I’m reveling in the absence of these “love locks,” a tattered ribbon flapping in the wind catches my eye. Then another and another and another. Next thing you know, I am staring at a long straightaway section of bridge wall that is littered with ragged ribbons, toilet paper, plastic bags, paper receipts, and ear buds that have all been tied on, by hand.
I didn’t think it was possible, but the human desecration of the Brooklyn Bridge had reached a new low… THIS is what tourists have moved on to doing after the city’s lock-down on the locks!
So let me get this straight, you come to visit a world-renowned landmark – one that is often referred to as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” one that has inspired all forms of art, one that took 14 years to build, one that over 20 people died constructing – and you pay your respects by tying your garbage on to it?
I stood there dumbfounded and continued to walk past the stretch of fluttering refuse. That’s when I saw three guys in orange vests and hard hats. I watched them painstakingly cutting and untying every piece of garbage left “lovingly” behind by legions of disrespectful tourists.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/69152

I feel it’s sort of like 9/11: I have long said that the only people who really have the right to talk about what that gruesome day actually felt like are the people who were in New York City.  Everyone else was just a spectator, not subject to the riot of conflicting emotions, anger, and fear that the residents of New York actually experienced on that day.  Others may be able to write about why 9/11 happened, or the geo-political events that may have precipitated it or resulted from it, but New Yorkers, and only New Yorkers, can tell me what 9/11 felt like.

And I think the very same is true of anyone trying to write about race in America.  Academics can analyze it effectively from historical and economic perspectives, and can tell the story of the how and the why, but how could a non-African American writer, even a great one, tell us what it feels like to be black in America?

The idea that any white American could pretend to understand or empathize with the experience of being black in America (especially the experience of being an African American descended from slaves) is absurd and insulting.  The moral obscenity of slavery, underlined by the crime of the institutionalized and authorized failure of reconstruction, created an obscene, permanent underclass in America (N.B.:  When discussing the crime of racial inequality and oppression, the failure of Reconstruction is far too frequently left out of the dialogue; in theory, after the Civil War Reconstruction was supposed to ease the transition to a more racially balanced American South; however, flawed by corruption from the very beginning, any attempt at Reconstruction collapsed following the absurd, monumental Presidential election of 1876, when Democrat Samuel Tilden beat Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.  The Hayes/Tilden election is one of the most important moments in American history, and it should TOTALLY be a required part of our curricula, but that’s another story, huh?  Anyway, after Tilden’s victory, the South – then firmly the undisputed land of the Democrats – agreed to allow Hayes and the Republicans to “steal” the election, in exchange for the end of Reconstruction.  In essence, the Civil War didn’t really end until the mid-1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson finally and formally used legislation to address the more blatant inequalities that had been, essentially, legalized since the Emancipation 100 years earlier.  And here I will further note if it wasn’t for his murderous blunders in Vietnam, LBJ would have – should have – gone down as one of our greatest Presidents; he ended the fucking Civil War).

Where Was I?

White people know nothing of the Black experience, not only of the more obvious dirty looks and police oppression, but the inevitability of horrific Inner City schools and unequal job opportunities; I address these atrocities only in the most general terms, because I am far from an authority on this crime, the second worst abomination in the story of our continent (the first, obviously, being the complete annihilation and disenfranchisement of the indigenous population of our section of North America).

So, unless approached from a purely academic point of view (and I will have to ask my friend Paul Sherman, a great and exhaustive reader of tracts on race in America for a reading list), it is extraordinarily rare to read books where white people write, with real empathy, meaning, and impact, about the black experience.

I can think of two examples, both of which I highly recommend (Finally, the gist of this column!).  I’m a little late on both of these, by the way; though neither of them are archival, neither are exactly new, either; but just give me a pass on that, okay?  Anyway, both these authors recognize that a Caucasian cannot write about the black experience without part of the story being that very inability.

Josh Alan Friedman’s autobiographical novel Black Cracker (2010) is a deeply moving, deeply funny, deeply tragic, and absolutely unique tale, so well executed and so full of extraordinary social ironies and tragedies that it is both difficult to read and difficult to put down.  Due to some very unique circumstances (i.e., local experiments in integration coupled with very well-intended liberal parents who wanted to put their money where their mouth is), in the early/middish 1960s in Glen Cove, Long Island, (very) young Josh was the only white child in an all-black elementary school; subsequently, he found himself caught between many different social, economic, cultural, and historical worlds, and not just the obvious ones.  The black children at his school didn’t fully embrace him (and when they tried, their families rejected him, with occasionally horrific results); the local white children rejected him, violently, for his ties to the blacks; and everyone was a little suspicious of his long hair and love of the newly arrived Beatles.  All of adolescent’s “normal” signposts are covered in this fleet, deep, gorgeous book, but they’re all set topsy-turvy against the absurd and frequently dangerous environment young, innocent Josh is thrust into. Black Cracker hits so many raw nerves in the story of race in America that at times one literally has to put it down out of fear; likewise, Friedman successfully conveys the feeling he had every day, akin to walking through a busy six-lane highway carrying an enormous pane of glass, that pane made up of all the history, anger, resentment, and longing that young Josh never asked for, but found himself the loci of.  A joyous, terrifying book.

