Category Archives: journalism

“the intervention that makes change possible is love”

Leave a reply

About two weeks ago, I offered a few thoughts on the latest work by Jeanette Winterson, offering one sideline smart passage while mostly urging you to seek out the book itself. Whether you did or not, I advise you to check out this review + interview in Gay City News. (One of the perks of my current job is that I sit next to GCN’s brilliant, singleminded editor, Paul Schindler.)  Michael Ehhardt’s smart review articulates the themes and more of the story than I did; I do feel gratified that one of the passages he chose to quote is the same one I did, which he calls typical of Winterson’s  “fierce Voltarian satire of future society.”

Interestingly, though, the author herself sounds less like Voltaire (who was, after all, one of the literary world’s first human rights campaigners) than like a cross between Barack Obama and Harvey Milk:

Everywhere I look, kids want to feel, want to care, want things to matter, but strength of feeling is frightening. One of the things that art can do is find a channel for strength of feeling at the same time as prompting thought – so the old split of head and heart is relieved.

This is something I have always followed in my work, and in the repeating worlds and circular mistakes of “The Stone Gods,” the intervention that makes change possible is love. Love of all kinds is crucial, not least because it resolves the head/heart tension too, and when I listen to music or read a poem or go to the theater, I am opening myself up to difference and to change — the possibilities of love. I think the artist is someone who is always falling in love — with life itself, and with the creative playful spirit of human endeavour.

Which means we get our hearts broken  every five minutes. Thank god the heart is muscle, and can lift far more than seems possible.

gentry less faded, more “ified”

Leave a reply

I’ve loved my neighborhood since before the realtors renamed it “Hudson Heights”; my best friend has lived in various corners thereof for 20-some years, and I soon knew both the assets and the liabilities of this small town at the top of the island.

But by the time we moved  up here five years ago, the renaming had happened, taking with it any hope we had of buying. The rent stayed reasonable, but barely. And every time we hope that things will soften, our neighbors who write for the Times ensure that an article like this one appears to perk things up:

Over the years, Hudson Heights — a quaint enclave that stretches roughly from 181st Street on the south to Fort Tryon Park on the north, and from Broadway on the east to Riverside Drive on the west — has attracted more affluent residents than the rest of Washington Heights, where the overall average household income in 2006 was less than $45,000, according to the United States Census Bureau. In Hudson Heights, one-bedroom apartments can fetch as much as $1,800 a month in rent and two bedrooms for nearly $3,000. Two-bedroom co-ops and condos can cost as much as $800,000. Much of the construction is prewar, and there are even some Tudor-style facades. A fortresslike wall stands along the community’s western edge.

Ostensibly, the piece is about the recession-era travails of small businesses on the block, focusing on the spa (!) that opened up on our block three years ago.  I wondered why the reporter didn’t check in with Mr. Anh, the tall chainsmoking Korean man who sells produce on the corner. I bet he’s actually seen an uptick in business, as more folk realized that Fresh Direct is really no bargain. (Besides, they miss Anh’s surreally good cilantro.)

Groundhog Day, with a few more clues

1 Reply

Last night, a meeting of a local transportation committee kind of made the past 15 months slip  away. The topic was the same as my very first story for Chelsea Now: the ARC Tunnel project, a plan by New Jersey Transit and the Port Authority to double the number of passengers crossing the river. Then as now, there was a New Jersey Transit rep with Power Point slides, ready to explain how the trains would only benefit New York and Chelsea. Then as now, there sat the opposition, renegade transit planners and passenger organizations with their own quixotic-seeming quest to remake the project.

In the interim, NJT had revised its plans significantly, but not to respond to the critics. Instead, the plan had diverged even further from its original concepts. There went those critics’ hopes to integrate the tunnel station with a regional rail system, as in Paris or Philadelphia.

My full article about the (bloody long and contentious) meeting will be in the paper, but I wanted to note some language I might never have noticed last February. The fellow from NJT rattled off a series of “impacts” now avoided by the new plan, which envisions a tunnel and station 155 feet underground that doesn’t try to link with Penn Station. “We would have had to get too close to the bottom of the buildings near the station. Both existing buildings and for future development,” he said. “The city, City Planning, asked us not to do that. So we found a better way.”

Anyone who follows New York’s development dance might have had their ears prick at that last sentence, and wondered when those conversations took place. And who it was that really asked. Given subsequent changes, that may make a difference in whether the Quixotes can slay their dragon.

Meanwhile, this movie is still in play. And thus,my current earworm is this song

the machine that goes ping!

