Red Hook Star-Revue, April 2019

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STAR REVUE

APRIL 2019 chronicling Red Hook and the world beyond

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April 2019, Page 15

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SUMMIT ACADEMY IN JEOPARDY — PAGE 5

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BQX Lobbying page 9 ©COPYRIGHT 2019 MARC JACKSON AND WEiRD0 COMiCS

Irish Parade at Rocky’s page 37

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April Events

EDITOR & PUBLISHER George Fiala ARTS EDITOR

Matt Caprioli

MUSIC EDITOR

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INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER Brett Yates REPORTERS

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Nathan Weiser Erin DiGregorio Noah Phillips

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Community Numbers: Red Hook Councilman

Carlos Menchaca (718) 439-9012 Red Hook Assemblyman Felix Ortiz (718) 492-6334 State Sen. Velmanette Montgomery (718) 643-6140 Gowanus Councilman Brad Lander (718) 499-1090 Park Slope Councilman Steve Levin (718) 875-5200 CB6 District Manager Michael Racioppo (718) 643-3027 76th Police Precinct, 191 Union Street Main phone (718) 834-3211 Community Affairs (718) 834-3207 Traffic Safety (718) 834-3226 Eileen Dugan Senior Center (718) 596-1956 Miccio Center 718) 243-1528 Red Hook East (718) 852-6771 Red Hook West (718) 522-3880 NYCHA Police Precinct, 80 Dwight St. Main Phone (718) 265-7300 Community Affairs (718) 265-7313 Domestic Violence (718) 265-7310 Youth Officer (718) 265-7314 Red Hook NCO police Damien Clarke, (929) 287-7155 Jonathan Rueda, (917)941-2185

Page 2 Red Hook Star-Revue

3 WEDNESDAY

Hear the latest precinct updates, voice your concerns and ask questions at the 76th Precinct Community Council meeting. It’ll start at 7:30 pm at the 76th Precinct (191 Union St.).

5 FRIDAY

The 11th Annual Brooklyn Folk Festival, presented by Jalopy Theatre & School of Music, will be a weekend full of fun, festivities and food – including music from 50 bands, film screenings, dancing, and vocal and instrumental workshops. It’ll be held at St. Ann’s Church (157 Montague St.). Also Sunday

6 SATURDAY

The 2nd Annual Art Slope: ‘Shorts in the Slope’ Film Festival will be screened at Berkeley Carroll School’s Marlene Clary Performance Space (152 Sterling Pl.).

For more info and ticket purchases, visit artslope.nyc.

The 11th Annual Brooklyn Folk Festival, presented by Jalopy Theatre & School of Music, will be a weekend full of fun, festivities and food – including music from 50 bands, film screenings, dancing, and vocal and instrumental workshops. It’ll be held at St. Ann’s Church (157 Montague St.). For more info and ticket purchases, visit brooklynfolkfest.com.

Kentler International Drawing Space (353 Van Brunt St.) will host an Artist’s Talk with Alexander Gorlizki at 4 pm. He’ll discuss his current exhibition “Your Eyes, So Beautiful, Like Washing Machines (But Not as Big).” This is free and open to the public with a reception to follow. The exhibition is on view until April 21.

7 SUNDAY

The 2nd Annual Art Slope: ‘Shorts in the Slope’ Film Festival will be screened at Berkeley Carroll School’s Marlene Clary Performance Space (152 Sterling Pl.).

For more info and ticket purchases, visit artslope.nyc.

8 MONDAY

P.S. 15 (71 Sullivan St.) will be presenting an evening with author Veronica Chambers, 6-8 pm. Chambers, a Brooklynite, will discuss her books “Resist,” “The Go Between” and “Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa.” She’s best known for her critically acclaimed memoir, “Mama’s Girl,” and being the editor of “The Meaning of Michelle” (named one of the Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 2017).

Hornblower Cruises & Events, Luna Park, The Gap, and Allied Universal Security will be actively recruiting qualified candidates at the Workforce1 Job & Resource Fair. Bring 2 copies of your resume and dress professionally. 10 am-1 pm at the Red Hook Library (7 Wolcott St.)

9 TUESDAY

False Harmonics #3 Bearthoven (performing work by Katherine Balch and Sarah Hennies & Luisa Muhr/Wendy Eisenberg Duo). Doors open at 7 pm; Luisa Huhr/Wendy Eisenberg Duo perform at 8 pm; and Katherine Batch and Sarah Hennies perform at 9 pm. Advance tickets are $15 and tickets at the door will be $20.

Compiled by Nathan and Erin

Join neighbors to hear updates regarding Red Hook West and voice any concerns or ask questions of TA President Lillie Marshall at the Red Hook West Residents Association meeting. 6:30 pm at 428 Columbia St., Tenant Office 1C.

10 WEDNESDAY

Community Board 6’s monthly general board meeting 6:30 pm in the Old First Reformed Church’s Lower Hall (729 Carroll St.).

A Taste of Fifth, presented by Park Slope Fifth Avenue BID, is an annual tasting and social event that helps support local charitable causes. 6:30-9:30 pm at Grand Prospect Hall (263 Prospect Ave.).

13 SATURDAY

Food lovers can eat different types of food at the 1st Annual “Tastes of Gowanus: Earth Day Crawl,” 2-6 pm, along 3rd and 4th Avenues to Bond Street. Tastings start at 4 for $20, 11 for $50. For more info, including purchasing tickets and a list of participating eateries, visit tastesofbrooklyn.com.

2nd Annual Easter Bunny Hop at Beyond at Liberty View (850 3rd Ave.), 12-5 pm.

Kids can partake in an Easter Egg Hunt; visit the Easter Garden on the second floor of BEYOND; and meet the Easter Bunny (and take a picture with him!).

2nd Annual Easter Bunny Hop at Industry City (274 36th St.), 12:30-3:30 pm. There will be face painting, family crafting, and Li-Lac Chocolates’ Meet & Greet with the Easter Bunny (plus free chocolate eggs!).

Author & DIY expert Nicolay will come to the Red Hook Library to demonstrate easy and fun ways to alter your t-shirts at the Tween T-Shirt Transformation Workshop. It’ll take place at 3 pm. A limited supply of shirts will be provided, so they’ll be first come, first served. Bringing your own shirt to transform is encouraged.

15 MONDAY

Hop on over and help support the Brooklyn Bridge Rotary Club at the Easter Basket Project as they spread some cheer for the youths living in the local family shelters. It’ll start at 3:30 pm at The Great Room (194 Columbia St.).

16 TUESDAY

Join neighbors to hear updates and voice any concerns or ask questions of TA President Frances Brown at the Red Hook East Residents Association meeting. 6:30 pm at 167 Bush St., Apt. 1B. The Red Hook Justice Center youth internship fair at the Miccio Center (110 W. 9th St.), 4:30-6:30 pm. Organizations that have volunteer opportunities for youth during the summer will be there. Youth can present their resumes. Job readiness, skill building and enrichment programs for young adults.

22 MONDAY

Free Earth Day Photoshoot at the Red Hook Library (7 Wolcott St.), 3-4 pm.

23 TUESDAY

Gowanus Canal CAG’s monthly meeting 6:30 pm at Mary Star of the Sea (41 1st St.).

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25 THURSDAY

DCP’s Gowanus Rezoning Scoping Meeting will be held at 4 pm in M.S. 51’s auditorium (350 5th Ave.).

30 TUESDAY

78th Precinct Community Council meeting. It’ll take place 7:30-9 pm at the 78th Precinct (65 6th Ave.).

Ongoing: Mondays – Jalopy Theatre and School

of Music (315 Columbia St.) weekly Open Mic Night 8:30-11 pm. Sign up in person by 9 pm. Each performer gets two songs or eight minutes.

Tuesdays – Professional dancers teach free dance workshops 6-8 pm, at the Red Hook Justice Center.

Red Hook Library has Coding for Kids (ages 5 and up), 3-4 pm.

Wednesdays – Brooklyn Crochets for a Cause: Homeless Outreach is held every Wed., 10 am-12 pm, at Brooklyn Borough Hall (209 Joralemon St.). Participants crochet hats, mittens, scarves and sweaters that’ll be donated to individuals who are homeless.

Join Healing After Violence, a support group for women who have experienced violence in a relationship, on Wednesdays, 5-7 pm, at Red Hook Justice Center Red Hook CARES 347-404-9017.

The Fancy Show delivers free stand-up comedy every Wed. at The Douglass (149 4th Ave.). It regularly features comedians from NBC, COMEDY CENTRAL, HBO, MTV, FOX and more. Doors open at 8 pm, shows start at 8:30 pm. Seating’s first-come, first-serve and food service is available during the show.

Thursdays – The Red Hook Community Justice Center (88 Visitation Pl.) hosts CARES Wellness Support Group, 5-7 pm. Learn about coping strategies for dealing with stress, and ways to relax and take care of yourself. Dinner and Metrocards are provided. For more info, call Red Hook CARES at 347-404-9017.

Broadly Entertaining hosts FREE Thursday Night Trivia at Rocky Sullivan’s (46 Beard St.), at 8 pm. First place winner gets 50% off their tab.

The Red Hook Library ProjectArt will offer free art classes for kids ages 4-7, 3:154:15 pm. Attendees will explore, create and express through visual art. Register at projector.org/enroll. Note: You must attend all classes to participate; email questions to elizabeth@projectart.org.

Fridays – Red Hook Library offers oneon-one Resume, Cover Letter and Interview Prep,11 am-1 pm.

Saturdays – Red Hook Library (7 Wolcott St.) has Saturday Storytime (all ages welcomed), 11-11:45 am.

Saturday Activities, held 10 am-5 pm, are available for ages 13 and up – including gym, theater, weight room and computers – at the Miccio Cornerstone Center (110 W. 9th St.), a program of Good Shepherd Services. For more information, call 718243-1528.

April 2019

Parks Department claims ballfields will open in 2021

T

he mystery of the desolate state of Red Hook’s ballfields was solved on March 11, as the Parks Department and the EPA swooped upon the Bay Street Rec Center for one of their infrequent community updates. They evidently waited until there was actually something to say, which was that, after years of planning, and a lot of false promises, their contractors were about to do something in and around the barricaded fields.

According to Commissioner Marty Maher, a contract that had construction slated to begin in the fall didn’t work out as planned.

“Though the start time was not exactly what we said, the finish time for all of the project remains unchanged,” Maher said to the few locals who bothered to show up. “We just started last week on some of the smaller trees and you will see trailers coming on sight soon and work starting in earnest in the next couple of weeks.”

What he was saying is that the trees around the ballfields, especially the ones on Bay Street, would be chopped down shortly, and a giant green wall, which Red Hookers are used to, will be going up.

“We were working with the EPA and the contractor to complete construction plans that needed to get a number of approvals by the EPA,” Maher said. “The EPA has approved all the plans that were prepared. Now we are mobilizing on site.”

Stage two will include soil movement

and the raising of the fields, which will take the most time.

Eric Mattes, the Brooklyn Borough Landscape Design Director at the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, gave more details.

The construction fence around the perimeter will be six feet high and will have fabric on it to prevent any dust or debris from getting off the site and into the neighborhood. They will regularly water down the site during dry spells to prevent dust from spreading, and the EPA will be on site once a week to check the dust.

“Instruments around the perimeter of the project will be monitoring dust levels,” Mattes said. “You will see these weekly dust monitoring results.

We want to make sure the community is not affected by the dust.”

If the dust gets to the alert level, then they will stop all work at the site until the EPA finds that all the dust is contained. Parks does not anticipate getting to the action level based on the frequent spraying, and perimeter fencing which will have a dust curtain.

Phase One is scheduled to be completed in spring 2020.

Surrounding fields 5-8 will be a bioswale. On the surface, five to six inches of grass or top soil will be removed.

They will bring in the aggregate and soil (which will be tested prior to arrival at the site) to fill this area.

Stage three of Phase One will include synthetic turf, new pavement, new curbs and new fencing. Mattes added that during Phase One they will be

by Nathan Weiser

planting 62 new trees, 900 shrubs and 5,000 perennials and ornamental grasses.

Maher answered questions about the trees “There is a palate of trees that the city puts in,” Maher said. “They all help everybody in the community.

They provide cleaning, they provide air.

Parks Department honchos Eric Mattes and Marty Maher update They purify the the Rec Center crowd (photo by Nathan Weiser) atmosphere and reconstruction of the current handprovide shade. ball courts and installation of an adult These are not going to be apple or fitness circuit along a new pathway. pear picking trees.”

“This is all currently on schedule,” Phase Two, which includes Ball Field Mattes said. “We are getting close to 9 (baseball field) and Soccer Field 2, completing design. That will be done is still in the procurement phase. They in a few months and the anticipated will be awarding phase two to a concompletion will be in fall of 2021.” tractor soon.

It is estimated that 4,900 cubic yards Construction for Phase Two is slated of contaminated materials will be to start in fall of 2019 and be completremoved, and 10,900 cubic yards of ed in the spring of 2021. clean fill and drainage will be brought Phase Three will include Ball Fields in to the site.

1-4 (the baseball fields in the back People in the community have sugnear IKEA) and the soccer/football gested that materials be barged in and field that is surrounded by the track.

Parks said that for a few reasons that The four baseball fields and the soc- this is not at all practical. cer/football field will all be reconThe first is that there are no approstructed with synthetic turf. The track priately licensed waste transfer locawill be reconstructed with a rubbertions near the site. The Henry Street ized surface.

Basin, which was a location that was Also, part of Phase Three will be the Continued on next page

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April 2019, Page 3

BALLFIELDS STILL CLOSED (continued from page 3)

brought up as a potential site, is privately owned in the land underneath the basin, which makes that location not possible.

In addition, the border deck at Henry Street is shallow, and the bulkhead is falling apart. As part of Phase Two, Parks will reconstruct the bulkhead.

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“We looked into the Department of Sanitation facility at Hamilton Avenue,” Mattes said. “The facility does not permit import of any material. It can only be used to export municipal solid waste, not soil, and the facility itself would need to be altered to import or export soil.”

As a safety precaution, while the site is under construction, a bus stop c at Lorraine and Hicks Street will be moved across the street.

Other setbacks in the pursuit of barging in materials instead of having them come in via trucks is that transport insurance is required and there is a limited number of barge companies that are licensed to transport the materials needed to fix the fields.

“Adjacent to that entrance, there will be a separate area where trucks get washed down on the aggregate area as well and then exit the site once they are appropriately cleaned,” Parks said.

“There is a decontamination area and a stabilized construction entrance.”

An emphasis will be put on making sure that there is a specific entrance for trucks and that everything is cleaned and decontaminated.

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Trucks will be staying in the commercial and industrial districts and will not be allowed to go in the residential roads or districts. After leaving the highway, they will primarily be on Smith Street and Court Street before coming down Bay Street.

Jim Tampakas, who has been a maritime business owner in Red Hook for many years, asked how trucks will come in via Hamilton Avenue. He wanted to know if the they will take a right on Hamilton Ave or come via another direction.

Maher said that he all he could say was that the trucks will follow the commercial route that is already established. He did not know where specifically the trucks will make a left or right.

John McGettrick brought up the issue of whether two developments that will be happening or will potentially be happening near the ball fields that should be taken into consideration.

Adjacent to the ball fields will be a creation of mega warehouses that will be over one million square feet,” McGettrick said. “With the active warehouse you are talking about hundreds of truck trips per day at each facility.”

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April 2019

Local Charter faces restructuring

R

ed Hook’s Summit Academy is in danger of closing or restructuring at the end of this school year.

Every two, three or five years, charter schools submit an application to the City and State departments of education.

Summit was authorized in December 2008. Five years later they were renewed for three more years. The state then came back and gave them two more years, which leads to where the school is right now.

NYC charter schools are evaluated based upon school performance compared to neighboring district public schools. They can’t just be equal to or in range of the schools; they must beat the district in various test scores.

“While our scholars have been improving year over year in middle school and year over year in high school, we still fall short of exceeding or beating the district,” school founder and executive director Natasha Campbell said at an emergency meeting held at the school.

As a result, Summit has two choices.

The first is to close the school. The second choice, and one endorsed by the Board of Education, is to have the school undergo a restructuring process. This would mean new teachers and administration.

The school does not accept this ruling and wants to prove how much the kids are improving and how they benefit from the school.

Principal Cheryl Swift told the parents at the meeting that she believed they are making a difference with the scholars. With the help of the parents and the kids, she believes that they can get the decision reversed and keep Summit as it is today.

“It is our mission to not only educate you child academically but to make your child the best young adult we can possibly make them, so they can go on to college and do the things that they dream of,” Campbell told everyone at the meeting.

She encouraged the parents to be active and protest.

Red Hook Star-Revue

“You have way more power than us,” Swift said. “Your voice and actions can change this decision. It is imperative that you let them know that we support your child academically and how we are making a difference in your child’s life.”

The sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders are constantly improving, and the high school’s graduation rate and the college graduation rate from Summit are higher than those of the city and state.

There are a few benchmarks that charters schools much reach that the Board of Education outlined at the meeting. These compare school performance to the Community School District (CSD). The first element, of which Summit was lacking, was the proficiency rates in English Language Arts (ELA) and math exams in comparison to the CSD. The Board of Ed also looks at the proficiency rates on the ELA and math exams for high-risk students. This includes students who are Englishlanguage learners, students who have disabilities and students who are economically disadvantaged. They look at Regents scores and how they compare with the city average.

In addition, they see if graduation rates meet or exceed the citywide rate, specifically graduation rates for

students with disabilities, Englishlanguage learners and economically disadvantaged students.

The final criteria is investigating the college readiness index. They try to see if the courses that students have taken are rigorous in college preparation.

The Board of Education’s goal is to identify what is being done well and keep it and to try to improve on where the school is struggling.

The school board and Department of Education asked that people email the school board and inform them what they like most about the school.

Many parents spoke out on how kids improve year by year upon entering Summit after struggling academically in their previous school, how their kids have been on the dean’s list, how the basketball teams do well, how students perform well academically, how the teachers really connect with the students, and how the school is a family-like atmosphere.

A school board member spoke about how this is the first time in NYC that a charter school has been offered to be restructured, but it has happened with regular DOE schools. The Board recognized how the students are progressing each year, how Summit was featured on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and how the graduation rate is

IMPORTANT MEETING 4/9

There will be a public hearing at Summit Academy Charter School (27 Huntington Street) authorized by the NYC Department of Education Chancellor on April 9 regarding the future of the school. Summit is part of Community School District 15.

The speaker sign-in will be at 5:00 pm, and the hearing will begin at 5:30 pm.

The school currently serves 350 students in grades 6-12. They are seeking a five-year renewal of the charter that would begin on July 1, 2019.

As part of the application, Summit is seeking an authorization to partner with a support organization to undergo a restructuring of the school.

The restructuring would include replacement of the current board of trustees and educational program for current and incoming students while utilizing the same charter.

The New York City Department of Education is required to hold a public hearing to solicit comment from the community in connection with the charter school renewal and revision process.

The renewal application doesn’t include any changes to the utilization of school district space.

This will be a renewal and revision meeting and will take place in the school auditorium.

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by Nathan Weiser 84-85 percent.

The board member added that the board does not agree 100 percent with what is going on and the process, but looking to the future for the children, they have to ensure the process is followed to stabilize the kids to make certain that the family-like atmosphere that the administration and parents speak of stays together.

This is the timeline on next steps that will be taken: on March 29 a potential new operator of the school will be selected; in early to mid-April there will be a public hearing at Summit; and on May 6 the Board of Regents will have a vote on whether they approve the restructuring of the school and the new school operator.

A pastor who was at the meeting wanted to know if Summit receives as much funding as the rest of the district since it is compared to the overall district as a whole.

Parents repeatedly said that their kids struggled before coming to Summit due to the ineffectiveness of their zoned school but once coming to Summit their kids started to prosper.

There was one student who said she would be a senior next year and had had come from another school that had shut down. She did not want to look for another school to go to for her senior year.

It was also brought up that sixthgraders have come into Summit at a second-grade level, which has caused some of the underperforming in the junior high.

A Board of Ed representative said that the option to restructure was not something they had to do and that an emphasis is put on improving the junior high.

The school will stay open as it has been until the end of the school year, and unless the Board of Ed approves the restructuring, the school will close. The Board did say that they are trying to keep the school community together and if the school does indeed close they will assist in finding a seat for students in a different, higher-performing school.

April 2019, Page 5

Gowanus Dredgers have Canal Vision

A

s conversations about the impending Gowanus upzoning and Superfund cleanup continue, ideas are beginning to form about how the Gowanus Canal’s shorelines can be better utilized in the Waterfront Access Plan. The Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club provided some suggestions during their presentation to CB6’s Economic/Waterfront/ Community Development & Housing Committee on March 18.

want to go to.”

“Our waterfront is unique in the sense that it’s a canal way – not a river way with large esplanades, bike paths and highways,” said Dredgers’ Treasurer Owen Foote, who is also an urban planner and architect.

Most importantly, the Dredgers stressed that mandatory access to and from the water at all City street ends and at any development with 100 or more feet of shoreline should be implemented – via ramps leading into the bulkheads.

To prevent underused amenity space along the shoreline, the Dredgers suggested having cultural and active passageways with, for example, rock climbing walls and mixed-use paths inclusive to slow-paced biking. Additionally, integrated waterfront service facilities (i.e. boathouses, barge docks, floating walkways) and integrated services offering food, marine supplies or boat storage could be in use nearly year-round. “[This] is trying to find a way to prevent the shoreline from just being a long row of glass and brick that rises up vertically from the path,” said Brad Vogel, the Dredgers’ captain. “You want variety. Otherwise it’s going to seem boring … and no one’s going to find this to be a unique place that they

by Erin DeGregorio

Other pitches included have charging stations, rumble strips or bollards on low traffic, dead-end streets to create ‘play streets,’ and ground-floor publicly accessible and useable spaces (similar to Whole Foods’ 2nd floor). Plus, since the neighborhood is known for its creativity and artistic talent, rotating art programs and art installations at street ends, bridges and open spaces should be encouraged.