(I also must note that Josh Alan Friedman is the author of Tales of Times Square, which is literally one of the ten ESSENTIAL books ever written about New York City.  No library of books about New York City is complete without Tales of Times Square, and it is likely no library of books on race in America in the 1960s is complete without Black Cracker.) 

Next…

Our generation has been chock full of people trying to assimilate elements of African American music, art, culture, and language into their own, while simultaneously trying to hold on to (what I will refer to) as the “privileges” of being white.  Which is all to say you can dress like a Beastie Boy all you want; you still won’t ever remotely know what it is like to spend (literally) 5 minutes as a black man in America.  You know, in this weekend’s Times, I read an interview with some young actress in which she whined, at great length, that her life had been oh-so-hard because some people at Horace Mann had called her ugly; seriously, she was talking about this like she was telling the story of Anne Fucking Frank.  Now, let her IMAGINE that she was at one of the nightmare-crates masquerading as a high school in Inner City New Orleans in the 1990s, crumbling shit-holes so dismal that the valedictorian couldn’t even pass the standard GED, and someone calls her ugly THERE.  Yeah, it hurts to be bullied at Horace Mann or Fieldston or Ramaz, I’m sure it does, BUT IMAGINE SPENDING ONE SECOND BEING BULLIED AT A PLACE THAT ISN’T FUCKING HORACE MANN.

Anyway.  Where Was I?

Nik Cohn’s Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap (2009) is, without exception, the best thing I have ever read about the absolute inability of a white person to ever fully understand and be part of the world of the disenfranchised, African American poor, despite their best intentions.  Cohn – I will explain a little of his extraordinary history shortly – found himself living in New Orleans in the years before Katrina, a town where the “right side of the tracks” and “the wrong side of the tracks” are often indistinguishable.  He soon found himself mentoring, befriending, and attempting to quasi-manage some of the city’s up-and-coming rap acts, and becoming very immersed in the singular social world of New Orleans’ rap.  He ends up not just telling the story of a vibrant and original rap scene, but of a city deeply disenfranchised from mainstream America, where the stains of slavery, failed reconstruction, and federal disregard for a city that is largely defined by its’ low-income people of color runs deep, hard, and ruinous.  And ultimately, Cohn’s awareness that he will never fully understand the native African American experience, even as he tries to empathize with it and truly holds its’ culture in regard, becomes a huge part of the story.

One cannot follow contemporary American culture for the last half century without being aware of the assimilation of African American cultural memes by White America.  It is an essential (if largely unspoken) part of that story that white America can walk it, talk it, but never really be it.  No book has ever captured that dichotomy, the tragedy of attempting to wear the affect of a life you can never truly assimilate, better than Triksta.

Now a word or eight on Nik Cohn, who I intend to write about at greater length in the future:  Nik Cohn is the greatest rock-pop journalist/author of the last half-century; although others make claim to the crown (Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches both spring to mind, and quite effectively, too), Cohn is The King; no one has better combined an extraordinary and original perspective on the half-century of post-Fabs Anglo/American pop-rock with an almost riotously original imagination and a deeply talented, almost scarring, skill for reportage.  I cannot sing Cohn’s praises more highly – he really is the pinnacle representative of his strange and often disgraceful profession; and lest you think I am exaggerating his importance, Cohn wrote the “source” material for two of the premiere musical/cultural phenomena of our time:  His non-fiction piece for New York Magazine, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” was turned into Saturday Night Fever, and his utterly brilliant surreal novella, Arfur, about a strange, precocious pre-pubescent pinball goddess wandering through the back alleys of a mysterious night-city, was adapted by Pete Townshend into Tommy.    

Okay, back to music (or some suchlike facsimile) tomorrow…I am willing to confess I know nothing about race, about what it is like to be on the wrong end of the American dream, to be the constant victim of the abomination of inequality and cultural insult; and this, I think, makes it absolutely appropriate for me to write about two brilliant books that are all-knowing by admitting everything that the authors could never know.

20 years ago today, I went on a spectacular voyage with a group of underdogs.  We achieved the impossible, but it never seemed impossible to us.  We never doubted we were doing the right thing; we simply followed the instincts in our practical and artistic hearts.

