Category Archives: writing

Monday morning links, not thoughts

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It’s a Monday morning, and I’m trying to simultaneously finish my crazy oversized book chapter and get my week at the newspaper firmly started. So I’m going to punt one more time, and offer up a couple of links:

Does Obama’s appearance on Fox News signify a move to the right? An interesting take.

A portrait of the overall primary drama from my favorite cartoonist, who is also one of our most fearless thinkers.

If you’re tired of political chat, some Chelsea stuff: for those of you curious whatever happened to the folks I described at the Hotel Breslin, here’s the latest update:

Last week, the Hotel Breslin on Broadway bustled with the sounds of construction. Eight DOB notices were plastered to the front door, between 28th and 29th Sts.—some clear (“Install New HVAC System”) and others mysterious (“Conversion To Prior Use”). Just below the doorman’s cubicle, workers wearing protective masks tramped down to the basement, while the sound of power drills and other heavy equipment blasted from beyond the inner door. Just beside that door, a yellowed notice pleaded politely: “Please Remember That This is a Residential Building. Avoid Excess Noise.”

And if you just want to grimace wondering why you didn’t come up with it yourself, the inevitable Yes We Can Has.

24 hours of irony?

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Two quick bits, since I’m otherwise mostly in the 19th century today:

First, Anthony Lane gave me a new catchphrase this week, in his New Yorker review of 88 Minutes:

Avnet is setting a noble example here: if all movies were named after their running times, Hollywood would instantly become a brisker place. Would Peter Jackson have dared to put us through a Tolkien trilogy called “Nine and a Quarter Hours of Elves”? I don’t think so.

I now never have to use the phrase “Lord of the Rings” again. In Lane’s honor, I will only use his alternate title. Including for the books.

But that’s not the ironic part. That happens in July, when this happiest? place on earth opens.

gentry less faded, more “ified”

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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.)

i get all my news from poets

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Time was, I never forgot when it was April, National Poetry Month. Now it’s almost over. I thought I should honor it with some Berryman, in honor of the site’s title: but instead of merely pasting his hilarious Dream Song 14, “Life is boring,” I found some sound.

If you’d rather just read, go peek at my sweetheart’s ghazals:

My eyes entombed with sleep, I need some coffee.

I can’t yet see the bathroom. Where’s the coffee?

She takes the can out of the freezer and the water from the tap.
And when I smell the air has changed I know I’m loved, for she made coffee.

A bag of beans, organic but uncertain.
How much of what I paid was paid to those who picked the coffee?

The line’s too long; I take the train. No cup in hand, I read.
I’m late for class. Be later. Be contrite. Just get some coffee.

This runs in my family. From a Chinese banquet hall on his daughter’s first
birthday, my brother rushes out to find a cup of take-out coffee.

Summer’s coming. When it ends, I will have ridden in its heat
obsessed with shedding winter pounds and gaining coffee

shaded skin (albeit three parts milk to two with some red syrup).
As the summer sweat pours down my arms, I will seep coffee,

eggs, bananas, meat. Along the hills of Brooklyn, dodging dogs
and children, dodging cars, smiling at everyone, I’m seeking coffee.

The Germans say “Not addict. Morphine-seeky.”
When I stop to rest my muscles in Park Slope or Coney Island I’ll get coffee.

On the boardwalk, watch the waves. They sound like steam
and final, gurgling drips; to Rachel’s ear no longer H2O, a pot of coffee.

— Rachel Rawlings, 2005

davy crockett, whose name should be on a casino

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Miraculously, I’ve somehow managed to spend much of my weekend on the book, thinking less about current controversies —including super-burning issues like this week’s Rand study documenting this country’s ongoing betrayal of new veterans — than about those of 1830: how long slavery should last, and what to do about the pesky presence of the original inhabitants of this continent. And I found a surprising new veteran character for the book: Davy Crockett, emblazoned in popular culture with a rifle and a coonskin cap, who killed many Indians in Andrew Jackson’s first wars.

To my surprised delight, I found that Crockett, then a Congressman from Tennessee, stood up to Jackson years later, when the then-president asked for formal endorsement of his policy of moving all Indians across the MIssissippi:

Soon after the commencement of [my] second term, [Jackson’s] famous, or rather I should say his in-famous, Indian bill was brought forward, and I opposed it from the purest motives in the world. Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me how well they loved me, and that I was ruining myself. They said this was a favorite measure of the president,and I ought to go for it. I told them I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure, and that I should go against it, let the cost to myself be what it might; that I was willing to go with General Jackson in every thing that I believed was honest and right; but, further than this, I wouldn’t go for him, or any other man in the whole creation I had been elected by a majority of three thousand five hundred and eighty-five votes, and I believed they were honest men, and wouldn’t want me to vote for any unjust motion, to please Jackson or any one else; at any rate, I was of age, and was determined to trust them. I voted against this Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgment.

Crockett’s faith in his voters may have been misplaced; he was soon returned to civilian life, a fate he’d foreseen from the beginning: “ I know’d well enough,though, that if I didn’t ” hurra ” for [the President’s] name, the hue and cry was to be raised against me, and I was to be sacrificed, if possible.”