“It gives people who are using recreational watercrafts the ability to take boats in and out of the canal,” Vogel explained. “But it also doubles as a place where people can be safely taken in and out of the canal.”

The Dredgers also stated that these ideas were not just their own; some overlapped and came from previously brainstorming with locals and other organizations, such the Gowanus Canal Conservancy. Public comments during the March meeting also suggested building more education about the waterfront and establishing collaborations with schools, so students can learn more about the canal and its surrounding environment.

“This is trying to find a way to prevent the shoreline from just being a long row of glass and brick that rises up vertically from the path.”

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April 2019

Gowanus CAG Frustrated as Rezoning Plans Move Forward

by Erin DeGregorio

A

s progress continues toward cleaning up the Gowanus Canal, the controversial Gowanus rezoning plan has become entwined in the discussion.

The Gowanus advisory group, called the CAG, hosted reps from both the Planning and Environmental Protection agencies to answer questions about how their actions will impact the Superfund work.

The Gowanus rezoning will result in skyscrapers invading Gowanus, bringing as many as 20,000 new residents to the relatively small area.

The agency reps were sent questions in advance of the meeting, and made attempts to provide satisfactory answers to the CAG members, many of them distrustful of the city because of its past attempts to thwart the Superfund process.

Frustration and concern could be heard in CAG members’ follow-up questions directed toward the agencies throughout the night.

“Why wouldn’t the city go ahead and finish the tank to bring some real CSO [combined sewer overflow] relief before any rezoning?” asked member Katia Kelly, who kicked off the Q&A session. “Why not build a tunnel first and see what this area can hold?”

DEP Deputy Commissioner Angela Licata responded that the two CSO retention tanks wouldn’t do anything for additional sewer capacity when rezoning takes place; their purpose is to further reduce the CSOs into the canal.

DCP Project Manager Jonathan Keller jumped into the conversation, reminding attendees that this is a public process.

“There still needs to be a disclosure document that says this is what the trade-offs will be; this is what we would need to do to accommodate either sewers or CSOs and share that with the entire community – versus saying let’s build a tank and then let’s do five years

of community outreach to come up with a proposed zoning,” he said.

Gowanus Canal Conservancy’s Andrea Parker then asked what the city would do to address the population increase, inquiring if there’d be plans for further tunnel expansion or more capital improvements. DEP responded that they can’t plan for expansion yet and that it’s premature to talk about what additional investments need to be made prior to DCP’s scoping meeting.

Other raised concerns were the floating raw sewage that’s still in the canal to date, and how incoming residents along the canal might be living next to that fetid pollution after rezoning takes place.

In the matter of retention tanks versus retention tunnel, which has been the latest monkey wrench thrown into the mix by the city, the EPA holds the final word. They told us the following: “EPA staff is working to provide the EPA Regional Administrator with critical analysis of pros and cons of each approach, recognizing that the tunnel system could go beyond mitigation of the Gowanus to address broader concerns with stormwater runoff and other CSO concerns. The city maintains that the tunnel system gives greater flexibility in managing stormwater, and the Regional Administrator wants to be sure EPA is conducting a full assessment of the accuracy of that assertion before it calls for any change in plans to address CSOs in the Gowanus.”

A day after the CAG meeting, EPA Senior Project Manager Christos sent an email to group members, saying the rezoning could affect tank scalability.

“If New York City anticipates increased CSO loads, as a result of planned rezoning in the areas around the Canal that will be serviced by the tanks, that will result in re-contamination of the canal, and if it provides timely and substantiated information, the design of the tanks can be easily modified,

Jonathan Keller of City Planning continues his question and non-answering of rezoning questions at a CB 6 meeting two days after facing the CAG . In the background is Land Use & Landmarks Co-Chair Mark Shames.(photo by George Fiala)

by increasing tank depth, to increase their size and their total capacity to a volume equal to the volume of the tunnel (16 million gallons) that the City has proposed to EPA,” he wrote.

environmental review – to be able to identify and assess what needs the community has to accommodate growth, particularly the growth envisioned by rezoning,” Keller said.

Mark your calendars

Community Board 6’s Environmental Committee will meet on April 15 to discuss the upcoming scoping meeting with DCP

DEP’s obligated to submit the complete design of the head of canal tank

by April for EPA to review.

DCP announced that the Gowanus Rezoning Scoping Meeting will be held on April 25 at 4 pm in M.S. 51’s auditorium (350 5th Ave.).

The public is encouraged to attend and provide comment at that time.

“An important part of the process is

The next CAG meeting is April 23, 6:30 pm, at Mary Star of the Sea (41 1st St.).

The CAG may hold a Superfund Townhall Meeting, tentatively set for May 29. Time and location yet to be determined.

TM

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Red Hook Star-Revue

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April 2019, Page 7

Urban Recovery - Red Hook’s Quiet New Neighbor by Erin DeGregorio

U

rban Recovery (UR), which opened at 411 Van Brunt St. in January, is the only private residential treatment facility in New York City. The five-level building houses 36 inpatient beds (including six detox-specific), and provides private inpatient and residential treatment for a variety of conditions, with a primary emphasis on substance use disorders.

We walked down the block to find out what exactly is going on in their brand-new building.

“In a world that’s become defined by division, we’ve created a community here in Brooklyn that’s based on the healing power of human connection,” said Dr. Paul Hokemeyer, Senior Clinical Fellow at UR, in a statement. “Yes, we have effective clinical tools, but the system in which these tools are delivered to the human beings and families who trust us with their challenges are different from the systems found in other, larger, more remotely located facilities. Our delivery system is intimate and nimble. It provides a physical and emotional frame within which our clients can tap into their power to engage in not only reparative and curative outcomes, but to optimize their functioning in the world.”

Chief Clinical Officer Bruce Singer, Psy.D., has extensive training and work experience in many areas of mental health, including chronic pain, chemical dependence and addiction. He said he was asked by Denise Bertin-Epp, UR’s CEO, about a year ago to join her in helping to create the facility. The two had previously worked together at Crossroads Centre in Antigua, a substance-abuse rehab center for drug and alcohol addiction that was founded by musician Eric Clapton 21 years ago. “[UR] was built and designed to be a five-story treatment center with the idea that … we could move away from this concept of the bubble of treatment where people go to the beaches of California, to islands like Antigua or to the desert – that we can work with people in their backyard,” Singer told us.

Since every case is different, UR does a series of assessments for those who walk through their doors and provides a tailored treatment plan that’d be most beneficial to them. Each day’s scheduled yet flexible and has individual and group sessions for clients to process their thoughts and feelings around recovery. Singer, who handles scheduling, also explained that no two days in treatment are alike; for example, there might be a focus on physical

This is how a room looks in the upscale detox facility that was just built in Red Hook.

health one day and a focus on mental and spiritual health the next.

Singer said they’d like people to stay between 35 and 90 days for their residential program. Since opening in January, they’ve had successful discharges and also some clients who’ve stayed with them almost the entire time.

Amenities UR’s licensed by the NYS Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services for medically supervised inpatient withdrawal and stabilization services and is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities for inpatient rehabilitation services. Singer explained that, as a result, there are two separate programs within the building to help treat clients.

Their primary therapists, who are licensed master clinicians and clinical social workers, have no more than five clients each. UR has 24-hour nursing, a full-time staff (including psychiatrists, counselors and wellness professionals in spirituality, arts and fitness), and contracts with outside clinicians to come in – like yoga and Pilates instructors, and biofeedback and neurofeedback therapists. Onsite there’s an in-house chef, fitness room, music studio, art room and private

rooftop deck. The facility also works with the city’s offered resources and integrates neighborhood-based exposure therapy as a foundation for lifechanging care.

“We’re doing our best to blend into the neighborhood and give [our clients] experiential activities that take them out into Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the city as part of their treatment,” Singer said. “So far that’s been very successful.”

Collaboration A film company joined forces with the rehab facility to introduce a video component to their counseling process. The studio is equipped with three hanging cycloramas (black, white and green), professional lighting, and audio and camera equipment setup.

This studio, which was a part of the original design concept, is used for clients who’d like to do video journaling during their time at the facility. It gives them the opportunity to speak freely, and is recorded onto an SD card that only they have access to.

“Journaling like this could be a powerful tool to help them hear their own language and voice around their experience,” Singer said. “How that language changes over time is very powerful for people.”

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April 2019

BQX Courts Small Business Owners

by Brett Yates

F

riends of the BQX, an advocacy group backed by developers Two Trees Management and the Durst Organization, continues to push for the $2.73-billion Brooklyn-Queens Connector light rail project favored by Mayor de Blasio and local real estate interests. Most recently, the Friends held an event for small business owners at the Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg on March 5.

Called “BQX Conversations: Real Impacts on Local Business,” the forum brought together entrepreneurs from across the country to testify as to how streetcars have benefited their cities – and how the BQX might benefit commercial enterprises in Brooklyn and Queens.

Inside the brewery, attendees mingled among a well-catered buffet, an open bar with 18 taps, and freestanding posters showcasing the triumphs of light rail systems in places like Toronto and Los Angeles. Tablecloths displayed the proposed route for the BQX, and rapturous quotations about “looking toward the future by investing in the streetcar” emblazoned specially made coasters.

To rent out the Brooklyn Brewery on a Tuesday evening, pricing starts at $4,300, though co-founder Steve Hindy, a vocal BQX supporter, may have offered a discount in this case. Despite all the expense put forth, however, rumblings in the crowd suggested that Amazon’s withdrawal from Long Island City may have already doomed the BQX. In November, the promise of HQ2 had reinvigorated de Blasio’s pro-streetcar campaign, which highlighted the need for outer-borough transit options to keep pace with new waterfront investment.

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Since then, however, City Hall has seen the danger of imposing largescale, unwanted development within neighborhoods already perceived to be at risk of gentrification. In February, de Blasio nevertheless went ahead and commissioned a $7.25-million Environmental Impact Study for the streetcar, but much of the wind still appears to have left the BQX’s sails, with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Gothamist, The Real Deal, and Crain’s all having issued pessimistic forecasts in recent months.

Congressman a no-show

Although the mailed invitation for “BQX Conversations” had promised a visit from Oregon congressman Earl Blumenauer, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams ultimately stepped in as moderator instead.

Queens Borough President Melinda Katz also made an appearance, and Senator Chuck Schumer’s daughter Jessica Schumer, executive director of Friends of the BQX, subsequently introduced a panel of four out-oftowners whom the group had flown into New York and wined and dined in exchange for their light rail wisdom.

Aaron Barthel is a chocolatier in Seattle, Washington. Isabel Chanslor is a vice president at the Neighborhood Development Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Chris Goode owns a chain of juice bars in Kansas City, Missouri, and Rick Gustafson formerly served as the executive director of Portland Streetcar, Inc., in Oregon. They all like streetcars a lot.

“The 21st century deserves a 21st-century transportation system,” Adams began. But some serious concerns had to be addressed first. His opening question for the panel asked about the challenges faced by businesses

along future streetcar routes during construction, when heavy machinery can scare away customers.

“In all reality, it is a big impact,” said Barthel, whose chocolate shop survived on wholesale profits during the jackhammer-induced retail drought.

Still, he encouraged shopkeepers to make the most of an unappealing opportunity. “Find a way to beautify the construction site. Can you take barriers and make them into an art project? Or hang lights. Make it so it’s an arcade at night.”

Chanslor explained that her nonprofit had provided loans, information, and marketing assistance to sustain storeowners in St. Paul during the fouryear slowdown before the opening of the Metro Green Line. Only four businesses within her University Avenue Business Preparation Collaborative shuttered.

Goode acknowledged that he had leased his juice bar’s space partway through the construction timeline of the KC Connector, stashing the property in anticipation of increased customer traffic in the area after completion. Gustafson claimed that, by working with the city to resolve logistical issues, business owners can reduce the length of the construction period affecting them – as did Michael Powell, the founder of Powell’s Books, who helped trim a planned six-month work period outside his bookstore to six weeks. “Get involved,” Gustafson instructed.

and 2016 constructed a free light rail line as a novelty to renew public interest in its stagnant downtown, rents have remained “reasonable,” according to Goode.

Chanslor noted that some businesses in St. Paul had seen significant rent hikes in the wake of the light rail but that, for many businesses, revenue had risen 40 to 60 percent. No one directly addressed what would happen to residential tenants who might see a similar rent increase without an offsetting boost in income.

“We are worried about gentrification,” Chanslor insisted. “It takes a community working together to truly prevent these things from happening.” Still, as she later put it, “progress is progress.

Growth is growth.”

In the end, all four guests agreed that the streetcars in their respective cities had been successes. And in the words of Gustafson, the BQX “has success written all over it.”

Adams also brought up the issue of displacement, which Barthel interpreted literally, stating that displacement had been a nonissue in Seattle because the streetcar ran along existing roads (thus not requiring the demolition of any habitable structures).

In Kansas City, which between 2014

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April 2019, Page 9

HIV Infections on the Rise in Brooklyn

by Brett Yates

I

n February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that progress has stalled in the effort to end the United States’ HIV epidemic: after five years of substantially declining rates of HIV infection, the number of annual infections has stabilized.

Three months earlier, The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene released a study showing a similar trend locally. The data, which tracked HIV diagnoses between 2013 and 2017, showed a significantly smaller decrease between 2016 and 2017 than in prior years.

In Brooklyn, the number of HIV diagnoses actually went up in 2017, from 576 to 640. No other borough saw an increase. The study also exposed the vast discrepancy in HIV rates between rich and poor New Yorkers. In 2017, areas with very high poverty saw 33.8 new HIV diagnoses for every 100,000

residents; in areas with low poverty, the figure was 9.5. Once infected, poor people, as well as black people, are more than twice as likely to die from AIDS than others living with the disease.

“This illness is impacting people of color more than other populations – in particular, black and Hispanic men who have sex with men,” commented Dr. Isaac Dapkins, the Chief Medical Officer of the Family Health Centers of NYU Langone, which has clinics in Park Slope and Sunset Park, among other locations. “We’re seeing increases in that population, and trans women as well.”

Dapkins advocates for pre-exposure prophylaxis – better known as PrEP, the antiviral drug prescribed under the brand name Truvada to HIVnegative adults who have a higherthan-average risk of contracting HIV through sexual contact or injection

drug use.

“The message about this as an option really hasn’t made its way out into the community,” Dapkins lamented. “A lot of people may be suspicious of taking medicines that are associated with HIV before they are HIV-positive and may not necessarily understand how high their risk is. It’s an incredibly effective way to decrease your risk.”

According to Dapkins, NYU Langone’s Family Health Centers use “peer navigators” to “get the word out” about options for patients. Dapkins described a peer navigator as “someone who’s from the community, who speaks the language, who understands the culture of the folks we’re trying to target, and they’ll be working on our staff and spending time in the community, going to events, going to parties, being present where people are in their everyday life and communicating in that setting.”

Dapkins acknowledged that PrEP “is a medicine that costs a lot of money if you’re going to buy it yourself, so there are programs that are available to help people get access” to the medication. Medicaid “is a great coverage for PrEP,” but at the Family Centers, uninsured and underinsured patients can apply for PrEP-AP, a New York State Department of Health program that provides financial assistance for prophylactic care.

The Family Health Centers also see patients who’ve contracted HIV or suffer from AIDS already. Dapkins noted that HIV-positive people see increased risks of certain cancers and cardiovascular disease. “The most important single thing that anybody can do is to know their status,” Dapkins affirmed. “Getting that particular test can be done pretty much anywhere.”

Bekka teaches workshop, by Nathan Weiser

K

hary Bekka led a multi-day civic engagement workshop for Brooklyn youth at the Red Hook Community Justice Center.

Locl high schoolers read from information that was presented, gave their ideas and got to hear from the knowledge that Bekka had.

Bekka started by asking what they got out of the first day of the workshop and what they thought was most insightful.

One Youth Court member said that “I learned how to control the system rather than be controlled by the system” and another said that “I learned how to be a helpful part of society.”

A five-minute video gave more information on how to be civic engaged in the community. A conversation about civic engagement encircled the room.

People discussed what it meant to be civically engaged, and how much each of them were, and how much they might be in the future Some listed involvement in Youth Court and some listed volunteering or other activities that they do, and some said they are not currently civically in-

Page 10 Red Hook Star-Revue

volved in their community but would like to be.

Bekka talked about volunteer work to the kids and told them how important it is to a community’s wellbeing.

“It is not always about money,” Bekka said. “I am volunteering now. Most of the volunteer work is done through the spirit and it helps.”

The youth were told that being on a football team or starting a block party can lead to being civically engaged and being involved in the community can help academically as well. It was also brought up that civic engagement can lead to learning from others in the community.

Bekka talked about politicians and how important it is to vote. He referenced local representatives can have more of an impact than the president on people’s lives.

“Our councilman, our assemblyman, our senators, our public advocates, they have more impact on our lives than the president,” Bekka said. “The president has his impact but the quality of lives in our community is basically controlled by the local officials. It is

about people participating in their society and feeling that they matter to others.” with what Pacheco works on with the Joshua Pacheco, who is the Youth & young people. Bekka developed the Community Programs Associate at the curriculum and the two Justice Center Justice Center and oversees the pro- staff members helped him in facilitatgram, preaches the benefits of being ing the program. civically engaged during their twice a week meetings. Some of the benefits were fulfillment and preparation for life This workshop came about through two different meetings that Bekka had at the Justice Center and some follow up work on putting together the plan for the workshop.

Pacheco originally met Bekka at the Justice Center when he was in the building meeting with Coleta Walker, who runs the peacemaking program at the Justice Center. The first time Pacheco met with Bekka, he explained to him that part of what he does is get young people who come to the Justice Center involved in their communities.

After this initial meeting, Bekka met with Walker and Pacheco and told them that he wanted to do a workshop on civic engagement, which meshes

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Youth Court members are recruited through the Justice Center’s connections with local schools and relationships that they have throughout Brooklyn. They receive applications in September followed by an interview process where 20-25 students are in the program for six months.

Pacheco and staff members at the Justice Center, which includes lawyers and social workers, train the members to play roles in the court room such as judge, bailiff, juror, youth advocate and community advocate.

Pacheco read from a statement from the packet that was provided that said that a small group of people hold a huge amount of power and they hold onto this by actively oppressing the majority of people. A student agreed with this since when he considered

Continued on next page April 2019

Gowanus Landmarks Group Rallies Against Destruction

by Brett Yates The Gowanus Landmarking Coalition wants to thwart the planned demolition of the S.W. Bowne Grain Storehouse, a circa-1886 brick industrial structure at 595 Smith Street. On the morning of March 13, the preservationists held a rally on the Hamilton Avenue Bridge over the Gowanus Canal.

Last year, a fire damaged the Storehouse, which the Chetrit Group, a real estate developer, had bought in 2007.

Chetrit also purchased three more parcels along the Gowanus Canal at the foot of Smith Street, demolishing warehouses on the lots. The Society of Industrial Archaeology, a D.C.based nonprofit, formally requested landmark status for the Storehouse in 2009, and the Gowanus Landmarking Coalition has since taken up the cause with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC).

On March 5, 2019, the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) received two complaints about demolition work despite a Stop Work Order (SWO) at 595 Smith Street. DOB inspectors confirmed the violation the same day and also cited the contractor for missing guardrails, excessive debris, and expired disability insurance.

Four days later, the DOB received another complaint about the erection of demolition scaffolding and visited the location again. The crew had continued to ignore the SWO and received an additional fine for working on a Saturday without a DOB After Hours Variance. When the DOB followed up on March 11 to ensure compliance with the SWO, work had stopped, but the inspector noticed a large hole in the construction fence and handed out a ticket for failure to properly safeguard the site.

Wouldn’t allow demolition At the time of the fire, councilman Carlos Menchaca deemed the incident “highly suspicious” and declared that he would “not allow demolition by neglect or fire to prompt zoning changes” in Red Hook’s Industrial Business Zone. The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) subsequently concluded that the fire was intentional, but the investigation remains ongoing.

Menchaca attended the rally on March 13, relaying news that Chetrit’s disregard of DOB instructions had landed the developer in potential legal trouble. “The Department of Buildings says that the borough attorney is commencing a process to issue a criminal court summons based on repeated violations,” Menchaca announced. “We are still trying to get clarity on what the enforcement timeline looks like. Until then, we must not relent until demolition stops and the

Red Hook Star-Revue

preservation of this gorgeous, beautiful building commences.”

Menchaca disclosed that, during his first term in the City Council, Chetrit had come to him with a plan to rezone 595 Smith Street for residential towers. He recalled his response: “‘This is a manufacturing district. Give me another plan.’ They came back with towers of housing with the first two floors of manufacturing. That is not what we want on this site.”

The councilman bemoaned “the corporate greed of developers that can’t wait to see me gone – I’ll be done in three years – to change the zoning here. And that’s why we have to be vigilant.”

Brad Vogel of the Gowanus Landmarking Coalition spoke of his group’s willingness to undertake “a multipronged effort to keep this building standing. First and foremost, we must get the FDNY to complete the investigation.” According to Vogel, the LPC has stated that it won’t consider landmarking the Storehouse until the fire investigation has concluded.