On July 5, 1994, Atlantic Records released an album called cracked rear view (lower case not a typo) by Hootie & the Blowfish.  It would become one of the top selling albums in history.  I was an A&R person at Atlantic Records at the time, I signed Hootie & the Blowfish to that label, and was integrally involved with them between 1993 and 1998.  I am so fulsomely proud of having done so.  I am so happy to have helped a band of such sincerity, talent, kindness, warmth, and determination achieve the kind of success that is so rare in the music business that it is now extinct.

In 1993, major record labels were signing nothing virtually but grunge (in forms sincere, corrupted, insincere, misunderstood, and misinterpreted), and virtually every new band on the radio was grunge.  A band like Hootie & the Blowfish, whose dominant influences was Toad the Wet Sprocket, Foster & Lloyd, and early/mid period R.E.M., and who evoked in listeners the spirit of Bob Seeger or John Mellencamp, was, to put it efficiently but accurately, literally the last thing the major labels were looking for.  I mean literally.

It is difficult to imagine that a group that was to become such a phenomenon, that became such an almost comically ubiquitous part of our cultural background and musical foreground in 1995 and 1996, began life in the mainstream industry as such adamant underdogs; but that’s the truth, and I have never been involved with a project whose result so vehemently exceeded its expectations. (cracked rear view, which eventually achieved sales of half a million record sales a week, did not, at the time of its’ release, have a single unit stocked by Tower Records in New York or Los Angeles).

Yet I do not feel lucky to have been involved with the success of Hootie & the Blowfish.

Fortunate, yes — hugely, enormously, profoundly, gratefully, resoundingly fortunate, yes — lucky, no.  Luck had nothing to do with it. These factors built the almost unprecedented success of cracked rear view: Creativity, persistence, strategy, follow-though, joy, trust, faith in the advice of the right people and lack of bitterness in the doubting words of others.  Luck was involved barely, or not at all.  Most of all, the band had faith in their music, and we all had a belief that the happiness we saw on the faces of Hootie’s first fans, the fans who had been hearing those extraordinary songs in little mid-Atlantic clubs for years, could spread to the rest of the nation and the world…and we had a group willing to do the hard work to make that happen.

I have been asked many times how someone (uh, me) whose past musical history was so entwined with extreme forms of the artful and/or noisy could have ended up working with something so intrinsically linked with the mainstream.  After all, prior to my association with Hootie, I was best know for my work as a punk rock DJ and as a member of a profoundly artsy avant-pop band called Hugo Largo.

The answer to that is easy: Hootie & the Blowfish were the most musically natural, most creatively honest, and most personally warm and engaging band I ever met. I loved them, I loved their music. Period. Is any other justification even remotely necessary?

No, dammit.

We had hoped, at the time of release, to sell as many records as the Jayhawks. This truly was our goal. Something so much greater happened.  A few people helped a lot in the very beginning  — especially Danny Goldberg, a product manager named Kim Kaiman, and a publicist named Patti Conte — and in many ways, for the first half-year or so that the band were signed to the label, the project was our delicious and warm little secret; and a lot of others just wanted to wait and see, which makes perfect sense to me.  Some others actually didn’t believe in the project at all (one very prominent A&R exec told me the record was unreleasable and had no singles), but thank to the support of Danny, we were able to move forward.

I have tried to consider how to write about this absolute unique and important event in my life that happened twenty years ago today, this event that had such impact on the lives of my dear friends, my colleagues, and millions I will never meet.  But all I really find myself able to say us this:

No artistic dream is impossible if it is creatively honest.

Dream hard, but dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.

Be grateful and gracious to every single person who helps you and be graciously firm to everyone who tells you it can’t be done.

Trust every single one of your instincts as if they were your children, but let those kids go to the movies with someone else every now and then.

It is not important to be right every time, or to stick to your guns every single time; it is important to stick to you guns that ONE time when you KNOW all the other rights and wrongs hang on a powerful, certain hunch.

Remember not to take the naysayers personally — even the most aggressive negative opinions are almost always based in fear, and people trying to protect their own turf.

In July of 1994, to virtually anyone on the corporate level, the later success of Hootie & the Blowfish would have seemed improbable or impossible.  I cannot even begin to tell you the other new groups “prioritized” over Hootie; if you recall a sweet but eminently second division (and ultimately tragic) grunge band named Surgery, let me apply some perspective by saying this: Surgery were considered an  “important” new release, and were guaranteed a video and radio support; Hootie, released at the same time had no video commitment.  To us close to the project, the level of success achieved was, and I mean this quite literally, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams (I honestly believe the band would have felt that their hopes and expectations had been met if they had gotten to open for Toad the Wet Sprocket and sold just enough to make a second record for the major label).

I believe cracked rear view sold 17 million copies in the United States.