Leave a reply

Like a lot of people, I’ve been thinking a lot about the upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania. On a separate stream, I’ve watched in train-wreck fear the wave of voting-machine failures, from Florida to Ohio. Thus, this report from the Star Ledger (ht: Raw Story) is particularly unsettling. The voting machines just subpoenad in New Jersey, which failed frequently on Super Tuesday and have no paper trail, are the same scheduled for use in the PA primary in two weeks.

All the more reason to pay attention to Dan Rather this time.

—

UPDATE: Election Day in PA, and as it turns out, there’s ample cause for concern. No conspiracy theories necessary now, just the inertia of stupidity + money to be made….

the kid gets an award

1 Reply

Just got word from colleagues ar Community Media that my series on illegal hotels (see Selected Articles, or just google my name and “illegal hotels”) was given an award for “in depth reporting” by the New York Newspaper Association. The citation read: “These stories were well written as well as rich and
informative–putting a consistently human face on a pattern of official indifferences to the illegal hotels.”

Not sure how significant that is in the outer world, but what makes me happy: I know this year the awards were judged by a similar association in North Carolina. I would never have thought that an only-in-New-York dilemma like illegal hotels would speak to readers from that far away, where NYC’s fragile web of tenant protections might feel like a dream.

And OK, I know I’m not so much a kid. But journalism keeps me feeling like a third-grader.

rashomon, via NYC schools

3 Replies

This past Tuesday, I sat in a windowless classroom on my beat, getting yelled at by a principal, four assistant principals, and a handful of teachers and students from a local high school. Many of their sentences began: “Do you even know..?”

Did I know that their math team had done well? That their media school produced numerous magazines and books? That their fine arts academy’s music and art teams had worked together on a concert, the latter painting the sets till all hours? And one young teacher hissed at me, “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

They were responding to one of four articles I’d written about their school, which like other large high schools in New York has been undergoing rapid changes under Chancellor Joel Klein: breakup of its student body into small “learning communities,” shifts in curriculum, and its first “report card.” These teachers and students felt I had stigmatized the school, that I had written a borderline racist way about the changes in the school’s demographics “without writing about the amazing things that happen here every day,” as the director of their business school put it. And their principal accused me of “twisting the facts to suit your (my) agenda.”

Now I know why education reporters burn out.

I’ve spent close to six months now trying to sort out fact from rumor on both the overall citywide reforms and on what’s going on in the local schools, to the extent possible when my beat isn’t Chelsea schools but all of Chelsea. I get letters and emails challenging this or that point as well as giving me tips about where to look. The stories told by each vary hugely, both in simple facts and in the mood about the schools themselves. Especially this one. I began to work more slowly, to examine each claim and to prepare to ask for an official response from the school.

Then news broke: a kid at the school had been shot a block away. With three bullets in his body, he had run around the corner to the lobby of the school and collapsed. Suddenly it was front-page news (for us), and a followup to the first story these teachers had hated, about rumors that swirled about gang activity after three of their students were stabbed.

After months of looking into it (to the extent possible while writing other news stories every week), I feel like I’ve been part of a 2000’s NYC version of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The school blames the community, with its out-of-town partyers and public housing complexes. The community blames the school — most of whose students live in less affluent neighborhoods, like the South Bronx or my own ‘hood Washington Heights. A longtime expert on NYC schools tells me that many parents from those neighborhoods likely chose it partly because it’s in a rich neighborhood, and they figure the kid will be safe there. OR they only send them reluctantly aftet their child begs, “because she wanted to take a chance on Manhattan,” as one parent in the room said on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a kid is recovering at St. Vincent’s Hospital. The school is trying to recover, the Tuesday group said, from the damage my articles have done. And I’m still turning the crystal around and around, hoping to distinguish between objective fact, personal testimonies, and the bigger picture, if there is one, while pulling out an actual story by deadline.

It’s a journalistic truism that if all your sources feel equally maligned, you’re doing something right. But as a sometime educator, I did feel bad that the kids felt I’d ignored their heroism. Because much of their work as I’ve seen it is indeed brilliant, like the short films and newspapers I’ve seen, a testimony to both students and the teachers who shepherd them. These kids’ writing sure beats the pretentious drivel I produced in high school.

If there’s one thing I learned from my time teaching at CUNY, it was that many of the students struggling to learn paragraph structure had already done things I’d never have the strength for — like living with alcoholic parents, or crossing over from Mexico in the dark of night. (I don’t remember the latter guy’s name, Department of Homeland Security, should your Google-enabled software find this entry. I do remember that he was a cook in a fancy Manhattan restaurant, and a hell of a poet.)

Time to shake off the dragged-to-the-principal’s office feeling from Tuesday, and finish my piece (deadline this afternoon). Most of the investigative stuff will have to wait for another week. If I succeed in describing one facet of the crystal with accuracy, I’ll be happy. I don’t expect them to be.