The FDNY’s ongoing work did not prevent the Department of Buildings from issuing a full demolition permit for 595 Smith Street earlier this winter. Chetrit had filed an application for demolition in September, 2017, but did not submit all the required materials until February, 2019, at which point the DOB immediately approved the request.

A statutory process determines DOB approvals. “If a property owner wishes to demolish their non-landmarked building in New York City,” said spokesperson Andrew Rudansky, “they must hire an architect or an engineer to draw up plans for the demolition” and “must then file an application with the Department of Buildings which includes these plans. If the application is complete, and found to be in total compliance with all of the applicable provisions in the NYC Zoning Resolution and NYC Construction Codes, they will get DOB approval for the project.”

The SWO at 595 Smith Street owes to an earlier, unpermitted demolition attempt from 2018. The DOB issued the order one week after last year’s fire at the Storehouse.

Although Chetrit has now resolved the substance of the complaint by securing the correct permit for demolition, the SWO remains in effect because the developer hasn’t remedied the violation on paper. “The issue is that they never requested the Stop Work Order to be removed, and as such DOB has not yet rescinded the order,” Rudansky explained.

The Gowanus Landmarking Coalition’s rally gathered a small crowd of

hopeful history buffs and promoters of manufacturing and maritime industry in Red Hook. These included Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council; author Joseph Alexiou, whose history Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal was published by NYU Press in 2015; and Carolina Salguero, the founder of PortSide New York.

“One of the great marvels of Brooklyn, of New York City, is the adaptive reuse of the historic properties of the waterfront,” Bankoff asserted. “They’re being reused for shopping; they’re being reused for light industry. The Fairway in Red Hook is one example of a warehouse building being reused for the continued distribution of consumer goods.”

Alexiou praised Menchaca for showing up to the event. “I think the next step, to me, is to keep hitting up all the local politicians,” he said.

Salguero urged attention to the adjacent problem of the crumbled bulkheads on the Gowanus Canal’s Smith Street shoreline. She blamed regulations by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation that prevent the reconstruction of waterfront infrastructure like piers and bulkheads once decay has claimed 50 percent or more of it.

The graffiti-covered Storehouse has decayed, too, but Vogel believes it could be rehabilitated. The building’s claim to historical significance rests in part on a landmark New York State labor law case prompted by an injury on the premises.

In 1916, S.W. Bowne, the president and primary shareholder of the S.W. Bowne Company, lost a leg to the machinery at the facility while helping his workers unload lumber. He successfully sued for workman’s compensation, claiming that his role as president made him an employee of his own enterprise (which manufactured cattle foods). His board of di-

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rectors sued in turn, arguing that because Bowne owned the company, he was not operating on the orders of the corporation, as an employee would be, when he incurred injury. The New York Court of Appeals disagreed, upholding the original ruling.

Workshop (continued from page 10)

the people in power, he thought that there was a reason that they had more power than others.

Bekka thought that an example of a small group of people having control is the example of NYCHA as he thinks most of policy is made by people on the outskirts.

“The population of NYCHA is bigger than the people on the outskirts,” Bekka said. “When it comes to public policy, people on the outskirts control because they vote. If you have people in NYCHA who say we are going to organize then they have more control.”

Bekka was recently released from prison after serving 26 years for his involvement in the death of PS 15 principal Patrick Daley.

The Youth Court meets every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 to 6:30 pm, at the Red Hook Justice Center, 88 Visitation Place.

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@redhookstarrevue April 2019, Page 11

“Felix Ortiz explained that extreme weather and pollution in Brooklyn partially inspired his interest in the Green New Deal, citing the impact of the Hurricane Sandy in Red Hook and the breathing problems faced by schoolchildren in the vicinity of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.”

Ortiz Introduces Green New Deal Legislation

by Brett Yates

T

he term “Green New Deal” typically brings to mind progressive politicians on the national stage, like U.S. Representative Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders. But thanks to Red Hook’s assemblyman, Assistant Speaker Félix Ortiz of the 52nd District, New York State has a chance to craft its own climate change plan in the same vein.

which will help the state become “greenhouse gas emissions neutral by 2030.” “Neutral” means that, while some emissions of greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide) may still occur after 2030, the quantities will be small enough to be offset by newly planted trees or, if the field of geoengineering progresses, perhaps by newly invented carbon-eating nanobots.

In February, Ortiz introduced Assembly Bill 5334, which would form a task force to design a Green New Deal for New York. Senator James Sanders of Queens introduced the same bill in the upper house.

The bill also promises job training and a living wage for anyone who wants to participate in the green transformation of New York. It ensures “a ‘just transition’ for all workers, low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities, rural and urban communities and the frontline communities most affected by climate change,” with “equitably distributed” investments for “deindustrialized or other marginalized” areas.

Ortiz’s bill appeared one day after Ocasio-Cortez brought House Resolution 109 (“Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal”) to Congress, partnering with Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. The Green New Deal is a proposed economic stimulus and job-creation program that seeks to mobilize an ambitious public response to the existential threat posed by climate change. Its name comes from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the package of public works projects, social programs, and financial regulations that helped lift America out of the Great Depression.

Ortiz doesn’t see much hope for a federal Green New Deal under President Donald Trump, whom the assemblyman criticized for climate denial. “I wish the president would call a national emergency to fund the transition to renewable energy, but that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon, so I believe that New York needs to step up and become a leader in environmental caretaking and an example in how government can protect the environment.”

Assembly Bill 5334 doesn’t specify exactly what a Green New Deal in New York would look like or how it would be funded, although it does set certain goals, such as “meeting 100 percent of New York state power demand through clean renewable sources,”

Page 12 Red Hook Star-Revue

The main purpose of the bill, however, is to appoint a 19-member commission to draft more detailed legislation for the Green New Deal. Their deadline would be January 1, 2020. The “task force” would include, among others, the president of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the chair of the New York Public Service Commission, and the commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (or their designees).

Appointments by the governor, by the Temporary President of the State Senate, and by the Speaker of the Assembly would fill several more seats.

Lifelong interest Ortiz, who introduced the Fossil Fuel Divestment Act in 2015, explained that extreme weather and pollution in Brooklyn partially inspired his interest in the Green New Deal, citing the impact of the Hurricane Sandy in Red Hook and the breathing problems faced by schoolchildren in the vicinity of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

“I have been working on a lot of legislation addressing our environment, starting from fracking to fossil fuels to renewable energy to jobs that should

be created to address the importance of solar panels and wind energy,” he said.

“I thought it was about time we moved forward to think about something more comprehensive. Senator [James] Sanders and I happened to be on the same page, and once I put all this together, I reached out to him, and he was willing to carry the bill in the senate.”

Ortiz believes that the New Green Deal task force will “come out with some very strong recommendations” in favor of electric vehicles, energy-efficient buildings, and improved infrastructure. “We have sewers that need to be updated,” he pointed out.

Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Works Progress Administration hired government workers to build publicly owned roads, bridges, parks, schools, post offices, and libraries. More recently, President Obama’s Recovery Act of 2009 used corporate and individual tax credits to spur growth in the private sector. Despite its name, the Green New Deal has not yet clearly determined (in its state or federal iteration) whether government will play a direct or indirect role in the creation of jobs or the construction of hydroelectric dams and solar farms. Ortiz’s task force will include at least one “representative from the private sector.”

Partnership Ortiz hopes to “engage every sector that can bring a positive contribution, whether it’s the private sector, whether it’s the unions, whether it’s the local leaders and nonprofit organizations on the ground that have worked on this and fought for changes in our environment. I see this as a partnership and a collaboration.”

Private investors own most of New York’s electric utilities, which in many cases use power sourced from petroleum-based fuel oil or methane. Under the Green New Deal, they would switch to renewables.

“We’re working with them, and they’re doing their own transformation little by little. I met with some

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of them last week, and some of them said to me, ‘We’re moving in that direction, but we need time,’” Ortiz recounted. “Well, how much time do you need? That’s the magic question.”

The private utilities “will be part of the conversation, and we will develop timeframes to ensure that we don’t leave them out. They already know that this is happening.”

At the time of his interview with the Star-Revue, Ortiz was working on the state’s 2019-2020 budget, due April 1.

“We have put a lot of stuff in the budget to address the local issues, as a result of Sandy, to make sure we have better resiliency in our communities,” he noted. He sees this as a positive sign for the Green New Deal, which would expand upon these measures.

He also expressed confidence in Governor Andrew Cuomo. “The governor has been calling for more renewables, more solar panels, moving forward to ensure that we will be able to have a better environment,” he observed.

As recently as January, Cuomo had supported a plan (less dramatic than the Green New Deal, though he invoked the same term) to source 70 percent of New York’s electricity from renewables by 2030. Meanwhile, a number of legislators have thrown their support behind the New York State Climate and Community Protection Act (CCPA), which would reduce that figure to 50 percent. The CCPA has already passed the Assembly three times and awaits the Senate’s approval.

Still, Ortiz has faith in the Green New Deal bill, which the Assembly referred to its Committee on Environmental Conservation on February 8. Jo Anne Simon, who represents Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill in the Assembly, has signed on as a cosponsor. “We’re going to continue to push this legislation,” asserted Ortiz, who expects to see it passed before the end of the legislative session on June 20.

April 2019

NYU Langone makes rehab a challenge

by Kelsey Liebenson-Morse

O

n a Friday afternoon at Rusk Rehabilitation Brooklyn at Sunset Park Family Health Center, 96-year-old Mable Henry determinedly steps up and down a set of stairs, working to relearn balance and coordination. The Rusk Rehabilitation center, located at 150 55th Street in Brooklyn, is part of NYU Langone Health, and home to a clinic that’s exploring new treatment options through the use of video games.

The rehab room is filled with familiar equipment like treadmills and weights, but also houses joysticks and computer monitors – the hope being that patients can begin to heal through games that are fun and interactive and might appeal to a younger, more tech-oriented audience. The “gamification” of rehab may likely be the new frontier in recovery, as NYU Langone has noticed strokes are steadily affecting younger and younger people. Dr. Aaron Lord, chief of neurology at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn, says, “Multiple studies in the U.S. and in Europe have shown alarming increases in ischemic stroke in young adults aged 20 to 45 over the last two decades.” However, accord-

“The goal is for Mable is to get back to where she was before, using her cane out in the community.” But it’s obvious Henry has the situation under control. Although moving slowly, she walks steadily and smiles often.

Henry, who was born in a small town in North Carolina, has lived in Crown Heights since 1976. She first moved to Harlem in 1945. Her early memories of the neighborhood were seeing performers at the Apollo. Henry enjoyed going to the movies and loved the buzz of Manhattan after growing up in the South. She was married for over 50 years, taught fourth grade before becoming a mother, and worked in the credit department at B. Altman for most of her adult life. Henry is most proud of the years she spent raising her daughter, Gwendolyn, saying, “She never gave me any trouble.” Behind her mother, Gwendolyn winks. The two women have a Mother’s Day tradition of traveling together with other family, and have visited Europe multiple times together. Henry’s therapist, Maxwell Cutty, gently pushes Mable, one hand ready to prevent a fall, testing her reflexes. When Mable is finished, Cutty guides her towards her wheelchair only to discover someone else has co-opted the chair. “We’ll walk,” Cutty says. Henry looks nonplussed.

Back in her room, speech-language pathologist Jessica Alves meets Henry, announcing, “I’m back for you, Ms. Mable!” Although Henry admits to being tired out, Gwendolyn urges her mother, “Just get it over with! You can rest later.” Yesterday Henry attended a communication group where she met with other patients and speech therapists to work together to practice

Mable Henry is getting her balance back

ing to Dr. Lord, the cause is unclear. “A small part of it is likely due to greater public awareness of stroke symptoms and improvements in our ability to diagnose stroke using MRI. But most of the increase is likely due to poorer health we see in many young adults, including increasing rates of obesity, diabetes, and high cholesterol as well as the increased use of illicit drugs nationwide,” reports Dr. Lord. Whatever the case might be, on this particular spring afternoon, Henry isn’t using any of the new technology. She has her eyes set on a set of stairs she determinedly keeps stepping up and down on, regaining her strength.

Only five days ago Henry experienced a left-sided stroke. She is currently under the watchful eye of a young and unfailingly encouraging therapist. At another table, a tiny Russian woman sits with a tattooed therapist, working on a puzzle, her grandson translating. Henry’s daughter Gwendolyn sits nearby. Although calm and composed, Gwendolyn never takes her eyes off her mother. As Branden Dennis, senior physical therapist and program specialist of neurology at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn, says,

Red Hook Star-Revue

Some of the new rehab machines look and feel like arcade games word retrieval, and she’ll stay at Rusk for another few days before she’s able to return to her home.

Jeffrey S. Fine, MD, chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation service at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn, says, “Over 50 percent of our admissions each year is stroke. We treat 300 to 400 patients per year and the whole team becomes aware how to manage. We have a lot of sophisticated equipment in our gym, emphasizing the gamification of therapy. Key to anyone’s recovery is repetition. The question is how do we drive the brain to change in the setting of a new deficit.” As seen with Henry stepping up and down a set of stairs, the focus of rehabilitation for stroke victims is based in consistency

and regaining skills that have been lost; the retrieval of information that has been erased by the stroke. For Henry, these skills are balance and speech, and for some, using a video game format might allow a quicker recovery.

When asked about her secret to longevity, Henry only shrugs but Gwendolyn pipes in, “She never smoke or drank.” Henry attends church at First Baptist and has been attending services her whole life. When she goes home, Henry is looking forward to returning to her garden in North Carolina where she plants flowers and tomato plants.

Gwendolyn assures her mother they’ll get down in time for Henry to plant her seeds.

Voting for Participatory Budgeting Started March 30

by Brett Yates

Voting for Cycle 8 of Participatory Budgeting New York City (PBNYC) will take place from Saturday, March 30, to Sunday, April 7.

PBNYC is a program that encourages City Council Members set aside at least $1 million from their discretionary budgets to be spent on capital projects selected by residents of their districts through direct democracy. As of 2018-2019, 31 of New York City’s 51 council districts take part. In District 38, councilman Carlos Menchaca has allocated $2 million to PBNYC this year.

Everyone who lives in the district and is at least 11 years old can vote, irrespective of immigration status. In District 38, there are 17 voting sites: seven

in Red Hook and 10 in Sunset Park.

The polling stations in Red Hook are the Miccio Center, P.S. 15, P.S. 676, the Red Hook Initiative, the Red Hook Public Library, the Red Hook Neighborhood Senior Center, and the Red Hook Recreation Center.

Most sites will offer ballots during regular business hours throughout the voting period.

Voting will also take place online at pbnyc.org/vote.

For PBNYC, residents and local institutions like schools and nonprofits submit ideas in the fall, which Budget Delegates fashion into more detailed project proposals over the winter.

District 38’s ballot features 11 possible projects, including five in Red Hook.

www.star-revue.com

P.S. 15, which hopes to update its schoolyard’s artificial turf for $750,000 and install an “electronic box with outlets” in the playground for $75,000, accounts for two of the proposals. P.S. 676 and Summit Academy are looking for an upgraded public-address system ($650,000) and a dance studio ($400,000). The Red Hook Initiative wants a permanent water hookup for the Red Hook Community Farm ($300,000).

The full list of projects can be found at council.nyc.gov/ carlos-menchaca/pb/8. Every district resident is entitled one ballot. Each ballot allows for five votes, but no more than one vote can be spent on each project.

April 2019, Page 13

 ART, CULTURE, BOOKS AND MORE FUN STUFF FROM BROOKLYN AND BEYOND 

STAR REVUE ARTS 

www.jennybelin.com

 

  INSIDE: GOING ORTHODOX … ON THE QUEER WATERFRONT … JULIUS CEASAR MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE … THE BIG LINGUINI … THE QUESTION AUTHORITY BROOKLYN FOLK FEST … IAN FELICE … THE SADIES … OZARK HIGHBALLERS

Red Hook Star-Revue

www.star-revue.com

April 2019, Page 15

Rathkopf Photography

On the (Queer) Waterfront Eliza Grace Martin

I

t was a night of firsts at the Brooklyn Historical Society. On March 5, nearly 200 city residents gathered in the Great Hall to celebrate the launch of “When Brooklyn was Queer,” a new book by historian and curator Hugh Ryan that traces the untold history of the borough’s LGBTQ+ community – from the publication of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” in 1855, through the shuttering of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in 1966.

But the book wasn’t the only cause for celebration. Visitors also came to toast a new exhibit at the historical society, which Ryan co-curated with the artist Avram Finkelstein. On the “(Queer) Waterfront: The Factories, Freaks, Sailors and Sex Workers of Brooklyn” is the first exhibition of its kind to focus explicitly on the borough’s queer history.

The exhibition documents how LGBTQ+ individuals in Brooklyn clustered around the waterfront.

The building of the Erie Canal in 1820 turned New York City into the most important port in the world, and as a result, Brooklyn boomed.

The industrial work and affordable housing on the Brooklyn waterfront provided queer people with the opportunity to live in community for nearly 150 years. “Queer desires have always

{behind the cover}

JENNY BELIN is a redheaded LA expatriate who grew up with an entourage of truly gorgeous California cats. Her portait of AOC is part of a series of feminists which can be seen on her website. She takes commissions, and specializes in pet portraiture. www.jennybelin.com.

Page 16 Red Hook Star-Revue

existed,” Ryan said, “but in order to find them in the historical record, you need density. You need that kind of life building that enables you to end up in documents like newspaper reports and arrest records.”

The evening kicked off with a conversation between Ryan and the journalist J. Bryan Lowder, which ranged from the book and exhibit to the very nature of queer history itself. “As someone pointed out to me today on Twitter,” Ryan said to the audience, “this actually is a queer historical moment, and so all of us are contributing to the very thing that we’re talking about at the same time.”

“The Brooklyn waterfront provided queer people with the opportunity to live in community for nearly 150 years.”

Many members of the crowd were active participants of Brooklyn’s queer history in their own right. The room bustled with queer filmmakers, writers, Radical Faeries, activists and archivists – friends and collaborators from various chapters of Ryan’s life that had come to witness the culmination of his six-year-long project.

Michael Yarbrough, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was one such collaborator. He met Ryan while organizing a conference for CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. Yarbrough came to show support for Ryan because, as he explained, it’s part and parcel of the artistic culture of the borough. “That’s also the Brooklyn thing, right?” he said. “You go to each other’s celebrations for each other’s creations.”

Yarbrough brought a friend along, Jamie Cruz Velasquez, who had chosen to come to the opening despite the fact that it was also his birthday. “I love queer history,” Cruz Velasquez said. “And at my age, I’m becoming queer history, so what better way to celebrate.”

After Ryan and Lowder’s talk, the crowd filtered out of the hall to tour the exhibition. The line to the Gina Ingoglia Weiner Gallery trailed up three flights of stairs.

artist, entertainer, sex worker, sailor, and factory worker. These were the forms of employment that were most commonly available to members of the LGBTQ+ community. As Ryan explained, queer people often gravitated to work that was eccentric, illegal, or itinerant, because it allowed them a certain amount of freedom of expression – and little oversight. There was also a lot of overlap. “Often times the sailors were sex workers,” Ryan said. “Sometimes the artists were also entertainers, who were seeing sex workers. It starts to knit together.”

The art, artifacts, and ephemera of the exhibit emphasize that interconnectedness. For instance, a 1942 portrait of the poet Naomi Replansky hangs in the “factory workers” section. According to the wall text, Replansky was actually on the factory floor when Scribner called to offer to publish her first book, Ring Song, in 1952. There’s also a black-and-white photograph from the 1920s of the poet Hart Crane’s lover, Emil Opffer, who worked as a merchant marine.

Hart Crane is one of the more recognizable names in the exhibition. In the case of the painter Edward Casey, only a few scant details about his life are known: He moved to Brooklyn after WWI, he was married to a woman, he was a high school teacher, and he was Catholic. But his work tells a different story. Casey painted erotic tableaus of naked men – interracial groups of dock workers and sailors – swimming and lounging on the banks of the East River. Two of his paintings hang in the show.

The most beguiling artifact in the exhibit is also the rarest: a never-before-seen scrapbook by Anne Moses, the first woman hired at the Todd Shipyards in Red Hook during WWII. “She was a prodigious scrap-booker,” Ryan said, and she “kept photos of herself and a group of lesbian women going back at least to the 1920’s.”

In a lucky turn of events, the one-of-a-kind scrapbook wound up in Ryan’s possession, by way of Moses’ nephew, who held onto it for decades after his aunt’s death. For Ryan, it was a gold mine.

“After searching and searching for visual records of the lesbians who worked in the factories in Brooklyn – there’s nothing else like this out there that I’ve ever seen,” Ryan said. “It’s incredible.”

On the (Queer) Waterfront is up until Aug 4.

The exhibit is separated into five segments:

www.star-revue.com

April 2019

FEATURE I

n 2005, Hella Winston published “Unchosen: The Hidden Life of Hasidic Rebels,” (an excellent starting place for the curious) which was the result of her research inside Williamsburg’s notoriously insular Satmar community. Following Winston’s book, a steady number of memoirs appeared, detailing, in intimate narratives, the experience of leaving Orthodoxy behind and transitioning to the secular world.

Deborah Feldman’s 2012 “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots” was a runaway success and marked a rising interest in the genre. The Jewish Book Council now has a specific page: “Ultra-Orthodox Communities and Those Who Leave.” Such memoirs, sometimes referred to as “exfrum,” continue to be published each year.