While Crockett didn’t then join fellow veterans Noah Worcester and Wiliam Ladd in their American Peace Society, instead taking the opposite stance and dying fighting for slavery at the Alamo, his vote against removal still counts for something. I’m still working to tease out how much, in this alchemists’ brew of dissent that I’m tracking. But I wonder how many deserters from subsequent wars traded stories about the frontiersman who stood up to a president.

By the way, before some random historian finds this and slams me: I know Andrew Jackson didn’t come up with the idea of removal. Sweet old Tom Jefferson had conceived of such tactics fifteen years earlier, should his chosen strategy of creating a red/maroon Generation Debt fail:

To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and the influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. . . . They will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.

In other words, Jefferson provided the ideology, Jackson the means, and reckless Western governments an incomplete Final Solution.

Thinking about all this, the poetry of white people pouring away their life savings at Indian-owned casinos comes clearer; I should probably mind less my parents going to Foxwoods in formerly Pequot Connecticut, or Mohegan Sun farther east. Though I understand the reluctance of William Penn’s city to want to allow a similar payback on their soil.

Groundhog Day, with a few more clues

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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

that’s what you’d expect in a democracy

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I’ve been a huge fan of Jeannette Winterson for more then ten years, ever since her novel Passion knocked me out of any literary or emotional comfort zone I’d ever had. I can’t say I emulate her: her brand of poetry, vision and audacity just can’t be mimicked, though I did tell students they could learn bravery from her fearless descriptions:

One woman who kept a fleet of boats and a string of cats and dealt in spices is here now, in the silent city. I cannot tell how old she may be, her hair is green with slime from the walls of the nook she lives in. She feeds on vegetable matter that snags against the stones when the tide is sluggish. She has no teeth. She has no need of teeth. She still wears the curtains that she dragged from her drawing-room window as she left.

The city in question is the same as Calvino’s, the period early enough that the narrator ends up traveling with Napoleon’s cook.

Admittedly, I’d sort of lost the thread of her work in more recent years, as it focused more on myth than I felt I could. But The Stone Gods, her newest, feels simultanously like yesterday’s news, tomorrow’s headlines, and the kind of poetry that rattles the brain. At first her dystopia, in which humans all choose to genetically stop aging whenever they wish, is hysterically funny as it horrifies:

Making everyone young and beautiful has made us all bored to death with sex. All men are hung like whales. All women are tight as clams below and inflated like lifebuoys above. Jaws are square, skin is tanned, muscles are toned, and no one gets turned on. It’s a global crisis. At least it’s a crisis in the countries of the Central Power. The Eastern Caliphate has banned Genetic Fixing, and the SinoMosco Pact does not make it available to all its citizens, only to members of the ruling party and their favorites. This way the leaders look like gods and the rest look like shit-shovellers. They never claimed to be a democracy.

The Central Power is a democracy. We all look alike, except for rich people and celebrities, who look better. That’s what you’d expect in a democracy.

I was going to quote a much later section, wherein she explains and describes the apocalypse that put her society into being, “the ugliness of how we had destroyed it, the brutal, stupid, money-soaked, drunken binge of a 21st-century world.” But I’d rather you read it in her book — which I first read in an addictive rush, pulled by her well-constructed love story/space opera/reverse-Jonathan-Swift commentary. Then I read it again, to savor the poetry, and the crystal palace Winterson has constructed.

Meanwhile, I do have one question for her. When is the film coming out, inevitably directed by the guy who dreamt up Torchwood?

Luxury [boring] City

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At Chelsea Now I often feel like I’m writing a subtler version of one of those blogs chronicling the loss of old New York in the crush of New York’s new development, like Lost City or Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. Roughly a quarter of my stories feature efforts to Save something, whether it’s Save the Garment Center, Save [Historic] Chelsea, or — this week — Save Saint Vincent de Paul, a historic church that served former slaves among its congregants back in the pre-Civil War Gangs of New York days.

All of them fear the future envisioned by Mayor Bloomberg and his aspiring-Robert-Moses deputy, Daniel Doctoroff, which was illumined beautifully by my J-school classmate David Freedlander in Thursday’s AM New York. David ended his article with a quote from urban scholar Fred Siegel; “”You can sum up the Bloomberg legacy in two words: luxury city.”

I found myself quoting Siegel, and by extension David, on Friday to some folks in Philadelphia, the city I’ve always thought of as a second or third home. For a journalist, I speculated, their town might offer much more interesting terrain than the latest $2-million condo or yet another elegy for a historic church/concert hall/bookstore. It was enough, I added, to make like John Cusack in this movie, telling his editors from a wild and woolly Savannah, Georgia: “New York is boring!”

Of course, I may just not be taking the long view; there’s no doubt that at least some of the new building is Ozymandian. Brooks at Lost City warns:

I still think the big wake-up call is yet to come, long after Bloomberg has left office and taken up his new job in Albany, when the City wakes up and realizes it has no working class, no artistic class, no small-business culture, no middle class to speak of, no younger generation that didn’t come out of law school or business school, or clings to a trust fund.

But by the time that happens, I’ll be collecting Social Security. And I wonder if I will be in New York or some other, more little-engine-that-could town.

the kid gets an award

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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

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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.