But the most beautifully impossible and improbable about thing about the stupefying success of cracked rear view was this:  Hootie & the Blowfish were the single nicest band I’ve ever met, and ever will meet.

And the people around them were the kindest, warmest band organization I ever met or interacted with (Rusty Harmon, Paul Graham, Jeff Poland, Jeff Smith, Peter Hoslapple, John Nau, Don Gehman, Gena Rankin, Vanessa, Lynn, Squirrel, and so very, very many others). And they bought out the very best in all of us jaded industry types, making us gorgeously and gleefully un-jaded for a few beautiful months and years; to this day I cannot think of Danny, Kim, Patti, Bob Clark, Bix Warden, Nancy Bennett, Tom Carolan, Jim Lawrence, and many that I am unfortunately forgetting, without smiling and knowing that we shared an absolutely once in a lifetime adventure: to be part of one of the biggest selling albums of all time, on a ride alongside some of the nicest people I’ve ever met in the music business.

Most of all, I love you Darius, Dean, Mark, and Jim.  You created a dream that the world wanted to share, and I am so honored that I helped get you to the world, and if my part in your story is what’s engraved on my tombstone, I am just fine with that.  It was the best kind of story.  And what we believed in and went through will link us like brothers, and I will love you like brothers, always.

I wish every one reading this a chance to enjoy the same feeling.  You can find it by finding something you know is worth standing up for, worth working for joyfully, and worth enduring all the obstacles and nay-sayers for, while keeping an open heart and making art without the obstacle of dishonesty.

I would hang the newsprint declaration on my bedroom wall and stare at it.  I would carefully copy the signatures; I would parse the encyclopedia for the biographies of the famous men whose names were contained therein; I would consider the significance and gravity of this great document, this famous lodestone of our nation.

I would spend much of the day playing patriotic music, committing famous historical quotes to memory, listening to the musical 1776, and considering the great characters in the magical story it told.

I was not so much interested in fireworks – the noise frightened me, and the libidinous spirit their ignition seemed to encourage somehow made me uncomfortable. Also, on July 4, 1969, my brother had been bitten rather gruesomely by a dog deranged by the noise.  So this whole aspect of the holiday had no positive association for me.

Weirdly, this annual burst of patriotism was not limited to Independence Day itself. Somehow, the sweep and grandeur of the Independence legend seemed to affect my overall personality and worldview.  In fact, my fascination with the bewigged formation of the country, the great traditions and myths of Revolution and victory, and the traditional songs and stirring Broadway melodies inspired by America’s birth soon became a dominant aspect of my pre-teen personality (and a somewhat lonely one it was, too, no surprise there).

It was almost like the sweep of our country’s history became a myth full of giants, perfect to replace the dominant myth that occupies the young, the story of the dinosaur.

In fact, for all intents and purposes, I became a little neo-con.  I was so fascinated with the story of the country that I presumed I must love the country, too.  Being a wee-right winger also had the added benefit of being a truly rebellious act, something that set me apart from and even offended my peers.  As distasteful as my 10-year old point of view may have been, I now recognize that it was likely the first time in my life that I actively set out to define a consistent path that would set me apart from my peers, as opposed to seek to please them or conform to their perceived social norms .

At that young age, and in an era lacking the pluralism and media ubiquity of the later internet age, I was unable to distinguish my love of history from the love of the results of history.  I had not yet learned to discriminate between the fascinating, colorfully drawn actors and their actions, and there was no room in my worldview for accurate interpretation of the gray, black, and blue dynamic and results of those actions.   I was in the thrall of the archive, so I presumed I had to be in the thrall of the men who filled the archive.

I now know that the story of the United states is deeply troubled and often shameful;  full of extraordinary nobility, invention, and determination, but also laced with wrongful wars and obscene classism, and thoroughly weighted down – very nearly to the point of self definition — by the astoundingly ugly scar of racism, which was enabled by the almost unthinkable sin of slavery and the nearly as egregious corruption and failure of reconstruction.

But the characters in the story are beautiful, their stories fascinating, it’s history rich and gripping, and I love it, love it, love it:  From the rookeries of lower Manhattan’s 5 Points in the 19^th Century to the manicured lawns of Asheville, North Carolina in the 21^st; from the sepia shabbiness of old, beautiful Times Square to the grim, graceful heroes of the Confederacy eternally  standing unsmiling watch over Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia; from the Stonehenge-like remains of the U.S.’s most beautiful monument, Route 66, to the bleached bungalows on Los Angeles beaches; from all of these places and all of the characters who people these places, and all the 880 million sacred and profane sites in this country and all their stories and storytellers and story listeners and story makers, America is the sum of our worst actions, our most  fascinating stories, our most grotesque instincts and our most enlightened learning, and it is always, always bursting with the potential and the hope that  the people who will make the stories of the future will be compassionate, generous,   sympathetic, and kind.