Written primarily by women, these memoirs have unfortunately developed a melodramatic and predictable cadence, relying on stereo-

Going Orthodox: a survey Shulem Deen

Shulem Deen types of unhappy marriages and unfulfilled sex lives. Such examples are Leah Vincent’s 2014 “Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood” and more recently, novelist Tova Mirvis’ 2017 “The Book of Separation.”

After having read a few of such unhappy stories, one can begin to feel as though one’s read them all: almost every Hasid’s departure from their community begins with a clandestine trip to the library for gentile literature, develops into experimenting with non-kosher foods, and ends with the rejection

Existentialism meets deep intimacy in My Time

T

he writer A.R. Garcia wrote “My Time” based off a single conversation with his mother that never left him. He asked if she regretted decades of marriage to his father.

Her answer was basically no, yet that no came with some qualifications. She didn’t regret the roles of wife or mother, her time with her kids or her many memories. She didn’t regret anything but she did have the sad sensation of not getting that time back. It had become a discreet chunk of reality – my time – and it was passing on without her.

The play he wrote and now directs is based around that phenomenon and sensation that anyone who’s lived long enough will invariably face. “My Time” continues themes of self-worth and gendered miscommunication Garcia developed in “She Hates Coffee” and his 2013 one-man show, “I Love Them All,” which was adapted to the film “Saint Nicholas.” For as long as he can remember, he’s been captured by the burden of silence around female pain, something he credits his father with inspiring.

“At a young age, he told me you’ll never be able to understand women,” Garcia said. “As I grew up, I saw men not understanding the emotions involved, so they turned away. But I came to a point where I thought I don’t understand you, but I can know how you feel and connect that to something similar.”

The idea for “My Time” has been percolating in his head for years, Garcia said, but he was always looking for the right leading lady.

Garcia met Francesca Van Horne, a playwright in her own right with the one-woman show Red Hook Star-Revue

By Kelsey Liebenson-Morse

of modest dress. The wig comes off, and women find themselves wearing pants and staying home from synagogue.

However, a few of these memoirs stand out for their clarity and authenticity. These memoirs are not just appealing within their own niche genre, but they also provide honest portraits of people, Jew or non-Jew, whom we can all identify with: those among us who feel we do not belong.

Best in the game is Shulem Deen’s 2015 “All Who Go Do Not Return.”

“Tales from the Trundle,” on the set of “Saint Nicholas.” In temperament and artistic vision, the two bonded instantly. That Van Horne had previous experience carrying the hundreds of lines for a one-person show encouraged Garcia to write the role around Van Horne.

Although they met on a film set, the two have a real fondness for the theater. For Garcia, it’s the most powerful medium to convey emotional truth.

“That’s the thing about live theater. The rawness of it will expose all of the truths and all of the hidden meanings and the folds of the story that you won’t get in film or TV.” That rawness, especially from a female’s perspective, is what drew Van Horne to “My Time.”

“A.R. has the ability to write from the female perspective,” Van Horne said. “In this nonlinear fashion with many layers. But what really struck me was how he wrote from a female’s perspective. That’s the sign of a great writer.”

Within this material, Van Horne says she’s really challenged. “My Time” revolves around Ana, a recently divorced woman in her late 40s. The play is loosely based around the seven stages of grief and explores how often they overlap in a dynamic stratum. As the duo ramp up for the late-April run, Van Horne is layering on her own experience to add to her relationship with Ana. “I thought it would be helpful to approach it as a Latina immigrant,” Van Horne said.

“Speaking for myself, I’ve rarely been in a relationship where it’s not hard to admit I played a role in its destruction.”

Ana’s reckonings with her own role in the dissolution of her marriage are where her character finally cracks open. But to make that seem authentic, Van Horne has rehearsed lines with a voice recorder, writing them on notecards so the emotion leads her to the next line, not rote memorization. It’s been a challenging but www.star-revue.com

Deen’s memoir meticulously tracks his loss of faith and eventual rejection from the Skver Hasidic community. Deen’s lucid, smart, and precise writing is reason enough pick up a copy. “All Who Go Do Not Return” turns a careful eye on the world outside Deen’s immediate reality while inviting readers an intimate look into a life that begins to feel increasingly small, restrictive and ultimately, false. When Deen sets out for the city on his own, leaving behind a wife and family, one acutely feels his liberation and sorrow––a well-rendered balance of the suffering caused by living two lives.

Another favorite is Pearl Abraham’s 1995 “The Romance Reader,” which, although fiction, reads with the searing honesty of memoir.

Rachel, the narrator, is the oldest daughter in an ultra-orthodox home where her mother reigns with terror and, infrequently, compassion. Rachel’s voice is similar to beloved literary heroines who won’t behave, reminiscent

continued on page 24

Francesca Van Horne in My Time.

rewarding journey of discovery.

“I’ve been living with Ana for a couple of days. She kind of changes every day.”

Van Horne says Ana is far more than a symbol of MeToo or a token PoC. She’s a function of her culture, how it is both repressive and praiseful of women, though too often the former.

“This is about the background of what she lived. She’s proud and religious. She’s had a hard life, but she refuses to see that. She never thought of having time to herself. ” Garcia’s hopes remain high for “My Time.”

The last time a production of his was at the Teatro LATEA was in 2013 when his entry was a winner at The ONE Festival.

“With my mom,” Garcia said, “with people like her, they were always told to get over it.

They had to stand tall and be strong, and not everyone realized you still have to take care of them. I view this play as a way to honor my mother. To say: look at the suffering and how she remained empowered.”

“My Time” runs April 22 to 28 at Teatro LATEA as part of The ONE Festival. Check out https://mytime.eventcombo.com/ for exact dates and times.

April 2019, Page 17

FEATURE V

era Iliatova sometimes accidentally leaves her studio in the same outfits as the women she’s painting. That’s because the draped, familiar trenches and sensible skirts that outfit the women in her work are painted from the mirrored reflection of her own body. Her work reverberates with the warmth of the same lifeforce.

It animates her lush dreamscapes to feel eerily familiar and once inhabited, like slipping into a jacket warm from another’s wear.

Ms. Iliatova immigrated from Russia to the United States at sixteen. Finding home in the neighborhoods of Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, she sees the lack of borders in her childhood memories and her life now reflected in the blended borough of Brooklyn.

She speaks to “experiencing the merge between not quite belonging to the past country and not fully assimilating” as a driving force in her work. Colors seep off the canvas, trickling into a space that is neither home nor

Vera Iliatova

By Erika Veurink

away. Even her brushstrokes, at once certain and lucid, evoke a palpable sense of the longing in leaving.

The women depicted in Ms. Iliatova’s contribution to this year’s BRIC Biennial: Volume III, South Brooklyn Edition, are similarly in flux.

Where these women are moving is not the question. It’s in the way they move–en masse–that the arresting beauty lies. The instability of their environment is counteracted by their certainty in each other.

Ms. Iliatova describes the ground they traverse in the work as “not quite stable,” citing the counterbalancing bond between females in novels and television dramas as inspiration for her work. Removed from distractions, dreamt into a shifting landscape, these women are their own North Stars.

Yi Xin Tong Finds His Inner Animal

G

Yi Xin Tong identifies as an by ravesend-based Brett Yates

artist first and as a fisherman second. But it’s a close second.

Tong, who makes sculptural and video-based installations, has found that his hobby brings him to the outskirts of Brooklyn. In his opinion, Floyd Bennett Field, a former airport that juts into Jamaica Bay near Marine Park, has the best fishing in the city. He mentions that Coney Island has a few nice spots for anglers, too. But his own favorite place is Calvert Vaux Park, which touches Gravesend Bay. “It’s almost run-down; it’s half-maintained. It’s very special, that place,” he says. “I’ve made a lot

From her studio window overlooking the bay, Vera Iliatova paints life as it unfolds in front of her. Working from observation is the only viable explanation for the vital force her work is laced in. Even the verdant floral still lifes that partly veil each piece

of works from materials sourced from there.” He’s also caught “all kinds of things”: striped bass, bluefish, flounder, and porgies.

Tong was raised in Mount Lu, China, within the boundaries of Lushan National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “People had to buy a ticket to enter. I grew up in a kind of utopian landscape.”

For him, Central Park exemplifies the “artificiality” of nature in New York City. “But in the places I go to, on the very periphery of the city, I see a lot of ruins, and nature’s reclamation is very present, so that kind of comforts me in a way.”

Through April 7, Tong has two works on display at the BRIC Biennial at 647 Fulton Street, including a tapestry that represents his latest effort in an ongoing project called Animalistic Punk. The design brings together urban and pastoral motifs

depict flowers in real-time stages of decay. Somewhere between utopia and dystopia, the worlds deftly conjured by Ms. Iliatova are fertile ground for timeless and borderless inquiries.

Where are we going? Or more aptly, who are we going with?

that hint at historical political rebellions in China.

During the Song dynasty, “scholars would retreat from government and be solitary fishermen in nature” as “a way of expressing their dissatisfaction with the political situation in the country.”

Tong’s tapestry started as a digital collage of his own photographs and “research materials” from libraries. A technician helped the artist translate “the digital language into a textile weaving language,” which directed the “actual weaving process” on a “half-automated Jacquard loom.”

His other work, a ceramic and glass sculpture titled “Nose Ring,” mimics the form of a calf weaner, the device fastened to the noses of young cows to prevent them from suckling. In Tong’s eyes, it resembles a human piercing. “It looks very punk.”

continued on page 25

The quietly political portraits of Dale Williams

By Christien Shangraw

I

went to the show specifically to see Williams’ work, but I couldn’t find it. I wandered through every other bit of work in the show as I searched, but Williams’ work seemed nowhere to be found.

(More on that below.) But I did find a show that lives up to its name: “The Impossible Possible.” It was as engaging as any group show I’ve seen in a long time. One of its stated aims is to “look inward, whether reflecting the sphere of the personal or some other alternate reality,” in search of – I’m paraphrasing here: new ways of

Page 18 Red Hook Star-Revue

working and existing outside the current state of social and political affairs without simply reflecting it.

I finally found Williams’ work set apart from the rest, in the hallway at the top of the stairs, directly opposite the entrance, which at first

seemed sort of unfair. But part of the rationale for hanging it there, I later learned, was that there are a fair number of musicians represented, and visitors to the BRIC performance spaces will pass the installation on their way to shows there – an excellent synergy with

www.star-revue.com

the cross-disciplinary ethic intrinsic to Williams’ work. And it turns out that the placement is justified: the long, white hallway wall is an ideal surface on which to display selections from Williams’ series of fortyeight portraits entitled, “Awareness Day Portraits” (acrylic wash and charcoal on paper, each 12” x 9”, 2018): “Celebrating American historical and cultural figures that are meaningful to [Williams] as a citizen and artist.” There are twelve portraits altogether, bookended by additional drawings and words by the artist: Dolores Huerta, Chief Joseph, A. Philip Randolph, Mary Lou Williams, Daniel Berrigan, Sojourner Truth, Albert Pinkham Ryder, SuAnne Big Crow, Lucy Stone, James McCune Smith, Rachel Carson, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Even if he hadn’t said so himself,

continued on page 25 April 2019

REVIEWS

Production photos (c) Gerry Goodstein/Henry Grossman

A lucid take on The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

T

hrough April 28, Theatre for a New Audience presents a clear and forceful production of Shakespeare’s 1599 tragedy, “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.”

Director Shana Cooper’s take is a great lucid rendering that accentuates the plays core themes and conflicts, even as the production careens into one too many air-knife-fights that turn the tragedy into a Mortal Combat training site. But the acuity of the set, sound, costume, and cast is so well done that Cooper, who was associate artistic director at California Shakespeare Theater and directed a version of this two years back at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, should be applauded. ¬¬¬¬Set Designer Sibyl Wickersheimer evokes the ruin to come with towering, glaucous white walls that frame the stage, parts of which will literally crumble even before the names of the moment’s political offenders are written on a scroll and strung up as a calling for their death. Mobs crawl the rampart and surge below the stage, mimicking the sense of instability and chaos that’s burgeoning in Shakespeare’s text. Wickersheimer ensures that there are clean lines to the drama of the main characters, especially the death scenes which, as murder orchestration goes, are fantastic.

By Matt Caprioli

expression defined the character so finely. He became quite the screen to watch the internal strife that Shakespeare envisioned.

This production has an admirable irreverence for gender norms. Why, for instance, was Cicero (Emily Dorsch) not only played by a woman, but also dressed like Dana Scully?

Matthew Amendt’s Cassius was good but uneven, especially with the accent (did I detect a hint of an Irish brogue?). But he may have been finding his sea legs still in previews. There were moments when he powerfully conveyed the

envy Cassius felt toward Caesar, who recently banished a rebellion with the General Pompey and who habitually welcomes him in the coldest terms. Amendt brought a level of sympathy to Cassius’ fury that was enticing. I found myself wanting to know more why he acted this way; what caused him to lead Brutus to a deed that was previously unimaginable.

Mark Antony was similarly powerful but wobbly.

Jordan Barbour has the flair of Todrick Hall, which works well as a coy pre-death-of-Caesar Mark Antony, but not so much as the Caesar protege who leads an army to avenge his father figure’s death.

This production has an admirable irreverence for gender norms. Why, for instance,

continued on page 25

The pulsing light – low-tone ambers and bristling shocks of white – can be overkill, but for the most part they serve as an adept background character. The lighting (Christopher Ackerlind) is extremely powerful in transitions, along with the sound design (Paul James Prendergast), which coordinate flawlessly together to draw out the play’s cogent themes of envy, misunderstanding, honor, and dignity. With all the elements of a production solidly in key, it was left to the cast to deliver.

And they by and large delivered. It seemed palpable that Brandon J. Dirden’s Brutus was a crowd favorite. His movement, flow, and

Red Hook Star-Revue

www.star-revue.com

April 2019, Page 19

REVIEWS A Tale Of Oh So Many Things

By Carly Quellman You know when you’re at a museum and you continue to tilt your head further and further to the left, as if that somehow allows you to better understand what you’re looking at?

Sorry to tell you, but it doesn’t.

cheesecake -- only a small portion of Giordano’s exotic material list.

I think it’s fair to be both hungry and disgusted at this point. Maybe that is precisely the point, to eat up any and everything that makes up Giordano’s brain.

Maybe that’s why I found myself positioned sideways, bent over to the right (my dominant side), peering up into Daniel Giordano’s “Big Linguini” art sculptures at SARDINE. I reiterate the word ‘into’ because as I craned my neck in various motions, I noticed there were so many gaping parts and shadows and holes layered with items such as sparklers, ticks, orange Tang, and preserved

“The Big Linguini,” shown as a half dozen bunch of mixed-media art, felt like a temperamental accident, alluding to the clusterfuck within Giordano’s embellished ItalianAmerican heritage. Generations of equally-odd life events and tales woven into many, many things, things that seemed too personal

for my senses… Like hoarded baby foreskin -- as told in a short story by Giordano’s brother -- which accompanied the folklore-inspired art.

I can appreciate the effort and artistic appeal behind Giordano’s approach. I also can appreciate that I took the time to peer at a clusterfuck of things mounted on subjective sculptures in the shape of male genitals for 30 minutes.

Am I trying to understand too much? Probably not.

“The Big Linguini” is comical and playful. Energetic, if you will. Childish and slightly volatile, if you ask me in certain tones. The multilayered storytelling that lays within each piece is also exhausting.

I wish to understand, and that is

the hardest part. So while I cannot understand, I will instead continue to take on the role of spectator, holding my head predominantly to the right side.

My head is heavy.

Am I trying to understand too much? Probably not. Exasperated, I must leave.

Once I opened SARDINE’s white door, its cheap plastic blinds hitting the frame behind me, I stepped back out into Brooklyn’s streets. The same streets caked with a multitude of experiences that were abruptly shoved back into my conscience.

Giordano’s onion-like tale wasn’t all that different from New York.

A tale of oh so many things. Better told by Daniel Giordano.

Memories of the Future

By Casey Mahoney For those familiar with the exquisite essays of Siri Hustvedt, “Memories of the Future” will be comforting terrain. Hustvedt’s latest circles her more pressing themes of female erasure, the fallibility of memory, and the bizarre fact that imagination always plays a role in our sense of the “present.”

The situations in this novel are also familiar, namely artists behaving oddly, cruelly, or bravely.

While readers of Hustvedt’s 2014 novel “The Blazing World” will take comfort in the novelistic scenes where the protagonist here “writes” the hero of her novel, “Memories of the Future” has more in common with the discursive, referential, and analytically beautiful essays in Hustvedt’s “A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women” (2016) or “Living, Thinking, Looking” (2012).

There are three narrative strands here. One is set in the 1978: an author by the initials S.H. (which brings to mind the authors name, but also, as the narrator would have us believe, Sherlock Holmes) tries to write a novel while being disturbed and inspired by the haunted neighbor she hears through the walls. Like the author, the narrator moves from Minnesota to NYC to attend a PhD program at Columbia University.

Weaved into this is a story set in 2016. S.H. and her sister are moving their nonagenarian mother into assisted living. In the move, she discovers a journal she thought had been lost. She also discovers an attempted-novel from that first year in NYC, nearly four decades ago. Its recitations from this novel are some of the most vivid moments and veer from a text that seems more comfortable in an essayistic state of mind.

Hustvedt contributes the playful illustrations (one of Trump and Duchamp reprinted here). The whimsical drawings echo the stance of the novel, which seems eager to dance and break past whatever labels critics may throw at it. And for the most part, these flights of fancy go uninterrupted, even as they’re surrounded (some may say drowned) by metafictional, rigorous contemplations of time, memory, youth, and gender inequality.

While there are hundreds of parallels between the author and the protagonist, the most obviousseeming are “false,” something that I imagine delights Hustvedt. For instance, at a McNally Jackson reading, Hustvedt said that “Minnesota” – the nickname given the protagonist by her closest friends – was never one bestowed on the Minnesota-reared Hustvedt. Hustvedt is a brilliant writer who loves to pull the leg of the reader, especially those who fret over demarcating fact and fiction.

The impish koans – “As I wrote, I was also being written” – are pleasurable and stirring, but tire over 300 pages of thought exercises rather than character development. What plot that exists comes from S.H’s abandoned novel that, by its nature, can’t deliver on all its promises.

The lyricism is often enough to bypass any deficiency in the narrative conventions that make one pick up fiction. As the narrator describes her childhood in the Midwest: “The oak’s roots that protruded from the steep cliff behind the house curled to make a royal seat, where a potentate could sit and survey her kingdom and lose herself

The Question Authority

By Lorraine Duffy Merkl A Brooklyn author’s beautiful take on an ugly subject “Does anyone remember the counselor…?” began the post on my old summer camp’s social media page.

I did not know the former camper who was asking nor did I recognize the vague description of the young

Page 20 Red Hook Star-Revue

adult being accused of allegedly taking advantage, but I was spooked to realize that while I was playing dodgeball and enjoying free swim, someone else was being preyed upon.

Although I was shocked, I was not surprised. It’s become common

in reverie and let her thoughts sail toward the inexpressible and the sacred.”

But for the most part, Hustvedt’s seventh novel is chock-full of intriguing ideas, like that writing can reconfigure social scripts: “It is on the page that I begin to take quiet vengeance for the master script, the script that had been dictated to me for years and years, a barely audible voice in my ear that insisted I obey.”

“Memories of the Future” is an honest and admirable meditation into the nature of art and justice.

Even if the rhythms and sentiments become redundant, it’s admirable that this discursive and interrogative novel insists on being nothing but itself up through the very end.

place to find out an authority figure in the form of a teacher, coach, clergy member, or renowned pop star, anyone really, in a position of power or influence, engaging in sexual misconduct with minors.

Stories such as these invariably lead us to ask, Why? How? and a myriad of other queries that swirl in our boggled minds with regard to the victims and perpetrators alike.

In The Question Authority by Rachel

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Cline, what drew me in was the prospect of getting some answers.

Albeit a work of fiction, the novel is culled from true tales of abuse, specifically at the hands of educators. What kept me reading though was the writing. Cline has a beautiful way with words while describing such an ugly subject. Her performance is riveting.

Now in their 50s, Nora and Beth, who were best friends growing up in

continued on page 24 April 2019

STARªREVUE MUSIC

reviews, previews, happenings in the neighborhoods you love

photos: Brian Geltner

The Brooklyn Folk Festival Now in its 11th year, the Brooklyn Folk Festival brings three days of music, workshops, film screenings, contests, and jam sessions to the beautiful, historic St. Ann’s Church located at 157 Montague St. in Brooklyn Heights April 5-7th.

Presented by the Jalopy Theatre and School of Music, the Festival is produced by Eli Smith, a banjo picker and passionate aficionado of roots music.

Smith teamed up with Geoff and Lynette Wiley, owners of the Jalopy, to produce the first festival in 2009. And it’s not just American folk music.

Smith says, “There will music rarely heard from Sardinia, Mali, and the Caribbean Coast of Columbia.”

Providing more detail, Smith states, “We’re having a Louisiana dance party Friday night with three bands: Jackson & The Janks, The Big Dixie Swingers, & The Revelers who all play Cajun, Zydeco, & Swamp. It’s great fun for dancing, and they rarely play in NYC. Saturday Dan Zanes and Claudia Eliaza will be performing family friendly music at noon. There will also be a workshop called “Playing With Trash”, where participants can build instruments out of everyday found objects. There will be another workshop revealing the banjo’s earliest history and its African roots, and of course the famous banjo toss, where contestants toss a banjo into the Gowanus canal with a chance to win a new banjo.”

of “American Epic” - a documentary about American Folk Music produced by Robert Redford and Jack White.

For the hungry, a folklorist has curated a delicious selection of food from the diverse traditions in NY, including traditional Ethiopian food. Comestibles can be purchased in a food court-vending area all within St. Anne's Church.

When asked how he finds performers, Smith says, “The festival is curated by me; it reflects my vision of folk music. I’m always researching and finding new folk music. It’s my passion and what I do. The bands represent a community of musicians. It’s a grass roots, underground community of musicians from New York and across the country who are generally underrepresented on festival stages. You won’t often hear or see these great bands elsewhere. Our festival is a great place to discover new music” According to Smith, while modelled on classic

festivals like the New York Folk Fest or the old University of Chicago Folk Festival, today The Brooklyn Folk Festival is one of the few of its kind. “There’s such a wealth of talent here in New York that it’s overwhelming, which is why I began this, to present these musicians. The challenge is to break through the wall of the ‘Music Industrial Complex.’ We don’t base our fest on hype and marketing strategies. We’re here to hip people to something they might not have heard about before.”

About the enduring legacy of folk music, Smith responds, “Folk music has come through the generations with us. It’s very humanistic music that has served us emotionally for centuries. It’s music that is timeless.”

For more information and to purchase tickets, go to www.brooklynfolkfest.com

Mike Cobb

Inside: Q + A’s:

Ian Felice of the Felice Bro’s Travis Good of the Sadies

ALBUM REVIEWS:

“We have 2 amazing bands coming from GA, Jontavious Willis, who plays blues - Friday night - and Kashiah Hunter, who plays sacred steel guitar, playing at 9:30pm Sat April 6,” Smith adds.

Girls On Grass Ozark Highballers

Attendees will also be able to view the premier

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April 2019, Page 21

In Conversation With Travis Good of The Sadies Originally hailing from Toronto, Canada, The Sadies have been playing their unique brand of psychedelic country rock for over 20 years. For those unacquainted, imagine Graham Parson’s era Byrds mixed with Nuggets garage grit.

Over the years, The Sadies have collaborated with Neil Young, Garth Hudson, Neko Case, John Spencer, Robyn Hitchcock, Andre Williams, and many more. Their 2017 release “Northern Passages” exemplifies their musical dexterity with ballads, rockers, and spaghetti western instrumentals. It also features the vocals of touring buddy Kurt Vile on “It’s Easy Like Walking.”

Brothers Travis and Dallas Good front the band and are the sons of the legendary Good Brothers, a folk group who toured across Canada by train with the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and The Band, as featured in the legendary film “Festival Express.” The Good Brothers recorded an album produced by the Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and still play today.

Carrying on the family tradition, Travis and Dallas are both accomplished guitar pickers and play off each other in an exciting and organic way, as if Lux Interior were dueling with Clarence White.

Upright bassist Sean Dean and drummer Mike Belitsky complete the quartet and help make them one of the most sought-after backing bands today.

The Sadies are playing a three-day residency at Union Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn April 2-4, with local band Girls on Grass as the opening act April 2nd. Don't miss these shows! I spoke to Travis Good by phone recently in anticipation of it all.

SR: When did you start working with Kurt Vile?

TG: He was opening for us as a solo act 5 years ago, and we got to know him by riding in the van.

And by our tradition of having our friends sing on

our records.

SR: How do collaborations like that usually happen?

TG: Often they’ll have heard of us, or we’ll have done a show together, or through the label. It depends on coordinating schedules and our mutual respect for each other. It’s really good for the band. It keeps us busy but also gives us a break.

It’s refreshing, fun, and interesting. Plus, we’re on our best behavior; we get along pretty well then.

(Laughs) SR: I know you played with Neil Young. What was that like?

TG: Wow. It was through Garth Hudson for a record he did called “Garth Hudson Presents A Canadian Celebration of The Band.” Garth had Neil come in to do “This Wheels On Fire.” I wasn’t starstruck until he had all his guitars and amps delivered to the studio. (Laughs) But we just went to work, and it went well enough that we did a Canadian tour with Crazy Horse right after that. That was amazing. Patty Smith and Los Lobos were on tour too.

SR: When you guys write, how do you work it out?

TG: Dallas and I are becoming the principal writers, though the other guys contribute too. But now that our songs are more lyrically based, they usually come to the table more well-formed.

We don’t start from scratch so much anymore; someone usually comes with three chords or a line. So that’s changed I think for the better.

SR: Did you guys play together growing up? How did you work out your guitar weaving?

TG: We’re five years apart in age and didn’t really talk much growing up. Dallas took piano lessons, and I took guitar lessons from Gordon Lightfoot’s guitar player. Dallas says he learned from watch-

ing me play guitar. He got good pretty quickly by watching. One thing we did always agree on was Alice Cooper.

It wasn’t until he was about 17 & I was 21, and one Halloween we did the whole “Love It To Death” record, which is interesting because I hear a lot Sadies stuff in there. Laughs. It goes in directions I hear the Sadies go with dark lyrics and galloping beats. Plus, the costumes.

SR: That’s true, you guys wear great suits. Where do you get them?

TG: The first ones we got were hand me downs from our dad’s band The Good Brothers. We got these white polyester suits from him that were made by a guy in California who was quite famous named Tony Alamo. And after that friends of our who take old vintage suits who embroider and put rhinestones on’em.

SR: Northern Passages features a photo of the Northern Lights. Have you ever experienced that?

TG: Oh yeah, I have. I’ve seen it up north and at my house quite often, even in Saskatoon. It truly is the most psychedelic thing in nature.

SR: As you tour, where do you find your music resonates most?

TG: We’ve always gravitated towards Spain. The nights are late, and the crowds are great.

TG: We’re going to Holland, Belgium, and the UK. Come see us in Brooklyn!

For more information on the Sadies, see their website: www.thesadies.net

Mike Cobb

Discover what you love 357 Van Brunt Street

Page 22 Red Hook Star-Revue

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WINE & SPIRITS

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April 2019

Ian Felice Loves the World Beyond Measure While the Brooklyn Folk Festival generally features underrepresented artists, indie folk fans might recognize Ian Felice of The Felice Brothers as a national touring act.

Hailing from Palenville, New York, The Felice Brothers are an American folk rock/country rock group. With brother James on accordion and keys, and a cracking band behind them, they are well established on the roots-rock scene.

The Felice Brothers have played The Newport Folk Festival, toured with Old Crow Medicine Show, Justin Townes Earle, and Dave Matthews, and have collaborated with Conor Oberst, Phoebe Bridgers, and Titus Andronicus.

Ian Felice is the lead singer-songwriter-guitarist of the band and will be performing a solo set at the Brooklyn Folk Festival. I spoke to him recently by email.

SR: How did you get involved with the Brooklyn Folk Fest?

IF: My friend Nick Panken, who plays in a band called Spirit Family Reunion, put the organizers of the festival in touch with me. I’ve heard about the festival before but have never had the plea-

sure to play it.

SR: Can you tell me about your cover of Fred Neil’s “I’ve Got A Secret?” Though highly influential, Neil seems underappreciated. I feel like he should be more celebrated.

are feeling in the moment and not worry about throwing other musicians off. It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there year-round.

SR: Can you tell me about your new album?

IF: Yes, I think he should be more widely known. However, I don’t think it’s uncommon for great artists to go uncelebrated. His album “The Many Sides of Fred Neil” is one of my all-time favorites. He was such a great songwriter and interpreter or songs, and his voice is deeply emotive and beautiful.

IF: Our new album is called “Undress.”

It’s coming out this May. It sounds like umbrellas being raised up against a storm.

SR: How does your songwriting process work?

IF: I write my songs on a cash register. I’m usually behind on the rent.

SR: What’s different about performing solo vs with the band?

SR: What about your work with Conor Oberst & Phoebe Bridgers?

IF: I recorded an old song that I wrote about my mother with them last fall. They sang very beautifully. They’re like two dreamers in a rowboat. I’ve been making music and touring with Conor for over a decade.

SR: Anything else you’d like the public to know?

IF: I love the world beyond measure.

IF: It's freeing because you can do whatever you

Album Review: Girls on Grass - “Dirty Power” - September Gurl Music combines country surf rock with indie pop. Think Boston’s Dumptruck meets The Smithereens with Southern Culture on The Skids, after the Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray has a fistfight with Lucinda Williams.

Girls on Grass are actually only 50% girls but they are indeed smokin’.

“Dirty Power” is the Brooklyn band’s second album – their self-titled debut being released in 2015 with a slightly different lineup. The fourpiece features songwriter Barbara Endes on lead vocals and guitar, drummer Nancy Polstein, and “two guys named Dave” (Mandl on bass and on Weiss guitar).

Girls on Grass deliver a sound that

“Dirty Power” features eleven tracks, two of which are instrumental, and deals with themes of love, politics and the grind of 21st century life. Opener ‘Down At The Bottom’ with its video shot in Coney Island gives the middle finger to the NYC A-type personality with Endes evincing us to come hang out with the ‘losers’ instead. ‘Commander in Thief’ is an ode to the current POTUS, swaggering along with pointed guitars and equally pointed lyrics sung in the first person – “I’m gonna take you down with me/the regular rules don’t apply/I come from superior genes/we’re all in this for the money.”

Endes has a way with lyrics that tell a great story with a fuck-you attitude and a side-order of humor.

‘Street Fight’ describes jostling for position in traffic which we can all relate to with a “get out of my damn way” all-or-nothing mission; the jangle country rock of ‘Got to Laugh to Keep from Crying’ opens with the line “who played who?” and continues with “left my man for a woman who looks like Aimee Mann.” Whoever the man was, he got owned, and Endes lets you know it.

Despite being a lyrically-strong, the album doesn’t suffer from the instrumental tracks as being mere afterthoughts. ‘Two Places At Once’ cleverly pans dueling electric guitars left and right as if Duane Eddy took the Devil down to Georgia, while ‘Asenio’ simply offers to take us surfing.

To bring “Dirty Power” to life Girls

on Grass pulled out all the stops and assembled a top-flight recording team. Recorded at Greenpoint’s fabulous Cowboy Technical Services and produced by Eric “Roscoe” Ambel (the Del-Lords, Roscoe’s Gang).

Ambel has worked with everyone from the Bottle Rockets to Steve Earle to Run-DMC. The album was engineered by Mario Viele (Squirrel Nut Zippers, Ollabelle, Los Lobos) and mixed by Michael James (Hole, L7, Reverend Horton Heat). Grammy-winning mastering engineer David Donnelly whose washinglist of credits include Chicago and Aerosmith added the final polish.

The end-result is “Dirty Power” does justice to the band, their playing and their songs, delivering a fine album that should equally appeal to college radio and country rock audiences.

Andrew White

Album Review: Ozark Highballers - “Going Down to ‘Leven Point” - Jalopy Records

It’s said everything makes a comeback, and that is especially true when you’re talking about music.

The average gap for a stylistic turnaround tends to be a couple of decades i.e. ‘60s garage rock influencing many artists the late ‘80s/early

90s for instance. And of course, there’s music that seems to just stick around regardless. Beethoven anyone?

Ozark Highballers “Going Down to ‘Leven Point”, the release coinciding with the annual Brooklyn Folk Festival (April 5th -7th).

In recent years, it’s been the turn of more traditional forms of music to quietly make a comeback. This is not music from the ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s but from the early part of the 20th century – old-time Americana with fiddles, banjos, harmonicas, parlor guitars and of course voice.

Music of the everyday people of the time, stories and songs unique to their geographical location.

“Most of the songs covered here come from the 1920s although many were not originally recorded until the 1950s or later, instead being passed along by wordof-mouth.“

Jalopy Records label has been part of this revival for a number of years, nurturing, teaching, showcasing and releasing traditional folk music in conduction with its performance venue, the Jalopy Theatre. This includes the new album form the

Hailing from the Ozark Mountains in western Arkansas, the Ozark Highballers are a four-piece, multigenerational ‘old time’ string band.

Made up of Roy Pilgrim (fiddle,

vocals), Aviva Steigmeyer (guitar, vocals), Clarke Buehling (banjo) and Seth Shumate (harmonica, vocals) the Highballers make a concerted effort to honor the methodology and traditions of the music’s origins.

For this album Pete Howard also lends additional fiddle on several tracks.

As the band’s bio explains: “Old-time is the music of square dances and school houses, church picnics and farm potlucks. It is the music heard on front porches while your hands are busy threshing beans or shelling corn. It is the music of the country, before country music was commercial… We are passionate about playing an Ozark music repertoire not just because it’s a local tradition that deserves to be carried on, but also because it’s a vibrant part of an

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April 2019, Page 23

Highballers, con’t ever-growing community in the Ozarks. Our rich tradition of music goes far beyond the "hillbilly" stereotypes and cultural tourism that often mask our region.”

And passionate they are. “Going Down to ‘Leven Point” contains no less than 22 songs and comes with extensive liner notes and historical photos about the region the music was born. Over the last several years the Highballers (a name for a fast type of freight train) have researched the music of old time Ozark string bands via university archives, dusty 78rpm records and of course the old-timers themselves who have passed-down the tunes to each generation. The album proves to be both entertainment and an educational experience.

Recorded in Arkansas and mixed at an old farmhouse in Virginia the album captures the live energy of this traditional music as it would have sounded back in the day with the benefits of modern technology, but without sacrificing authenticity.

It seems that most of the songs covered here come from the 1920s although many were not originally recorded until the 1950s or later, instead being passed along by wordof-mouth. Gunfights, picking corn, poor lost children and the plight of being a 'single lady' all figure lyrically via raucous jigs, waltzes and ballads. The album is split between instrumentals and some great lead vocal cuts shared by Roy Pilgrim and Aviva Steigmeyer.

“Going Down to ‘Leven Point” is a fine and important release for old time music and worth checking out for your next porch session. Maybe just don’t call it a comeback!

Orthodox, con’t of Frankie from “A Member of The Wedding” or Jo March. The most captivating aspect of the novel is Rachel’s journey of becoming a lifeguard, beautifully tracking her physical, mental and emotional growth as she learns to become a stronger and more confident swimmer. Rachel possesses an eerie and delightful violence (she often daydreams about killing people who upset her), and the vivid interiority of a teenage girl makes “The Romance Reader” a compelling and engrossing novel.

“Rachel possesses an eerie and delightful violence.”

Also notable: Leah Lax’s 2015 “Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home,” not because it’s remarkably well written (the writing is functional but lacks life) but because Lax’s story is different. Lax comes to Orthodoxy as a teen in Texas, much to her dysfunctional family’s disappointment, and represses her lesbianism over many years, bears seven children, sees her husband through cancer and comes to terms with familial sexual abuse. Although the victim of deep unhappiness in her Orthodox life, Lax remains a dedicated mother and a believer in God and eventually finds her place in the Jewish community.

Andrew White

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Question Authority, con’t Brooklyn, are reunited when they end up on opposite sides of a pedophile case. Beth is defending a teacher accused of molesting a student. The two women remember all too well this kind of situation. However, they recall what happened quite differently. As the saying goes: There are three sides to every story—yours, mine, and the truth.

Nora feels empowered when she and other women with whom she attended the Academy reach out to each other to discuss calling Gloria Allred regarding what happened long ago between the eighth graders and their 26-yearold married teacher, Bob Rasmussen. (Even his last name has an evil villain sound to it.) His brownstone or “Bob’s-house-as-hangout,” was where his 13-year-old students were invited to use his library as a resource room, and his water bed apparently for recess.

Beth, however, takes umbrage with her former BFF’s accusation that Beth was one of his victims. She was in love and even though barely a teenager, knew what she was doing. For reasons you need to read to believe, Beth still supports the relationship. She also thinks it’s time to knock Nora off her high horse, where she prides herself on never having let Rasmussen get her, implying she was too smart to “become a member of his cult.”

This claim, although true, isn’t exactly accurate and is proven when Beth presents Nora with evidence of such.

And where is Rasmussen in all this? He’s an old man now. Oh, and he hates himself. (I’ll certainly sleep better knowing that.) Upon looking back, though, he rejects the term “pedophile” because it connotes, “an old guy who bribes little girls with candy.” He much prefers the more formidable “pervert,” which he equates with being “an outlaw, a badass.”

He rationalizes that he never

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forced anyone. He was nothing but nice and helpful; made the girls feel special; really listened to them and told them they were beautiful. And since when did a gentle hand on a shoulder or up someone’s shirt do any harm? When the girls climbed onto his rolling sea of a bed, they

He rationalizes that he never forced anyone. He was nothing but nice and helpful; made the girls feel special; really listened to them and told them they were beautiful. were showing their appreciation.

The one-time educator also views himself as a bit of a knight in shining armor, one who rescued his wife Naomi, in particular, from an abusive household when she was fifteen. She too was a victim but legitimized by marriage.

Her whereabouts while this harem of grammar school girls was on the second floor of her home making use of the resources? Why, she was downstairs “doing macramé or tie-dye or baking cookies.” So convinced of the narrative drummed into her by Bob that he’d saved her, Naomi spent her marriage turning a blind eye to the fact that her shaggy, hippie husband was a criminal.

The ending of the book does not bring the satisfaction one would hope—you know, where Rasmussen is carted off to prison, then found dead post-shanking. It is, however, realistic and dare I say hopeful.

The lesson learned from The Question Authority is more than not to immediately trust someone simply because they’re on a lofty perch, but to speak up when said person crosses a line. The longer one waits, the less of a chance the abuser has of paying for the abuse.

Lorraine Duffy Merkl is the author of the novels, “Fat Chick” and “Back to Work She Goes”

April 2019

Dale Williams, con’t the influence of artists like William Blake and Kenneth Patchen would be apparent in the manner he combines text and visual imagery. Unsurprisingly, Kenneth Patchen’s is among the faces in the series; unfortunately, that portrait is not included in this show. But the reflective hope and weary pathos of Rachel Carson and Daniel Berrigan, to name just two others, emerge beautifully from the wall.

Incorporating text and imagery has been an “ongoing concern” of Williams’ for many years. “I’ve been a writer for as long as I’ve been a visual artist. Even if it’s just a label of where a drawing was made or something like that. I’ve done art/text books.”

Below the portraits he’s painted directly on the gallery wall: “I see: sparks of love jump off the soul’s flint – our steely purpose hits and misses – found and lost – again and again.”

For nearly a decade he’s been collaborating with his friend, the writer Ben Miller. “Ben is a voluminous note-taker,” says Williams. “He writes down things that occur to him in hundreds and hundreds of notebooks – things sometimes illustrative and sometimes a little more abstract. We’ve been invited out to his alma mater in Iowa to present some of our collaborations there. It’s been great.” A few years ago they debuted a performance of their collaboration, “Cage Dies, Bird Flies,” at the {Re}HAPPENING at the old Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC.

ing/Book Arts/Drawing in 2014. He’s had solo shows at Gowanus Loft in Brooklyn. He’s published in numerous art and literary magazines. On and on it goes.

I asked him how he got involved with this particular show and he immediately told me about Elizabeth Ferrer, head curator at BRIC. “I guess she’d been looking over works by people who’d exhibited at BRIC in the past,” says Williams. “I’d been in a show there in 1989. For a long time I’ve participated in the Gowanus open studios tour and she’d seen my work in that context. And at this large exhibition at Gowanus Lofts over on 9th street – that’s where Elizabeth saw this series of portraits.”

And its connection with the overall theme of the show? Williams says, “The pitfalls of making art with political themes has become amply apparent to me over the years since 9/11. I would find myself thinking of images that I felt confronted specific issues only to pick up the next day’s newspaper to find that the issue I wanted to address had morphed into something less clear, or something else had supplanted it in importance.”

I asked him how he felt about his work appearing in the larger context of the show. “It is really very interesting to me to because it’s dealing with issues that I myself don’t necessarily have, so I’m flattered that I can fit into that milieu. It’s a great honor.

But the really interesting thing?”

Tong has been “thinking how cerHe pauses here for effect. “I’m the Williams has far too long a resume tain characteristics of animals can oldest guy there.” to reproduce here, but highlights change human beings’ social role include an MFA from Hunter Coland mental status in a society. When The show runs through April 7th at lege in 1989, a show at the Drawing you start to gain certain animalistic BRIC Arts Media. If you go, be sure Center in New York in 1989 (“Seleccharacteristics, you may be becomtions 46”), a solo show at the Kentler to check upstairs, just past the ing more punk. You’re not able to International Drawing Space in 1996, entrance where you walk in, before obey the normal social rules.” you turn to go downstairs into the and solo shows at Manhattanville He’s made “Nose Ring” the logo for College in Purchase, NY. He received main gallery; that’s where you’ll Animalistic Punk. The series took find these deeply communicative a fellowship from the New York shape in his imagination after the portraits by Dale Williams.

Foundation of the Arts in Printmakonce-popular zoo in his hometown closed, and years later, while exploring the abandoned site, he noticed I loved Rome more; Et tu, Brute was Cicero (Emily Dorsch) not traces of human habitation in the (Which Rocco Sisto as Julius Caesar only played by a woman, but also former animal cages. delivers with tear-jerking agony). dressed like Dana Scully? It’s not The image of squatters living in really explained, and I don’t even This production brings to the fore the old zoo sparked Tong’s current feel the need for an explanation as the power and danger of revolu“post-apocalyptic” aesthetic, where Dorsch carried on with such confition. Brutus, after much agonizman and beast meet at the edges of dence. Other costumes mix beaning, decides to help kill Caesar, a crumbling civilization, reflected in ies, café-chic, and Casual Friday fearing what he believes to be an business wear. I was especially fond unquenchable thirst for power. But artworks that “are about survival.”

Brutus at home looking cozy in Gap then Mark Anthony, slyly managing Fortunately, the fish in Gravesend sweater and jeans.