There are no words available to us, and no words exist to aptly describe the incredible, horrible, fantastic and furious carnage and tumult of the First World War.

There are no words available to us, and no words exist to aptly describe the First World War’s impact on the human and physical map of this planet.  It is our civilizations’ greatest war, the war that changed everything that would come after and make us reconsider everything that came before.

There are no words.

Yet here come some words, these words, scribbled by a mere dilettante, the son of a son of a survivor, a mere ant looking up at this Golem of History that ended 43 years before his birth.

Until the Final War, the war that has not happened yet, the war we cannot imagine, until that final war, no war in human history will ever be such a monument to slaughter, no war will have as much impact on the HUMAN planet; until this species’ final war, the war that has not happened yet, the war we cannot imagine, no war in human history will ever topple as many systems of government, unseat as many Kings; no war will ever sacrifice such a significant portion of an entire continent’s youth; no war will ever result in such a destabilization of economic and political securities; no war will ever result in such universal butchery leading to nothing gained, and no war will ever result in such universal butchery leading to phenomenal change; no war will ever change so much and leave so much as it never was before; and no war will ever impact the world as the First World War did…until the last war.  Only the LAST WAR of this species, the LAST WAR of this civilization, will impact the world as much as the First World War, which began one hundred years ago this past Saturday.

Until that Final War, to be fought on a plane we cannot imagine, fought with weapons we cannot conceive of, at a human and social cost the species will not be able to bear, The First World War will be our most dramatic, most fundamentally altering war.  Until that final war, the Greatest War, the most Horrific War, the War that left our planet most altered than the way it was before that war began, will be the First World War.

Because The United States was only in the First World War for a relatively brief time – this unimaginable thresher of death lasted four and a quarter years, and our country was involved for just a year and a half – we have been taught relatively little about it.  Now, the U.S.’s role was very important – in many ways, we enabled the end of the murderous stalemate that was killing all the young men of Europe – but we did not suffer the incomprehensible death tolls that that the Europeans endured, nor did we suffer the complete alteration of our political, economic, literal, and social geography as the Europeans did.

This was the War to End All Wars.  There would be other wars, there will be other wars, but until the final war, the war that began one hundred years ago this past Saturday is The War.

There are no words, but there are facts…and just a few of the Eight Hundred Million Facts about the First World War are staggering:

17 Million Dead…almost half of them civilian non-combatants.

Repeat:  17 MILLION DEAD.

1.2 million DEAD at ONE battle, The Battle of the Somme; That’s the dead of 24 VIETNAMS IN ONE SINGLE BATTLE (and this is said NOT to downplay the tragedies of the American young who died in South East Asia, but to underline, to emphasize, to italicize, the sheer VOLUME OF DEATH poured in the fields of France in one single battle)…

Nearly one million dead at ONE battle, the Battle of Verdun – nearly twice the amount dead in the entire American Civil War, in one single battle…

Half a million dead at the Battle of Gallipoli, another Half a Million dead at the Battle of the Marnes…to CONCEIVE of these numbers, imagine this:  THINK OF ONE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING EVERY DAY, EVERY HOUR FOR 19 YEARS.  That would be the toll of the Battle of Gallipoli, or the Battle of the Marne (NOT “and” but “OR”).  CAN YOU FUCKING IMAGINE?   I make this sick and sorry comparison NOT to lessen the impact that we have suffered from the sickness of social and political terrorism, but to underline the monstrous toll of these battles, which are beyond the scale of any kind of suffering that we as Americans have ever had to experience because of war.

The First World War also bought about…

The End of 1,000 Years of Russian Tsardom…and the creation of the nations of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and modern Poland…

The End of 700 Years of the Ottoman Empire, the kingdom who had stabilized the middle east since the middle ages…

The End of half a millennia of the Austria-Hungary Empire, ending the lineage of the Holy Roman Empire (and with the fall of the house of Hapsburg, the creation of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Hungary);

And lest we forget…that First World War led to The Bankrupting of Germany by unbelievably punitive War reparations, leading to the worst inflation and economic collapse the world has ever seen, leading to the rise of a Nationalist right wing who marched Europe into another World War…

The list could and should go on and on.  We should never forget that

We cannot and should not even think of the idea of War without remembering the war that began one hundred years ago this weekend.  Despite my truly meager attempts, in which I have stupidly attempted to trace the shadow of the chalk outline around this fearsome scar on history, there really are no words.