Bay are safe to eat. to stay alive and deliver a seemingly But maybe the more contemporary innocent defense of Caesar, gives a stirring oration that incites public clothing serves a point. It does remove an obstruction to character. In wrath against Brutus & co. It seems twisted as they are by soothsaythat the power broker was actually looser garments that we recognize ers. When Portia (the marvelbenevolent and perhaps (perhaps!) as normal and that can fade into ous Merritt Janson) pleads with shouldn’t have been murdered. the background, we focus more on Brutus, her husband, to let her in Yet for all his skillful rhetoric, the character and the personal/political to his internal strife, he’s unable audience is unlikely to trust Mark turmoil of each one. to open himself up. That personal Anthony, or even Brutus, leaving us This need to pave the way to a new in the unstable situation of being silence that intertwines with the audience may also explain the deciable to trust no one. political is, to my mind, the real sion to sand off the anachronistic tragedy.

And that is one aspect of this tragbits of the play. This edited version edy that is rarely illuminated: there preserves, for the most part, the With the recent uproars over are no stable resolutions when it play’s poetry, and it certainly proeffigies of Trump or Obama becomes to approaching utopia. Mob tects the marquee lines – The fault, ing placed as Julius Caesar, this rule can bring down noble people. dear Brutus, is not in our stars; Not production is a refreshing take that I loved Caesar less, but that Yet noble people can act unjustly, that avoids such easy connections

Inner Animal, con’t.

Caesar, con’t

Red Hook Star-Revue

www.star-revue.com

to contemporary politicians. In immersing itself in the play rather the present moment, it minutely captures the conflicts with in each character. In pitting psychic and political conflicts so clearly against one another, Cooper & co. show why this play endures: not because it mirrors our current political situation, but because it informs our existence.

Polonsky Shakespeare Center. 262 Ashland Place. Through April 28.

Tickets start at $90.

April 2019, Page 25

ARTS CALENDAR April 1 Several leading LGBTQ authors and journalists meet up at Brooklyn Historical Society to look at queer sensibility in a panel dubbed “The Queer Creative Impulse: Artistic Expression and Gender Identity.”

Daniel Hurewits, Sherill Tippins, and Hugh Ryan talk art and activism with June Thomas, founder of Slate’s LGBTQ section, Outward. $5 GA. Event at 6:30pm. The exhibition, with ancillary events, runs through Aug 4. 128 Pierrepont Street

April 3 Black Ball Projects features sculptor and painter Sarah Trigg in the upcoming show “Territorial Expansion of the Innermost Continent.” Trigg, the author of “Studio Life: Rituals, Collections, Tools, and Observations on the Artistic Process” continues her exploration of a strange universe. The opening is April 3, 6-9PM, and the exhibition runs through May 26. 374 Bedford Avenue

April 5 Two art openings at NARS Foundation from 6-8pm.

“Chromatic Reveries” features Vincent Dermody, Darryl Westly, Nicholas Cueva, and Audree Anid.

The “exhibition explores the exaction of personal history, fractured realities, and the character of the cities where these four artists have spent time creating.” Through April 24. 201 46th Street, 4th floor

April 6 Jenkins Johnson Gallery closes its fine exhibition of Enrico Riley’s “New World.” Enrico Riley challenges viewers to decipher and contextualize his work’s fractured narratives. For many Americans, exposure

to the plethora of recent media examples of reflexive violence perpetrated on African-Americans has blurred the boundaries between the historical record with which our country is so familiar and the problems still facing contemporary culture today.”

207 Ocean Avenue

April 13 It’s the last day to see Gloria Klein’s abstract works on paper at Kustera Projects. “Her rigorous and colorful geometric abstract works are based on her own mathematical system for dividing and organizing her canvases and systematically distributing colors to create stunning and detailed compositions.” 57 Wolcott Street

April 13 Site:Brooklyn wraps up two juried shows.

“Birthday Suit” judged by Benjamin Sutton looks at joyous and often bawdy forms of nudity, and “Blue” judged by Marcia E. Vetrocq: “The call for participation posed a simple question: what’s new in blue?” 165 7th Street

April 14 It’s the last day to see the acrylic abstract paintings of Jo-Ann Acey at 440 Gallery. "In a nod to a formative study of Chinese brush painting techniques while in art school, JoAnn approaches each work without a goal in mind.” Sixth Avenue @ Ninth Street

MUSIC CALENDAR * critics pick *********

Bene’s RECORD SHOP 360 Van Brunt St. 718-855-0360 All Shows 8:30PM, unless noted.

Check Local Listings! *********

IBEAM

168 7th Street between 2nd and 3rd Ave. ibeambrooklyn.com Shows at 8PM unless otherwise printed.

FRI 4/12 Lesley Mok’s The Living Collection David Leon - alto saxophone/flutes Yuma Uesaka - tenor saxophone/ clarinets Kalun Leung - trombone Sonya Belaya - piano Florian Herzog - bass Lesley Mok - drums, composition + Florian Herzog’s SPLINTER Anna Webber - saxophone/clarinet Dierk Peters - vibraphone Raf Vertessen - drums Florian Herzog - bass, composition SAT 4/13 DOUBLE FEATURE: Bass Solo + Quartet 8:00PM Sean Conly - Solo Bass + 8:45PM Hooker / Conly / Rosenbloom / Gauci William Hooker - Drums Sean Conly - Bass Mara Rosenbloom - Piano Stephen Gauci - Tenor Saxophone *********

JALOPY TAVERN 317 Columbia St. 718-625-3214 jalopytavern.biz MON 4/1, 9PM Wild Goats feat. Hilary Hawke WED 4/3, 8PM The Honky Tonk Heroes (formerly Trip Henderson and the Hip Trenderson’s) FRI 4/5, 11PM Brooklyn Folk Fest After Party Papa Vega and the Rocket 88’s SAT 4/6, 10PM Paisley Fields TUES 4/9, 9PM Fatboy Wilson and Friends!

WED 4/10, 9PM Barry Clyde THURS 4/11, 9PM Isto

FRI 4/12, 9PM Papa Vega and the Rocket 88’s SAT 4/13, 9PM Frankie Sunswept and the Sunwrays TUES 4/16, 9PM Open Mic Night!

WED 4/17, 8PM Charlie Judkins and Miss Maybelle!

THURS 4/18 Audra Rox’s 3rd Thursdays!!

FRI 4/19, 9PM Papa Vega and the Rocket 88’s *********

JALOPY THEATRE 315 Columbia St. 718-395-3214 jalopytheatre.org Every Tuesday Night, 9PM Open Mic Night, sign up by 9 sharp!

Each performer gets 2 songs or 8 minutes.

Every Wednesday, 9PM Roots n’ Ruckus - hosted by Feral Foster.

Real deal folk music in NYC. Free!

Every Thursday, 8PM show 10PM jam Brooklyn Raga Massive Weekly: with guest artists Raga Jam: Free entry to musicians who come at 10 and are ready to play!

4/4: Tomchess and Mir Naqibul Islam 4/11: Parish, Bass, Ramamurthy 4/18: Rope Mahadeevan, Utsav Lal & Jake Charley 4/25: Arun Ramamurthy Trio THE 2019 Brooklyn Folk Fest* FRI 4/5 - SUN 4/7 Featuring 40+ bands, Workshops, Jam sessions, Film screenings, Contests Delicious local food + more!

Blues, old time string bands, jug bands, music from Italy, Colombia, and Mali, Western Swing, Trad Jazz, Bluegrass, Songwriters, Ragtime, Gospel + more!

Too much to list, for full listings go to: www.brooklynfolkfest.com SUN 4/7, 11AM Little Laffs - A Kid’s Variety Show FRI 4/12, 8PM Lonesome Ave String Band with Megan Downes & the City Stompers special guest Tom Bailey Concert + Square Dance SAT 4/13, 8PM Erin McKeown + Kris Delmhorst SUN 4/14

Page 26 Red Hook Star-Revue

11AM: The Good Ms. Padgett 3:30 PM: Brooklyn’s Oldtime Slowjam 8PM: Red Tail Ring/Ben Bedford FRI 4/26, 8PM AnonAnonA performs: Our Rite of Spring SUN 4/28, 11AM Family Fun with Suzi Shelton *********

LITTLEFIELD 635 Sackett St. littlefieldnyc.com SAT 4/6, 11PM Reggae Retro 1st Saturdays Dance Party SAT 4/13, 11PM Be Cute Brooklyn Presented by Matty Beats x Horrorchata: Selena Tribute Night FRI 4/19, 10:30 PM Outlook Festival: New York Official Launch Party DJ Vadim, Egoless, Strategy (DJ Set), Anna Morgan, Bell Curve, Dub Stuy DJ’s SUN 4/21, 6:30PM Tim Dillon Has Guests* (Comedy) TUES 4/30, 8PM Kendrick Scott Oracle Blue Note Record Release for International Jazz Day *********

April 14 Pioneer Works closes its exhibition of the Danish artist Joep Van Lieshoutfor. The three-decade survey of is titled “Atelier Van Lieshout: The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth.” The artist may be best known for his mobile homes that question domestic life (that or large-scale cartoonish replicas of human genitalia). Through April 14. The opening is March 1, 7-9pm. 159 Pioneer Street

April 14

Not As Big)” by Alexander Gorlizki. The critic Julie Baumgardner describes it as such: “Gorlizki often evokes the primordial, containing incantations of ancient beliefs and the personification of otherworldly spirits, wafting, ethereal entities... tempered by Gorlizki’s own devotion to the absurd and askew. His drawings and paintings are brimming with puns and flipped narratives: a man with a beak for a mouth, a figure riding on the back of a seal and wielding a potato masher, an elephant looking in the mirror and seeing a duck reflected back. It isn’t easy to make sense of or tie together these divergent paths and maybe we shouldn’t even try.” 353 Van Brunt Street

“Stop Kiss” by Diana Son at The Heights Players finishes its run today. Directed by Bernard Bosio and Steven Ackerman, the play follows two women and the kiss that seals their fate.

26 Willow Place

April 21

April 15

April 28

Brooklyn Historical Society celebrates “On the (Queer) Waterfront” with historian George Chauncey, author of the seminal “Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.” This lecture picks up from where he left off with an exploration of gay life in the cold war period. $10 GA. Event at 6:30pm. The exhibition, with ancillary events, runs through Aug 4. 128 Pierrepont Street

Is the last day to see Eleanor Kipping’s “Strange Fruit” at FiveMyles Gallery in Crown Heights. As Kipping writes: “Approximately 800 Afro picks, purchased from a wholesale supply company that provides goods for institutions and organizations, have been gilded with copper-based gold leaf. The combs define the boundaries of the work and the space between the performer and audience. The picks, identical and with no apparent pattern, sway gently until disturbed...The picks are disposable and worthless, yet are undeniably iconic to Black culture, identity, and hair care.” 558 St. Johns Place

April 21 Kentler International Drawing Space closes “Your Eyes, So Beautiful, Like Washing Machines (But

Tuffy, Sound Dogs, TBD FRI 4/26, 9PM Harlana, Geena Kaye, Presidio *********

SUNNYS 253 Conover St. 718-625-8211 sunnysredhook.com all shows 9PM unless otherwise printed. *********

SUPERFINE 126 Front St. superfine.nyc EVERY SUNDAY Bluegrass Green Chile Brunch /

SARDINE Gallery ends its solo exhibition of Ryan Scails’s scintillating drawings titled “Another Now.” 286 Stanhope Street

Evening Jazz and Americana Sundays Noon - 3pm / 6 - 8pm Unless Otherwise Printed 4/7 Jackson and the Janks (New Orleans), 12PM 4/14 The Haggard Kings/Beat Kaestli 4/21 The Lounge Leader, 12PM 28 Abby Hollander Bluegrass Band/Megan Palmer (Nashville TN) *****

ROULETTE INTERMEDIUM 509 Atlantic Ave. Brooklyn Roulette.org

SPECIAL CONCERT ANNOUNCEMENT** SAT 5/4, 7:30PM Doors May the 4th Be with You Jaimie Branch and Roulette Present: AnteloperXKim Alpert Electronic Duo with Video jaimie branch - trumpet/synth jason nazary - drums/synth kim alpert - video synth + Fly or Die jaimie branch - trumpet Lester St. Louis - cello Jason Ajemian - bass Chad Taylor - drums **disclaimer: plugging my own gig here***

SUNNY'S BAR APRIL 2019

ALL SHOWS 9PM UNLESS LISTED OTHERWISE

PIONEER WORKS 159 Pioneer St. pioneerworks.com All Shows 7PM unless printed.

THURS 4/4* Matmos + Keith Fullerton Whitman MON 4/8 Amir Elsaffar’s Two Rivers with Hamid Al-Saadi TUES 4/9* False Harmonics #3: Bearthoven performing work by: Katherine Balch and Sarah Hennies + Luisa Muhr/Wendy Eisenberg Duo *********

ROCKY SULLIVAN’S 46 Beard St. 718-246-8050 rockysullivansredhook.com Always three sets on Fridays!

FRI 4/5, 9PM Fly Andres, David Mick, The Arms and The Legs FRI 4/12, 9PM Slut Magic, Hot Lips, Amanda White Band FRI 4/19, 9PM

www.star-revue.com

April 2019

W

hile I have never embraced “binge watching” of television series, I do admit to be an occasional binge eBay shopper.

I was first guilty in the mid 1990’s when for the first time I discovered myself with a little extra cash. I was waiting for my companion to finish looking around in a roadside flea market when I spotted a folder with old coins in it. I leafed through it and found a shiny Indian penny from 1863 for sale at $100.

I’m not sure that at that point in my life I ever spent a hundred bucks for anything, much less anything kind of frivolous, but I had the coin collecting habit when I was a kid, and I actually had some real cash in my wallet, so I bought it, and spent the rest of the trip showing anyone that would look the penny that I bought for $100.

While nobody was impressed, I was, and soon found myself scanning the auction board for other shiny Indian pennies. Next, I went for shiny Mercury Dimes and the first 50 years of

LETTERS Honored

Someone let me know about the review of my building at 156 Beard Street -- thanks so much -- and please thank Micah for me! I am very honored. Would it be possible to correct the firm’s name in the on-line addition? My firm’s name is Studio Cicetti Architect not Cicetti Architecture Studio. If not, no worries...my last name is pretty unique -- even in Italy!

Many thank you’s again! Melissa Cicetti, Studio Cicetti Architect PC,

More bus for 15 Dear Star Revue, thank you for taking the time to cover our ongoing need for safe reliable public transportation for the students at PS15.

I wanted to clarify that the students at PS15 are going on field trips. DOE school buses are available for field trips from 9:30 am to 1:30 pm. However, many destinations for school field trips are located on existing bus lines or subway lines. We are trying to work with the MTA in addressing preexisting transportation opportunities

The future is the past, maybe, by George Fiala Lincoln pennies.

It took a while until I realized I was obsessed and I finally stopped. But to this day I occasionally take out my coing books, and nerd that I am, gaze at the leavings of times passed.

Skip ahead about ten years and I found myself at the New School studying international relations.

For some reason, at almost 50 I decided I needed more schooling. I know why - I didn’t really pay much attention in college, and I ended up graduating without learning too much, at least academically. One of the consequences of this lacuna was that in any discussion that transcended music, coins or F. Scott Fitzgerald, I soon found myself outclassed because of a lack of facts.

AND THEY

WeT-NOSED PAL, H0TDOG. CALL Me

MUSTARD!

H

M

I preferred Crawdaddy, because even then, I preferred the less corporate path. Crawdaddy was a little less professional than even the early Rolling Stone, making them a bit more irreverent and carefree about what they might write about.

Mostly because of eBay I know have bookshelves of bound volumes of those old journals. Occasionally I will feel like putting myself in the mood of, say, 1928, and I’ll pull out some of those books and become immersed.

“The era of the real live “card-carrying Community” soon may be revived.

Gus Hall, the Party’s general secretary, says the party is seriusly considering a return to issuing membership cards, a practice abolished more than 20 years ago to avoid the legal and extra-legal harrassment of the McCarthy period.

Hall, again running for President tis year, says the revival of the party cards has been urged by younger members, “who are not intimidated by the forces of oppression.

I haven’t been on eBay that much since I started this paper, which pretty much takes up all my excess cash.

But just recently, in thinking about the direction I’d like the Star-Revue to take, I find myself back on the auction boards.

So I found myself in graduate school miles behind my fellow (much younger) students. Only responsible for one class a semester, I had the luxury of doing lots of reading that I needed in order to catch up.

As a teenager I loved listening to the radio, and that led me to a love of music. Around those years there were two magazines to read (or at lest two that I read). Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy.

for field trip destina-tions without creating extra school bus emissions, additional congestion on the streets or the possibility of schedule disruptions due to heavy traffic.

We hope to continue to work with the MTA/DOE to find the best solution for our kids!

The MTA is rightfully concerned that students could fill an entire bus, resulting in overcrowding. We would like to point out that our interest in bus passes would be in special circumstances for smaller groups of about 25 people, much less than the MTA bus seated capacity of about 50 seats, especially during off-peak hours, since field trip transportation would never take place during rush hour.

It is commendable that the MTA can provide free passes for the subway for our school children to go on field trips, yet troubling that such free passes are unlikely to be used for the many public schools in all the boroughs (including PS 15) that are over a 30 minute walk (for a child) to and from the closest subway stop.

We would love to see PS 15 children have the opportunity to take the local B61 (and/or B71!) bus, in order to enjoy the many cultural offerings at stops along the bus line or subway system. New York City is an amazing learning center and our kids would love the opportunity to explore it all.

HOTD0G AND MUSTARD BY MARC JACKS0N THIS iS MY

A lot of what I didn’t know had to do with 19th and 20th century world history. I happen to like reading history as it happens, so I ended up with a jones for two magazines - Foreign Affairs, and something called The Review of Reviews.

THIS iS OUR 0WNeR, DAVE.

YOU DON’T GeT TO See HiS FACE,

TH0UGH.

M

Thanks again for your time covering this issue—Cateia Rembert, PS 15 Parent

March Issue Very Good

Thanks for your realty-zoning coverage. As a life-long 71 year old Brooklynite who couldn’t afford a home until I was 41 - and needed two mortgages to swing it - it saddens me that we are bequeathing to our children a city where they can’t afford to rent, let alone buy, a place to live. In the last 10 years NYC has ADDED more residents than presently live in Tampa, Florida. And it seems to me they’ve all settled in Brooklyn. City “Planning” here has become an oxymoron. I’ll shut up now. Keep up your great reporting, George! —Joe Enright

We don’t want it!

Councilman Menchaca hits the nail on the head– who wants this project done and where is the demand for a trolley line?? I mean , outside of the real estate developers and their Friend, Mayor DiBlasio—Peter Haley

THAT’S N0T BECAUSe HE’S

Page 28 Red Hook Star-Revue

IN A C0MiC OR

It’s because they wouldn’t be able to sell their million dollar homes if they say ‘oh, and you’ll have to bike/drive thru one of the largest public housing complexes with decaying infrastructure before you go home to your beautiful newly constructed building, the likes of which none of those people will ever be able to afford or even look at, just blocks from cobblestone streets, a waterfront, and charming little shops. Just ignore the poverty before getting to those strips of charm and wealth.—Hupovabixe W.

Rating New Homes

It would be interesting to now compare the buildings your reviewer likes (as well as other new or substantially improved buildings) with resiliency standards: I.E: which buildings conform to Appendix G and are either wet flood or dry flood proofed: which buildings either through poor elevation surveying, poor or criminal engineering, or good engineering and accurate elevation surveying.

This can be considered important because all flood insurance rates are based on community building practices. Thank you—Stephen Kondaks

#1

R0OM FOR HiM!

TO BE

ANYTHING...

www.star-revue.com

Red Hook’s not all that healthy

iT’S BeCAUSE eACH PANEL IS 0NLY TWO AND HALF iNCHeS HIGH SO THeRE IS LiTERALLY N0

eMBARRASSED

WWW.MARCMAKeSC0MiCS.C0.UK

According to Gus, there are about 12,000 Community party members in the United States, “not all of them FBI agents.” - from the Pot Shots column by Greg Mitchell in Crawdaddy, March 5, 1972,

mj

COLUMN

M

M ©COPYRIGHT 2019 MARC JACKSON AND WEiRD0 COMiCS

April 2019

Brett Yates: The Tonnage of the World

Kirsten Gillibrand’s Period of Adjustment

L

ike the majority of people these days, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has announced her candidacy for President of the United States in 2020.

According to most polls, zero to three percent of Democratic voters would choose Gillibrand among the slate of likely primary candidates. Her unpopularity may seem strange to prognosticators who initially saw the senator as a plausible inheritor of the Hillary Clinton coalition of 2016.

Between 2007 and 2009, as a Blue Dog Democrat from a conservative upstate district in the House of Representatives, Gillibrand pushed an anti-immigrant agenda – advocating against plans to give driver’s licenses to undocumented New Yorkers while voting to speed up deportations, strengthen border security, and withhold federal funding for sanctuary cities – and earned a 100 percent positive rating from the NRA. In the Senate, however, she instantaneously adopted New York City’s liberalism, co-sponsoring the DREAM Act and introducing the Gun Trafficking Prevention Act. While some observers may have regarded Gillibrand’s midcareer aboutface as cynical, a sizable contingent of white-collar, educated Democrats actually admires a politics of cynicism, which to them registers as savvy pragmatism. Blue-state residents whose own hollow, self-interested ambitions have elevated them to the managerial rung of the corporate ladder have learned to negatively correlate principle and efficacy, valuing candidates like the Clintons for their smarts, flexibility, and ostensible electability.

Gillibrand has managed to lose even these Democrats, and her current campaign may come to represent a cautionary tale about the struggles of corporate-backed centrists amid increasing pressure from the left.

In 2016, Clinton supporters touted their candidate’s feminist credentials, painting rival Bernie Sanders as a stodgy mansplainer buoyed by a gang of misogynistic brocialists intent on thwarting Hillary’s quest to break the glass ceiling. When the #MeToo movement began in 2017, Gillibrand spotted an opportunity to become a feminist political icon in her own right by calling out sexual predators in government – specifically Senator Al Franken, whom she effectively forced to resign before the Senate Ethics Committee could review the sexual misconduct allegations against him; and then Bill Clinton himself, who she said should have stepped down in 1998 on account of the Lewinski affair.

formed primarily as a bad-faith cudgel to ward off a socialist insurgency led by a candidate who happened to be male. The centrists who cringed at Donald Trump’s vulgar sexism had never actually wanted to see dignified, intelligent men of power within their own ranks held accountable for their misdeeds. All along, substantive feminism had been a leftist cause, not a liberal one, and today many liberals hate Gillibrand for her betrayals of Franken and Clinton about as much as they hate Jill Stein for whatever she’s supposedly done. For 2020, the Clintonists appear already to have coalesced around Kamala Harris, not Gillibrand.

Meanwhile, the New York senator will never find a home on the left, even as her official platform by now rivals that of Bernie Sanders for “radicalism.”

She knows which way the wind is blowing, so she’s stumping for Medicare-for-All. She also wants a Green New Deal and a jobs guarantee. She even wants to abolish ICE, or so she’s said. A staunch advocate for Israel’s interests throughout her career, she ended up in 2019 voting against the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which he had co-sponsored in 2017 in an effort to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism.

Leftists, however, are unlikely to applaud Gillibrand’s canny willingness to pivot to a new set of policies whenever she perceives a shift in popular opinion. What they want is the policies themselves – not a shrewd, politically motivated gambit to seize the progressive momentum surrounding those policies, followed by a series of judicious compromises, which obviously is what Gillibrand has planned.

For her, politics has always been first and foremost about raising money and then about saying whatever vot-

ers seem to want to hear. Sometimes she gets it right, and sometimes she gets it wrong, but she’ll never quite understand that the voters pushing for Medicare-for-All will under no circumstances accept a candidate who says she favors single-payer healthcare and then attends a fundraiser held in her honor by a Pfizer executive, as CNBC reported she would in March.

To better understand how ill-suited Gillibrand is for this political moment, one can read her 2014 autobiography Off the Sidelines: Speak Up, Be Fearless, and Change Your World, a girlpower manifesto that transparently sought to capitalize on the readership generated by Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 hit Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. In Gillibrand’s book, which functions in large part as a how-to guide for women struggling to balance work, family, and a strict diet, the senator reveals how she mistook her own ideologically empty careerism for progressive righteousness and ended up in Congress as a result.

According to Off the Sidelines, a dearth of female representation in Washington inspired Gillibrand, a highly paid corporate lawyer in Manhattan, to enter public service, which meant inserting herself into a political system built by men and making no effort whatsoever to transform it. So malleable was she that, when her first boss decided that the name she had gone by her entire life, Tina, sounded girlish and unprofessional, she switched without complaint to her theretofore unused birth name Kirsten, even though it “hardly sounded like myself.”

Before that, however, Gillibrand grew up in a family embedded in boss Dan O’Connell’s deeply corrupt Democratic political machine in Albany –

Five years old, Off the Sidelines is already a time capsule from a different era of American political history, when Democrats didn’t have to choose sides in an ideological battle between centrism and leftism.

But Gillibrand had miscalculated, failing to recognize that the purported feminism of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party in 2016 had in fact

Red Hook Star-Revue

her grandmother, Polly Noonan, was the lifelong companion of Erastus Corning II, who served as mayor for 40 years at O’Connell’s behest. When Gillibrand decided to get in on the action, she was living in New York City, where she had fewer family connections. Instead, she used money as her passport into the political arena.

What makes Off the Sidelines fascinating and even revelatory is the openness with which it acknowledges the centrality of money in Democratic politics. Its unabashedness owes to its awareness of its intended audience, a privileged set of businesswomen, socialites, and other movers-and-shakers. They already know that this is how the world works.

Gillibrand doesn’t pretend that she got her start as a grassroots activist.

Rather, she claims that she saw that most of the big, important jobs in government were occupied by men, and that didn’t sit right with her – she, too, wanted a big, important job where she could “make a difference” in some generic sense of the phrase.

“I called a friend whose mother, Nancy Hoit, was active in politics nationally,” Gillibrand explains. “When I called Nancy, she couldn’t have been nicer.

She told me to join the New York City chapter of the Women’s Leadership Forum. The organization, in turn, said they’d be just thrilled if I joined. All I needed to do was write a check for $1,000.” Gillibrand wrote the check.

In 2000, Hillary Clinton, Gillibrand’s hero, announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate in New York. After trying unsuccessfully to get hired by her campaign, Gillibrand realized that she would have to increase her annual donation budget from $2,000 to $10,000 to gain proximity to her idol.

Eventually, she paid for a chance to meet Hillary at a dinner on the Upper East Side, and then again in Tuxedo Park, where the former First Lady granted her an opportunity to throw

continued on next page www.star-revue.com

April 2019, Page 29

Incoming Karaoke Nightclub Raises Concerns

by Erin DeGregorio A members-only nightclub with 26 private rooms and 26 bathrooms is coming to Red Hook, replete with liquor and a private waitstaff.

The principals of KS Dreamland pleaded their case before the Permits & Licenses Committee of Community Board 6, which recommended approval of the club’s liquor license with the only proviso being that they close a bit earlier than 4:30 in the morning, as they are currently planning.

The club is planning to open in the former Cornell Box Company building at 168 Van Dyke Street, which has been marketed for the past year by Realty Collective, a local real estate company.

The club explained that the establishment will have a tiered membership system in place, though a fee hasn’t been determined yet. Members, who must be 21 or older and approved by the establishment via a credit check, must present their membership cards and can bring guests. It was also said

Gillibrand (continued from page 29)

a fundraiser on her behalf, with a $50,000 goal.

Fortunately, all of Gillibrand’s friends were rich, too, and the turnout for her event impressed Hillary. Still, Gillibrand struggled to find a real job in government until she approached Andrew Cuomo, then Secretary of HUD, after he gave a speech at the Women’s Leadership Forum. In her telling, she grumbled about the difficulty of finding a foothold in politics as a newcomer: “I’m hard-working, well educated… and I can’t break in. It really seems that it’s an insider’s game.”

Here, Gillibrand doesn’t acknowledge that, of course, Andrew Cuomo had granted her a face-to-face precisely because she was already an insider.

(Governor Mario Cuomo had appointed Gillibrand’s grandmother vice chairperson of the state Democratic Party in 1982 as a reward for her fundraising efforts.) The younger Cuomo offered Gillibrand a job at HUD on the spot, where she helped design “job incentive programs for single mothers” until George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001.

Soon, she and her husband, a venture capitalist, bought a house in New York’s 20th Congressional District in order to enable an eventual run against the incumbent Republican John Sweeney. Gillibrand paid $10,000 to a pollster to measure her electoral chances, which initially

Page 30 Red Hook Star-Revue

that, in order to become a member, one must apply via a digital form.

Locals were worried about the club’s appropriateness in the neighborhood, potential rowdiness outside, traffic and residential quality of life.

Red Hook Civic Association co-president John McGettrick was very concerned about the proposed business hours and the area’s nighttime “no parking” rules. A club principal, who owned a similar business in China, responded that a limo service would be provided to all members as part of their party package. He said those limos would wait across the street in a parking lot. He also told the committee that drunken members would be sent home in a limo before they could cause local problems.

This will be addressed again at CB6’s general board meeting on April 10, 6:30 pm, in the Old First Reformed Church’s lower hall (729 Carroll St.).

McGettrick said afterward that it was somewhat frustrating that community

didn’t look great. Republicans outnumbered Democrats two-to-one near her home in the rural outskirts of the Capital District, but Gillibrand had a powerful ally on the Republican side: Governor George Pataki, to whom she had a connection through her father, a lobbyist for Lockheed Martin and Morgan Stanley.

According to the Times-Union in Albany, Pataki had turned against the Republican congressman Sweeney because, after the 9/11 attacks, he had “developed a formula to ensure that New York City and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg received a proportionate share of the [federal] aid.” The terms of the proposed split between City and State angered Pataki, who subsequently introduced Gillibrand to big-time donors in Albany. She defeated Sweeney in the 2006 midterms.

In early 2009, Hillary Clinton vacated her Senate seat to become Secretary of State, leaving Governor David Paterson to appoint her replacement.

According to Gillibrand, Paterson knew that his appointee would need a “strong support network” to survive both a 2010 special election and the 2012 regular election. But based on her expensive campaign in 2008, Gillibrand “could raise the necessary funds” for back-to-back races, so Paterson picked her.

In the Senate, Gillibrand distributed copies to her staff of the Oprah-approved self-book The Secret, which teaches readers that picturing themselves accomplishing their greatest ambitions can function as means to achieve them, under the theory that imagination and belief have the capacity to bend reality. Gillibrand used the technique in the service of

These are the people who are bringing a karaoke bar to Red Hook. (Degregorio photo)

concerns like traffic generation hadn’t been fully explored by the committee during the meeting. He added that the applicant confirmed that this type of business set-up hadn’t been previous-

ly operated in New York; “that should have allowed for more questions.”

her own highest objective: obtaining heaps of campaign cash.

because no such battle was meaningfully taking place.

“During my 2010 election,” she recounts, “I set a grandiose fundraising goal for the first quarter: $3 million.

I knew this wasn’t entirely realistic, but I believed it was crucial for my credibility in Washington. To keep my thoughts positive I changed my computer password to 3M1stQ. (You can laugh, but it worked.) A positive mindset sets a tone for my office.”

In those halcyon days, barely anyone in the general public cared about policy. The job of politicians was to project an air of reason and decency; to run on a milquetoast, focus-grouped platform of vague campaign promises for which no one would ever hold them accountable; and to collect money from rich donors in exchange for keeping their taxes low. Today, even Kirsten Gillibrand has sworn off contributions from corporate PACs for her 2020 campaign.

Off the Sidelines chronicles Gillibrand’s relentless determination to become great at her extremely political job in a completely apolitical sense: she works late, attends countless events and meetings, wisely manages her staff, and casts votes while parenting sick children. It is not a chronicle of her ideas, because she has none. Sometimes, a particular cause – improving safety regulations for infant beds, or repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” – will jump out at her, and she will fight tirelessly for it, but together these priorities don’t add up to any conscious political philosophy.

When she first met George W. Bush, she “thanked him for his service.”

Her view of her own advancement in government as inherently a feminist achievement, irrespective of the liberalism or conservatism of her legislative record, doesn’t require her to develop any mission larger than her personal success as a politician to satisfy her sense of self-importance (which is the driving motivation for her career). Five years old, Off the Sidelines is already a time capsule from a different era of American political history, when Democrats didn’t have to choose sides in an ideological battle between centrism and leftism,

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“Important issues need to be resolved,” he said.

The promise is symbolic: the money from corporate executives will find its way into Gillibrand’s campaign treasury by another means. Without it, she’d presumably dematerialize. You might say she’s dematerializing anyway.

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April 2019

Heart attack at 38

Langone doctor prescribes marathon running

by Erin DeGregorio

H

eart attack survivor Trymaine Lee, 40, is a Bed-Stuy resident and a primetime correspondent for MSNBC. He’s also a marathon runner, having participated in last month’s Brooklyn Spring Half at Prospect Park. He uses the sport as a means to recuperate, be healthy and inspire other heart attack survivors.

In July 2017, Lee unknowingly had a major heart attack at the age of 38.

He was young, considerably healthy and had no family history of heart disease or early death. He said he first felt chest pressure on a Monday and more extreme pressure the next day; it was hours later that same day he called 911. He was told by Dr. George Fernaine, chief of cardiology at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn (formerly Lutheran Hospital), that he had a heart attack caused by complete blockage in his main coronary artery.

“We think symptoms are supposed to present in a certain kind of way, like I’m thinking of a crushing pain or a spike in your chest. It wasn’t that kind of pain at all,” Lee told this paper. “It was extreme pressure, so it didn’t really click to me that I was having a heart attack.”

Upon hearing such news from the doctor, Lee’s first instinct was to smile with gratitude because he did survive, when many others sometimes don’t have that same fortune.

“But to finally hear that … if I didn’t get to the hospital when I did – that I might not have made it – it was really a shock to me,” he said. “It was like ‘Oh my goodness, if I got here an hour later, I might’ve been rolling in on a gurney.’”

There were many tough moments during the healing process, with Lee often worrying about having a second heart attack. But he also said that his journey’s been enlightening and has allowed him to find ways to become stronger and give himself a fighting chance.

“The first few months were going through cardiac rehab, which was really a blessing to help me get my feet back under me and realize that my heart wasn’t just going to stop or explode,” Lee added.

Nearly two years later Lee’s still undergoing physical rehabilitation, doing lots of cardio and running to upkeep a healthier lifestyle. He’s also more focused on his emotional and mental health, and being more present in the moment and with his family.

“I’ve been able to get myself in a place where I feel really good about life and I see myself as a survivor and not a victim at all,” Lee said.

Half marathon About six months after his heart attack, Lee decided to pursue outdoor running after talking it over with Dr. Fernaine. He said that even though he played college football, he wasn’t really a runner beyond doing 15-20 minutes on a treadmill. With Fer-

Red Hook Star-Revue

naine’s approval and encouragement, Lee had the confidence to pursue it.

Lee began to run through new neighborhoods he had never spent much time in and progressively racked up the miles – going from two-and-a-half to three, to five, and then seven miles.

It wasn’t until fall 2018, that a friend suggested he should run a half marathon (13.1 miles). Lee said he initially dismissed the idea but figured he could accomplish it since he was already running 10 miles. So he signed up for the 2019 Brooklyn Spring Half, presented by Citytri, that would take place at Prospect Park on March 16, 2019. He ran three times a week, including 10 to 11 miles on Sundays.

“Hopefully this will inspire other people who have survived heart attacks or other people who are going through physical or medical issues, that you can come back and come back stronger,” he says.

Lee’s goal was to run a sub-two-hour race. He ran with 384 other participants and finished at 1:58:14.

Heart attack facts The American Heart Association says heart disease (including coronary heart disease, hypertension and stroke) remains the number one cause of death in the U.S. Coronary heart disease accounts for approximately 13 percent of deaths in the U.S.

Trymaine Lee

Fernaine said cases like Lee’s are not common, but do happen. While individuals can’t control their genetics or family history, they can control healthier habits like eating properly and partaking in regular exercise.

A classic sign of a heart attack is a discomfort in the chest or a squeezing pain, as if somebody was sitting on your chest. Other symptoms include dizziness, shortness of breath, nausea, and diaphoresis (the kind of sweating where your shirt is soaked). That compilation of symptoms would warrant a 911 call. Fernaine said people should seek immediate medical help when they start noticing a difference in their ability to exert themselves or even if they “feel off.”

“The common thing that people misunderstand is it’s not pain – pain is probably the wrong word for it,” he added. “Everyone perceives pain differently, so you have to be careful with the definition of pain. That’s why I always say ‘discomfort, ache, pressure’ because it’s a different feeling for different people.”

He also recommends exercise, regular doctor’s appointments, and having blood tests done for cholesterol at least once a year (starting as early as 20 years old) to help prevent a heart attack. Those who have survived a heart attack, Fernaine said, need to redouble their efforts in paying attention to diet and exercise, in order to lessen the odds of having another attack.

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April 2019, Page 31

Tuffy the Tiger is Coming to Park Slope

Tuffy Tiger’s Family Festival is a free community event for the whole family that’s filled with music, games, arts, crafts and Tuffy Tiger. Now in its eighth year, it will be held along 4th Street at 5th Avenue (near Old Stone House), on April 27, 11 am-3 pm. Kids can watch performances

by Tuffy Tiger himself, meet him throughout the day and spin the prize wheel to win a free autographed copy of Tuffy Tiger’s latest album “Songs & Music for Me.” While admission is free, activities cost between $2 and $5, including tote-decorating, spin art and puppet-making. Local and national businesses and civic and cultural vendors will also have free activity booths and lots of giveaways. Free gift bags will be given to the first 200 kids in attendance. This event is sponsored by the 5th Ave BID of Park Slope and will host visits by the 501st Empire City Garrison (a worldwide Star Wars costuming organization comprised of and operated by Star Wars fans) and Empire Saber Guild (New York’s premiere costumed lightsaber training and performance charity group). The festival is rain or shine.

Tuffy says hello

programming through his website, music albums, digital games, liveaction videos and mobile app. His music is part of the line-up for the Australian National Children’s radio station, Kinderling. Tuffy Pod Casts, which are informal conversations with Tuffy for kids, serve as a springboard for parents to begin conversations and/or reinforce positive life lessons to their children. They are usually filled with whimsical sounds, music and interviews.

Puppetry Arts’ mission is to offer creative and cultural exploration to all individuals through the multidisciplinary art of puppetry by providing a venue for emerging artists, innovative teachers and community members to facilitate youth development, enrich family activity, empower civic responsibility and to engage and entertain.

Tuffy Tiger is featured in multimedia Veronica Chambers at PS 15 library At 6 p.m. on Monday, April 8th, author Veronica Chambers, best known for her 1997 memoir Mama’s Girl, will be speaking in the library at P.S. 15, Patrick F. Daly Magnet School for the Arts, located at 71 Sullivan Street. Hosted by Friends of P.S. 15, the event is free and open to the public. Chambers, born in Panama, was raised in Brooklyn.

Her memoir Mama’s Girl is set on the streets of Chambers’s 1970s Brooklyn and examines her close relationship with her mother along with her experience and identity as Afro-Latina. The New Yorker called Mama’s Girl “a troubling testament to grit and mother love… one of the finest and most evenhanded in the genre in recent years.” Chambers, a prolific writer, has written and collaborated on books covering a variety of topics from slavery to Japanese geishas. She has also published books specifically for teens and children.

Additionally, she has written a novel, Miss Black America, and worked with Robin Roberts on her memoir, Everybody’s Got Something.

Most recently, she edited The Meaning of Michelle, which was named a top-ten nonfiction book of 2017 by TIME. She will be discussing three of her books: Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa; The Go-Between; and Resist. Currently, she is a JSK Knight fellow at Stanford University.

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Narcotics taken off the streets by the cops of the month Erin DeGregorio The 76th Precinct honored five officers at the March 6 precinct community council meeting.

On Feb. 2, Police Officer Matthew Schmalix was conducting a routine patrol when he observed a vehicle commit a traffic infraction.

“Upon stopping the vehicle and observing the suspicious movements and inconsistent narratives of the motorist and passenger, both of whom were known narcotics dealers, Schmalix realized the matter required further investigation,” Deputy Inspector Megan O’Malley explained.

Schmalix obtained a search warrant for the vehicle. Officers recovered 1,619 glass vials of heroin, crack, marijuana, and over $4,000 cash from the car. Five days later a local narcotics dealer was arrested, and more than 200 glass vials of heroin, 362 bags of crack cocaine, 2 large bags of cocaine and uncut heroin, and nearly $8,000 cash were recovered.

NYPD Assistant Chief Brian Conroy, who attended and spoke at the meeting, emphasized that communication between community and NYPD was key.

“This is where the community and police officers get to work together to keep the neighborhood safe,” he said.

“I’m proud of the work they do, [and] proud of the great community relations we have here in Brooklyn South and at the 76th Precinct.”

OTHER UPDATES

O’Malley said she was most concerned about the recent increase in commercial burglaries, especially at night. She emphasized that business owners, especially those who are located along Court and Smith Streets, need good cameras in working conditions.

The homicide of Red Hook resident Sharon Whigham, which occurred outside the Joseph Miccio Community Center in May 2016, has remained unsolved and is still being investigated. Anyone who has information regarding this case should contact NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-8477, which can be done anonymously.

“The kind of closure that brings to the family is immeasurable and that’s [what] we hope to get out of this case,” O’Malley said.

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April 2019

the red hook

Spring Styles

STAR REVUE

THE NEW VOICE OF NEW YORK

Senior Citizens Vamp at Fashion Show, photos by Micah Rubin

The Red Hook Senior Center held their annual fashion show last month and Star-Revue photographer Micah Rubin was there to document the well dressed models on the runway.

Participants included Marjorie, Elsa, Edouardo, Valerie, Maddy, Magdalena, Yolanda and Margarita.

Red Hook Star-Revue

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April 2019, Page 33

the red hook

Spring Styles

STAR REVUE

THE NEW VOICE OF NEW YORK

with Erin

Going to the Drawing Board with Fashion Illustrator Joanna Baker

E

-commerce site Etsy is a global marketplace for handcrafted, vintage, custom and unique items – anything and everything from glass art to personalized zipper pulls. It was founded right here in Brooklyn 14 years ago, and still has its headquarters based in DUMBO. Etsy is where we found fashion illustrator Joanna Baker’s shop.

Baker sketches and posts contemporary fashion and lifestyle illustrations for people to admire, purchase and even master on their own through digital tutorials and templates. She’s also been known to sell her original sketches on stationary, mugs and more at Brooklyn craft shows like the Renegade Craft Fair held in Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Sunset Park.

She loves to draw gowns and shoes – especially those that sparkle and highlight different silhouettes – in colored pencils and markers. She enjoys drawing her favorite pieces from couture shows during Fashion Week and whenever there’s a major awards show, and placing them all next to each other in one image.