I leave you with a poem about the carnage, and the generation of men caught in the maw of death, by Wilfred Owen, the great, beautiful poet who died in battle, only one week before the end of the war:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

      — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

      Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 

      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

      The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Last week my wife and I, along with a friend, took a tour of some of the more impressive mausoleums in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Following the guided tour, about which I’ll be blogging more in the near future, the three of us went to Battle Hill, the highest point in the cemetery grounds (indeed, the highest natural point in Brooklyn. It was the site of an important engagement in the Battle of Brooklyn (sometimes called the Battle of Long Island, as the area in which the fighting took place was not yet part of Brooklyn). The battle was the first engagement of George Washington’s Continental Army against the Royal Army, and was a defeat for the Americans. It could have spelled the end for the young Revolution, but for some heroic rear guard actions, including that at Battle Hill, and a stroke of luck, in the form of bad weather, that allowed what remained of Washington’s forces to retreat from what is now my neighborhood to Manhattan, then to New Jersey, then to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where they endured a harsh winter before re-crossing the Delaware and enjoying their first victories at Trenton and Princeton.

The monument in the photo above is topped by a statue of Minerva,”the Roman goddess of battle and protector of civilization.” She faces toward, and waves to, the Statue of Liberty, which can be seen from Battle Hill. On the face of the base below the statue are the words, “Altar to Liberty.” The mausoleum behind belongs to the family of Charles Higgins, the ink manufacturer who funded the monument.

There is also a Civil War monument (photo above) on Battle Hill.

The plaque on this face of the monument has the words:

Ever remember how much of National Prosperity is due to the brave exertions of the Soldiers who died in the service of their Country.

Source: Self-Absorbed Boomer
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tzVM/~3/ZKmFW_JSru8/the-monuments-on-battle-hill-green-wood.html

BHB publisher/ LICENSED NYC tour guide Homer Fink is brushing off his walking tour shoes and hosting another edition of his Hidden Brooklyn Heights Walking Tour on Saturday (5/24).

Buy tickets here.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/67385

Looking for something more? Museum educators will lead children’s art projects and a photo activity.

For more information, check out the Museum’s website.

It was announced last week that Midtown Equities had been chosen as the developer for the adaptive re-use of the historic Empire Stores warehouse buildings, which extend along Water Street between Dock and Main streets in DUMBO. There was, however, no immediate announcement of which of the anonymous “team” entries revealed in June was the winning design. We now know that it was “Team 5″ that was chosen, a design by Studio V Architecture for Midtown Equities, which includes a glass arcade at the roof level.
Here’s another view, showing almost the whole building from above. Renderings are by Studio V Architecture, via DUMBO NYC. You can see more renderings at Brownstoner.

Empire Stores already has one announced major tenant, furniture mart West Elm, which will move its store and corporate headquarters there.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/62279

The statue in the photo above is of Angelina Eberly.  I’d never heard of her until I read Gail Collins’s column Wendy and the Boys in Wednesday’s New York Times. The column focuses on Texas State Senator Wendy Davis’s filibuster that succeeded in stopping a bill that may have effectively outlawed all abortions in Texas. Ms. Collins began it thus:

There is an old saying that Texas is “heaven for men and dogs, but hell for women and oxen.” But the state’s history is chock-full of stories of female role models. Barbara Jordan. Ann Richards. In downtown Austin, there’s a statue of Angelina Eberly, heroine of the Texas Archives War of 1842, firing a cannon and looking about 7 feet tall. 

Collins then says she doesn’t have time to explain the Texas Archives War, although she goes on to say, “it’s an extremely interesting story.” It seemed most interesting to me, as my wife is an archivist, and through her I’ve met many other archivists and learned a little about that fascinating profession. (“So, you’re an archivist. What exactly do you do?” my mother asked my wife-to-be. “I read other people’s mail and I don’t have to answer it,” was the reply.) Although I once had a silly fantasy about a comic book series called Action Combat Archivists, the notion of an “Archives War” seemed, well, bizarre. I had to look it up. The Texas State Historical Association website tells the tale:

In March 1842 a division of the Mexican army under Gen. Rafael Vásquez appeared at San Antonio demanding the surrender of the town; the Texans were not prepared to resist and withdrew. On March 10 President Sam Houston called an emergency session of the Texas Congress. Fearing that the Mexicans would move on Austin, he named Houston as the meetingplace. The citizens of Austin, fearful that the president wished to make Houston the capital, formed a vigilante committee of residents and warned department heads that any attempt to move state papers would be met with armed resistance. President Houston called the Seventh Congress into session at Washington-on-the-Brazos and at the end of December 1842 sent a company of rangers under Col. Thomas I. Smith and Capt. Eli Chandler to Austin with orders to remove the archives but not to resort to bloodshed. The Austin vigilantes were unprepared for the raid, and the rangers loaded the archives in wagons and drove away, but not before Mrs. Angelina Eberly fired a cannon at them. On January 1, 1843 the vigilance committee, under Capt. Mark B. Lewis, seized a cannon from the arsenal and overtook the wagons at Kenney’s Fort on Brushy Creek. Only a few shots were fired before the rangers gave up the papers in order to avoid bloodshed. The archives were returned to Austin and remained there unmolested until Austin became the capital again in 1844.

So, there you have it. A war in which the first shot was fired by a woman, and in which nobody gets killed, or even hurt. And all over archives. Well, to be fair, really over what was to be the capital of the then independent Republic of Texas. Another reason, along with Wendy Davis (and many others; see the addendum to this post), for me to love the Lone Star State.

The photo is from the home page of an Austin based “psychedelic Americana band” called Archive War. Alas, the band may no longer exist, as their last website update was in November of last year.

Source: Self-Absorbed Boomer
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tzVM/~3/rAKuCTBWAmA/the-texas-archive-war.html

As part of its Centennial Celebration, the New York Transit Museum and the Architectural League of New York held a competition seeking modern reinterpretations of Grand Central Terminal. Contemporary architects and designers submitted more than 100 designs that captured and re-imagined Grand Central in media ranging from charcoal drawings to computer-generated landscapes. The jury selected 20 winning designs – and those designs will be on display at the Transit Museum beginning June 15. That’s Brooklyn resident Stephanie Jaszmines’ interpretation above.

The Transit Museum is located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn. More information here. And there’s more information about the year-long celebration of Grand Central Terminal’s centennial here.

Rubin earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in classic archaeology with a concentration in urban topography from the University of Buffalo, going on to work at the Brooklyn Museum as an assistant to the director, and he’s held a variety of positions at Columbia University, currently directing the Master of Science Program in Sports Management at Columbia University.

A Brooklyn native, he’s lived for much of his life in Park Slope, most recently on Eighth Avenue, in the home he and his parents purchased in the late 90’s, a vintage Brooklyn brownstone at the northern end of the avenue.

“One day,” Rubin said, “my father made a passing, cryptic comment to me – ‘We finally made it to Sportsmen’s Row.’  I thought to myself, ‘Maybe one day I’ll look into that.’”

It was no idle thought, and last year, the History Press published Rubin’s book, the history of the block that in the 1890’s was home to some of Brooklyn’s brightest sporting luminaries, at a time when the city of Brooklyn, then the borough, was home to three race tracks, at Brighton Beach, Gravesend, and Sheepshead Bay.

The first owner of Rubin’s house was James G. Rowe, Sr., a famous jockey and Thoroughbred horse trainer who was elected to Thoroughbred racing’s Hall of Fame in its inaugural 1955 class; the block also attracted other trainers, jockeys, and horse owners.  Some of its more celebrated residents were the Dwyer brothers, butchers who had a shop at the corner of Court St. and Atlantic Avenue before dominating the racing world as owners.

Other residents of Sportsmen’s Row included men well-known in politics, the arts, business, and law, among them William James Gaynor, mayor of New York City from 1910 to 1913.

Rubin made extensive use of Brooklyn resources in researching his book, finding particularly valuable the collection and librarians at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

“I love what I do, but I love the BHS,” he said. “Working for them would probably be the only other job I’d consider.”

He also used the resources of Green-Wood Cemetery, itself a National Historic Landmark and the location of the burial sites of several of the sportsmen about whom he writes in the book.

This Sunday, Rubin will speak at Green-Wood on “Life and Death Along Sportsmen’s Row: Brooklyn’s Eighth Avenue and Green-Wood,” looking at both the famous and the not-so-famous people he writes about, followed by a trolley tour of some of the cemetery’s sites.

Among those whom Rubin is certain to mention is Edward “Snapper” Garrison, a Hall of Fame jockey who rode from 1882 to 1897 and who lived at 30 Eighth Avenue until about 1897.  In addition to their geographical kinship, Rubin discovered something else he and Garrison have in common: their birthdays. Both were born on February 9.

Rubin’s book is available at The Community Bookstore in Park Slope and from Amazon.  The Green-Wood talk starts at 1:00 and is free; the accompanying trolley tour costs $10 for members of the Green-Wood Historic Fund and $15 for non-members. Space is limited and reservations are recommended.

You may recall the lengthy legal battle over the St. Ann’s Warehouse theater’s attempt to build a new performance space inside the 19th century Tobacco Warehouse in the Fulton Ferry Historic District, which led to a court decision holding that the transfer of the Tobacco Warehouse space from Brooklyn Bridge Park had not been done according to law. This legal obstacle has now been overcome by a transfer of new land into the Park in exchange for the Tobacco Warehouse, and St. Ann’s has presented new plans (see image) for a performance space, community room, and lobby to be built inside the roofless shell of the Warehouse. You can read more about the planned new facility and see more images in Theatermania.

The design proposal by St. Ann’s was considered by the Executive Committee of Community Board 2 at its meeting this last week and will go to the full board on May 8.

Note: This post has been modified since original publication.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/57706

The iconic Hotel St. George sign on the corner of Henry and Clark Streets has been refurbished and returned to Brooklyn Heights this morning. Michael Correra at Michael Towne Wines and Spirits wrote us to say that the sign is looking great thanks to the hard work of the folks at Paul’s Signs.

BHB reader Chris Fohlin tweeted us a photo of the sign’s return this morning. Our Heather Quinlan is on her way to get more info….

UPDATE: And here I am, Heather Quinlan, with the latest sign news. According to Correra, “I think the sign is from 1933, though I don’t have any proof. What’s interesting is the man who repaired it said it had square bulbs, and they haven’t used square bulbs since the 1950s.” Correra also recommended a book New York Nights about the history of NYC signage. Featuring the Hotel St. George Sign, square bulbs and all.

Looks like the new St. George sign may be going up today /cc @bkheightsblog twitter.com/cfohlin/status…

— Chris Fohlin (@cfohlin) March 20, 2013

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/56534

Grace Church, which was designed by America’s then pre-eminent church architect, Richard Upjohn, and has stood at what is now 254 Hicks Street (corner of Grace Court, between Joralemon and Remsen) since 1848, is about to undergo an extensive renovation that will close its sanctuary (photo; services will be held in the upstairs Guild Hall during the renovation) for a year, starting after the Easter services at the end of March. To mark this occasion, and to give all members of the community an opportunity to view the sanctuary before it is closed, the clergy and vestry of Grace will host an open house and tea on this coming Sunday, March 24, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. There will be guided tours of the interior and a talk about the magnificent stained glass windows, some by Tiffany; organ music by Paul Olson; and an opportunity to see a model of the interior’s planned restoration. Refreshments will be served.

In the words of Grace’s Wardens and Rector:

Throughout its long history, Grace Church has served the wider community in Brooklyn Heights and beyond as well as its parishioners, whether through Grace Church School, the 85 year old pre-school, by making space available for community groups to meet, and through our many outreach activities. We view Grace Church as a community landmark and resource as well as a spiritual home for our many parishioners.

Please be our guests on March 24th to learn more about our plans to restore this beloved community landmark. We look forward to seeing you.

The event is free and all are invited.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/56448

What is Jane Austen’s Twitter blurb for an episode of “Girls”?

Entries limited to 140 characters, but you can enter as many times as you like. Best entries will be published on the Brooklyn Bugle; the top two winners will also receive a copy of The Jane Austen Handbook by Margaret Sullivan.

Enter below in the comments with a valid email address.

Contest closes Sunday, February 3, at 12:01 am. Must be 18 or older to enter; must provide a valid email address. Winners will be chosen by our panel of judges. Their decision is final.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously to deny an application to legalize changes made to the interior of the former Gage and Tollner Restaurant at 372 Fulton Street. The landmarked interior, which has housed a discount jewelry store since 2010 (formerly Arby’s and TGI Friday’s) has already faced mounting fines because it masked the interior decor without permission.

Curbed reports that the applicant insists its display and lighting system doesn’t penetrate the walls—but Landmarks sees it differently, saying that a majority of the historic detail is gone. Several gas lamp fixtures remain, while an arch was placed in storage.

According to an LPC spokesman, the building owner’s architect described these changes as “interior desecration” and actually apologized on behalf of the tenants. Commission Vice Chair Pablo E. Vengoechea noted that “hiding something behind something is not a preservation strategy. You need to expose what’s there.” The tenant must now submit a new plan and file a permit application for the interior. (Top Photo: Chuck Taylor/2010)

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/54502

The Bossert Hotel could begin receiving hotel guests at 98 Montague Street as early as this summer, according to a report from the Architect’s Newpaper—as long as construction remains on schedule. That includes preserving the facade, lobby and reception area, updating the rooms with new design finishes and amenities, and restoring the Marine Roof to a restaurant and lounge.

On January 8, the Board of Standards & Appeals unanimously approved a request for variance to change the Certificate of Occupancy for “transient hotel use, accessory hotel use and commercial use,” officially allowing the building to open its doors as a hotel once again.

David Bistricer and Joseph Chetrit closed on the 103-year-old, 14-story property, for $81 million in November. Since the 1980s, the building had been owned the Jehovah’s Witnesses and used as a community facility. At the time of purchase, Bistricer said the hotel would remain independent and maintain the name of original developer, lumber mogul Louis Bossert.

Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/54069