“I’m usually sketching what I see in front of me, but it’s always never explicitly a ruffle-for-ruffle detail,” Baker says. “That’s what’s so fun about fashion illustration; it’s an exaggeration. You can amplify, add details, add more movement and make something look more fun.”

Aside from sketching looks that hit the runway and red carpet, Baker also releases new work four times a season, much like a collection. For this upcoming spring collection, she’s thinking about incorporating more home décor and sweet treats to round out her illustrations, which gives them that lifestyle-brand feel.

The Road to Fashion

Baker studied studio art at Washington College, but also began her own handbag business during her time there, which helped shape her entrepreneurial side. She taught herself how to sew and created handbags on her dorm room floor, selling them on her own website. She says that she thought about attending a school that would help her properly learn the craft and industry.

“I had Project Runway on in the background as I was making my bags, which was right after the show had started [in Dec. 2014],” Baker explains. “I was like, ‘Parsons is known for fashion design, so why don’t I go there after I graduate?’”

Taking a leap of faith, she applied,

Page 34 Red Hook Star-Revue

got into the AAS Fashion Design program and moved to the city that she had only been to twice in her life for family trips. She graduated in 2010 after a stressful yearlong program and a summer internship, and later worked at J. Crew’s Upper East Side store with visual merchandising. She then got a job in fashion design at Macy’s and spent the next five years learning and growing in the corporate environment.

“I feel like what I’m doing now I couldn’t have done without that experience,” Baker says. “I think it’s important to have that corporate experience because it helps you to get good experience working with other clients, sending emails, making meetings and presenting in front of people – all of those life skills definitely can be applied to running your own business.”

Wanting to go back to her art school roots, Baker started sketching on the weekends and posting them on her fashion illustration blog. She quit her job at Macy’s in 2015, when she felt confident in her work and online presence to become a fulltime freelance illustrator.

Importance of Social Media

In today’s day and age when social media can help make or break a career, Baker says Instagram is huge as a portfolio platform.

“When I first quit my job, I had maybe like 500 followers and I was able to build to 10,000 in a little over a year,” says Baker, who has 29,100 followers as of mid-March. “It was very quick; it didn’t seem difficult to do because you’d post something, tag someone and then they would regram it.”

Designers Bergdorf Goodman and Carolina Herrera, for example, regrammed her work in 2015, which allowed her to get more eyes on her illustrations and gain more followers. But she says now the platform’s oversaturated, which has made her look to other popular media – Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook – to build an illustration community.

Since many had asked her for sketching tips and tricks, Baker began creating content for her YouTube channel in July 2016. To date she has 23 videos, including tutorials on how to sketch basic fashion poses and how to render quilting, jewels and hairstyles.

Collaborations

Baker’s worked with private clients, who want illustrations of their

families or for their weddings, and corporate clients like Hint Water and Kind Snacks for specific campaigns.

inside your bag,” she explains. “I feel like they’re even more in display as an accessory item.”

But her favorite project was in 2012 when she was a Top 5 winner of a design contest with Bergdorf Goodman and Christian Louboutin. At the time Louboutin was launching a line of shoes to celebrate his 20th anniversary as a designer. The challenge, Baker explains, was to design a ready-to-wear look based on one of his shoes and create a mood board around them. So she did just that and received an email weeks later that she was a winner. The prize was $1,000 to actually make the designed gown, which would then be unveiled and shown on a model at the 20th anniversary event. Her gown was also in a weeklong Bergdorf’s installation afterward.

She says her own phone case’s currently bejeweled, which has allowed her to ‘dress up’ the mobile device in a fun way. As she puts it, it’s another surface to put a print or another pattern on to make it look pretty.

“That doesn’t happen every day.

You live it up for one night and then you’re back to reality,” she says. “It was a lot of fun and a great opportunity.”

Phone cases as style statements Baker has dipped her toes into licensing, allowing some of her work to appear on holiday cards, gift bags and gift cardholders in TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods this past holiday season. She’s also printing her illustrations onto phone cases in a partnership with CASETiFY. “Your phone and what you put on your phone is an extension of your look, especially with the trend of these transparent bags recently … and the phone will be prominent

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What’s next?

Baker’s launching her first online class on April 5 called “Beginning Fashion Illustration with Marker Rendering.” She says this grew out of people commenting and asking for additional help on how to sketch certain subjects and even how to become an illustrator.

“I think there are a lot of fashion illustration classes, but that aren’t as detailed as the one I’m getting ready to put out,” she says. “Promoting that and fostering a community around it is the next step of my business.”

This five-hour class – complete with worksheets and downloads – will teach people, step-by-step, how to render fashion illustrations with markers, which Baker says is tricky when you’re first using them and trying to blend.

She’ll also be selling her latest spring collection of prints, stationary, stickers and more at the NY Handmade Collective’s Spring Pop Up on May 12, 10 am-5:30 pm, at 100 W. 77th St. (Manhattan).

To see Baker’s illustrations and other products, visit joanna-baker.com or follow her on Instagram @joan-

April 2019

the red hook

Spring Styles

STAR REVUE

THE NEW VOICE OF NEW YORK

with Erin

dark to light, and has transitioned more into a sombré (the nickname for a soft or subtle ombré) – meaning the color’s transition is more gradual and less extreme. To imagine this sort of style, Guidice described it like seeing your hair become lighter in color when you go to the beach during the summer – the ends of your hair have been to the beach more times than the hair three inches up from that, and thus are naturally lighter from the sun’s rays. Balayage is a technique that’s used to achieve an ombré by freehand ‘painting’ bleach or lightener onto the hair (versus using foil for the same effect).

Fiona Hair NYC: A Cut Above the Rest Fiona Guidice, who hails from Lakeland, Florida, has been a hairdresser for two decades. She started doing hair and makeup for theater as a teen and participated in a twoyear-long hairdressing program at a vocational school. After working as a head hairstylist and salon manager throughout Florida and on cruise ships in the Caribbean, she moved to New York in 2007 and then to Brooklyn a year later.

Once her state hair license transferred, Giudice began working at Donne Salon on Union St. She moved on to own a one-chair salon after building up clientele, and eventually expanded to a four-chair salon two and a half years ago.

Trends and Styles

Guidice says the most popular services are highlights and covering up gray roots, the “bread and butter of most salons.” Due to the nature of these service, a lot of her highlight clients will come in one or two times a year because “it’s the more weathered, grown-out look that’s in,” according to Guidice.

But the other latest trend is getting naturally-placed highlights that mimic nature, even if the color selection may be unnatural. “[It can be] natural-looking blonde and caramel highlights or something more like the mermaid/unicorn sort of colors like fuchsia or rainbow,” Guidice further explains.

The ombré’s become more blended in terms of color gradation from

Red Hook Star-Revue

“You use this technique to create different looks, like the two above, or to do more traditional highlight looks or to achieve the look of ‘surfer’ or ‘little girl at the beach’ hair.

Like painting sunlight on the hair, creating ribbons of light on the hair,” Guidice explains. “It gives a soft, natural-looking blended root that grows out beautifully and makes maintenance more manageable.”

Another trend Guidice has noticed within the industry is returning to older methods of styling; much like what’s old is new again.

“There are rollers out now that you can sleep in [and] give you a soft, tousled effect,” she says. “It’s still a very modern look, but the process is more like what our grandparents did than what our parents did, as far as styling goes.”

Green Salon-Certified

Green Circle Salons is a special recycling/repurposing program that ensures hair, foils, color tubes, plastics, irons/dryers, and chemicals are diverted out of landfills and water systems. Since these materials, products and tools are salonspecific and cannot be recycled by the city, they are sent to Green Circle Salons instead. Additionally, Guidice collects and sends in hair clippings (shorter than 10 inches) so that they can be repurposed and used for oil spill cleanups.

Red Hook Photogenic Hook,” Trofimchuk explained. “I’ve been trying to incorporate those cars that you can find there with the shoots. It’s like, ‘Let’s do a quest in trying to find cool cars to shoot near.’”

During his explorations, he also discovered Brooklyn Motor Works, a brick and mortar motorcycle shop located at 185 Van Dyke St. that has vintage motorcycles and classic cars.

Photographer Denys Trofimchuk, originally from Rivne, Ukraine, moved to New York seven years ago. Though he’s been doing photography full-time since 2015, he first picked up a camera when he lived in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, years ago and learned the craft through trial-and-error during the cold winter months. Now he shoots a lot of film and portraits, including some fashion and weddings, in both color and black and white.

Since he’s not a studio photographer, Trofimchuk enjoys using New York City landscapes for his backdrops. He likes shooting in Manhattan’s Financial District, especially on weekends, because the light’s very good in the mornings there and makes the photos look more majestic. However, he also likes to come to Red Hook for inspiration and unique backgrounds, which he began doing about a year-and-ahalf ago after a friend had recom-

the shop.

Besides looking for classic cars in the neighborhood, Trofimchuk sometimes goes to Louis Valentino, Jr. Pier to take photos of friends who are models. Plus, he’s previously done photo shoots in front of the older warehouses, which provided a bit of a rough, edgy look.

At the end of the day, Trofimchuk just wants his clients and even strangers to feel something when looking at his photos – not just quickly double-tapping the post on Instagram and continuing to scroll through other types of content.

“I want them to pause for a second and to look at the picture because I would really hope some would – with the photos I do – stop and think about something,” he said.

Inside the salon, Guidice tries to be as eco-friendly as possible, using only LED light bulbs, maki. She uses some organic hair color lines, which many professional companies are now making.

The salon’s open Tuesdays through Saturdays . For more information, visit fionahair.nyc or call 646-6483322. Fiona Hair NYC is located in the basement level of 488 Smith St.

“It’s a to-go place to eat and to shoot,” he said with a laugh while also referring to Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies, which is adjacent to

Trofimchuk’s been giving prints as well to his personal clients, which isn’t as common in today’s digital world. mended the neighborhood.

“I like vintage and classic cars, and there are a lot of spots where you can find them, especially in Red

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“Although you have a bunch of pictures on your phone, a print is physical and it has an aura to it that’s better,” he said.

Trofimchuk can be followed on Instagram at denysphoto.

April 2019, Page 35

the red hook

Spring Styles

STAR REVUE

THE NEW VOICE OF NEW YORK

with Erin

Q&A with Style Expert Bridgette Raes

Brooklyn Sewcial Teaches Fashion Skills

Style expert and personal stylist Bridgette Raes has been working with women since 2002 to elevate their wardrobes – especially when they’re experiencing a professional or life transition, or encounter a situation where their image and style isn’t expressing who they are or their goals effectively. She previously worked in retail fashion and spent nearly a decade as a designer after receiving a design degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Brooklyn Sewcial founder Alexa Nigro discovered her love for sewing at the age of 12 because of her grandmother. She attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and graduated in 2006.

The best style advice Raes has ever received is, “If you wore it once, you don’t wear it again – at least not the same way.”

Raes loves adding pops of color, including neons, into her neutralbased wardrobe. This season she’s looking forward to adding a touch of Living Coral, Pantone’s color of the year, in small doses as well.

Raes spoke with us and delved into springtime styles, her favorite places to shop and how she’d describe the fashionable look of Carroll Gardens, where she’s lived for the last 21 years.

RHSR: Are there any trends to look out for this spring?

BR: This all depends on what publication you read or whose advice you follow. Some are saying headto-toe neutrals while also saying brights will be trendy. I always read these trend reports with a grain of salt until I see how they’re embraced on the street. The street often determines which trends rise to the top. So, I’m just as excited as everyone else to see which trends people embrace and which will go by the wayside. I just hope it’s not the bicycle shorts trend that everyone embraces unless they’re going to the gym. The notable trends I have been reading about are: crochet looks, black and white optic prints and polka dots, feathers, florals, surf-inspired fashion, neon, yellow, [and] animal print (as if that ever goes away).

RHSR: What are some suggestions for transitional outfit ideas as we head into springtime?

BR: Taking a little from colder weather and pairing it with spring/ summer pieces. A sweater with a pair of cotton crop pants and a sweater and sandals, for example, or always having that trusted car-

Page 36 Red Hook Star-Revue

digan or scarf nearby that you can layer over a summery look.

RHSR: Where are your personal goto places to shop?

BR: I’m going to rent more and buy secondhand with a goal to be more environmental and to affordably buy better. … I love The RealReal for secondhand luxury and I rent a lot from Rent the Runway for one-off needs. I often shop Soula here in the neighborhood [185 Smith St.] for my shoes because they sell such stylish and comfortable styles, and I’m still mourning the loss of Lord & Taylor. With clients, Saks and MM.Lafleur are two go-to’s because I work with a lot of professional women, and recently, Universal Standard, especially for special sizing.

Nigro began working in Pins & Needles, a small Upper East Side sewing shop. There she taught and was inspired to start her own studio in DUMBO. She moved to Greenwood Heights in Oct. 2016.

Now Nigro is a full-time teacher at the studio.

Nigro’s currently learning how to dye fabric using natural products like avocados and turmeric. She also likes to make dresses that can be created within a few hours.

“If I’m going to make myself a dress, I’m going to be doing it on a machine,” she said. “But there’s something really special about adding little details that are handstitched.”

“I love projects where I can allow the kids to have creative liberties like a t-shirt they can design or a createyour-own stuffed animal,” Nigro explained. “It’s really fun to see where their minds go, have them get creative and let go a little bit.”

The Lost Art of Sewing Nigro calls sewing a “lost art” because long gone are the days of learning how to sew in home ec, or even maybe learning from family members like she had.

“With the computers and everything nowadays, kids don’t get to make things with their hands; that’s something … so tangible because it’s your clothes or something you can cuddle with at night,” she explained. “It’s something personal you’re making to learn.”

“There are so many parts of sewing that can be hard and you have to work through it, so I think it gives kids a lot of skills that are necessary growing up,” she said.

A Sew Cool Seasonal Schedule For spring break (April 22-26), there will be a Harry Potter camp for kids ages 6-13, where they can make Sorting Hats, basilisk body pillows and more.

Nigro has seen an upswing in kids’ desire to sew. She had to add more classes to the summer camp series. Harry Potter Week, which will be in early August and is for kids ages 6-13, currently has a waitlist.

Kids can also make sleepover bags during Sleepover Week, and can make matching outfits and accessories with their dolls during Doll Week, June 24-28.

RHSR: How would you describe the overall style of Carroll Gardens?

BR: I think the style here is really casual and that’s one of the things I love most about living here. Nobody gets gussied up to go out or tries to outdo one another. It’s such a more laidback and unpretentious place in terms of style. I love how I can leave my home and get on with my day without getting bogged down with no makeup or doing my hair if I can’t be bothered.

the first time.

Her next personal project is a handdyed, hand-stitched and machinestitched robe.

Classes and Workshops The children’s afterschool classes and summer camp sessions are popular. The studio also offers adult workshops like an introductory one-day ‘learn to sew’ class that has participants making napkins.

The three-day Summer Beach Fun workshop will include making a bathing suit and bath robe, decorating flip flops and making beachinspired crafts.

Brooklyn Sewcial at 87 19th St. in Brooklyn brooklynsewcial.com.

“Everybody wants to sew for a different reason, whether they want to make themselves clothes, make presents for people, or even to make stuffed animals,” Nigro said.

With so many personalities, interests and types of students in mind, Nigro’s created a variety of schedules and themes for anybody who enjoys sewing or wants to learn for

www.star-revue.com

April 2019

Gaelic League Branch Marches for Irish Language Rights

by Brett Yates

O

n March 17, the Brooklyn branch of the Gaelic League held its annual St. Patrick’s Day parade outside Rocky Sullivan’s, with members making a short loop from the bar on Beard Street to the shoreline at Erie Basin Park with flags and signs in hand. The political concerns of the group, however, extend far beyond Red Hook.

Douglas Hyde, who served as the first President of Ireland from 1938 to 1945, founded the Gaelic League in 1893 to promote the indigenous language of the Irish people. Gaeilge, as it’s known to its speakers, survived centuries of British colonialism and remains the primary daily language for about 75,000 people in mostly rural areas of Ireland.

In 1902, while living abroad, the Irish revolutionary Tom Clarke and his wife Kathleen Clarke followed Hyde’s example and established the Brooklyn Gaelic Society on Red Hook Lane, before returning home to plan the 1916 Easter Uprising against British rule in Ireland. Officially reestablished in 2016, today’s Brooklyn branch of the Gaelic League – called Cumann Cháitlín agus Thomáis Uí Chléirigh (which translates to “The Kathleen and Thomas Clarke Association”) – emerged out of the longstanding Tuesday night Irish language classes at Rocky Sullivan’s.

Its president is Chris Finnegan, and the group has about 30 members. Dáithí Mac Lochlainn, from Queens, currently handles the teaching duties. Four students have won Fulbright Ireland’s Summer Scholarships to study in Ire-

Red Hook Star-Revue

land. The classes are donation-based.

A Gaelic language, Irish belongs to the Celtic family, alongside Scottish, Breton, and Welsh. “Languages live by being spoken,” Mac Lochlainn said.

Kevin Rawdon comes from Marine Park to participate every week. A guitarist, he became interested in the Irish language due to his interest in Irish music.

“I also just wanted a second language in general, and this was the language of my grandparents,” he recalled. “This is the only place that’s really affordable to learn the Irish language.”

John Becker drives down from the Bronx to take part. “It’s very rare in the city that folks are willing to meet on a weekly basis to learn the Irish language, and I think that’s really precious,” he commented.

Mac Lochlainn, however, pointed out that, in recent years, pop-up Gaeltacht events have begun to appear throughout New York (and at Rocky Sullivan’s, too). Gaeltacht is the Irish word for an Irish-speaking region; the pop-ups are social events, often held at bars, where people get together to have friendly conversations entirely in Irish.

Cumann Cháitlín agus Thomáis Uí Chléirigh inaugurated its annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in 2016 as a show of solidarity during political demonstrations in Belfast, where protesters marched in support of a long-promised Irish Language Act, which would give Irish equal status with English in Northern Ireland. The constitution of the Republic of Ireland recognizes Irish as its “national language,” but in the United Kingdom’s Northern Ire-

Outside of Rocky Sullivans on Beard Street. (photos by Yantes)

land, Irish can’t be used in the courts or legislature, nor does it appear on public signage.

“It’s a human right,” said Red Hook resident Fachtna Ó hAodha, who grew up speaking Irish in Cork. “If you want to speak your language, you can speak your language.”

The Brooklyn branch of the Gaelic League continues to support the Irish Language Act, but the theme of 2019’s parade was Brexit. “Hard border? Soft border? No border at all!” was the slogan. A political partition has divided the island of Ireland since 1920, but the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union has renewed Irish nationalists’ hopes for a united, sovereign Ireland.

UK lawmakers recognize the danger of placing border checkpoints and customs inspectors on the currently open border between the Republic of Ireland (which will remain in the EU) and Northern Ireland only two decades after the end of the Troubles, whose violence plagued the border region. A proposed solution known as the “Irish backstop” would keep Northern Ireland in the EU’s customs union and single market and place the border somewhere instead in the North Channel, between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, creating a travel barrier within the UK itself.

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Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) – which in 2017 joined with the Conservative Party in the UK’s House of Commons to form Prime Minister Theresa May’s minority government – has rejected the Irish backstop out of fear that it would put Northern Ireland on a path to reunification with its southern neighbor. The right-wing, historically anti-Catholic DUP, which seeks to defend the “Britishness” of Northern Ireland (with its Protestant plurality) against the leftwing nationalist party Sinn Féin, also opposes the Irish Language Act, with one major DUP politician referring to Irish as a “leprechaun language.”

Mac Lochlainn believes that a united Ireland “will happen. I think it’s becoming inevitable.” He looks forward to the day when the Irish language will no longer carry “political baggage.”

Until then, Brooklyn’s Gaelic League members will march each St. Patrick’s Day. Chris Byrne, who performed traditional Irish songs at Rocky Sullivan’s after the parade, likes the simplicity of their event, which he held in contrast to “corporate” parades with product tie-ins. “There’s no schmaltz,” he explained. “It’s a grassroots expression of our Irishness, especially in terms of the Irish language, which is under attack, and we feel like we’re keeping the flag flying for the language.”

April 2019, Page 37

FOR SALE: 472 SMITH ST. $2,875,000

BumbleBeesRus’ Red Hook Location Celebrates Seventh Anniversary

by Erin DeGregorio

B

umbleBeesRus (BBRU) Child Day Care Center in Red Hook, located at 76 Lorraine Street, just celebrated its seventh year in the neighborhood last month. Jessica Figuly, who has been a part of the BumbleBees family for five years as the center director, said it’s been a pleasure to watch the center grow throughout the years.

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“BumbleBeesRus’ Lorraine Street location has become a staple in the community and we have so many local families that utilize our daycare services and refer their friends and family,” she told us.

Families, staff and students celebrated the occasion with cake and cookies in a room decked out in yellow and black decor. A giant board, filled with photos of family volunteers with their children, showcased all the activities the students have participated in to date. Families also had the chance to write and share what they loved most about BBRU on cute bee-themed stationary.

BBRU employee Jessica Lemmerman also has her two daughters, Kylie and Emmie, enrolled at the center.

She called BBRU a “home away from home” for her girls, who have been there for the last two years.

“They adore their teachers and are learning and growing every day because of them,” she said. “As a mom, nothing is more important than feel-

Page 38 Red Hook Star-Revue

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ing like my girls are safe, loved and well cared for.”

Grant Xavier Daley-Ortiz’s family wrote that they love the teachers’ attention to detail with the kids to make sure they’re meeting their milestones.

Jamir Ricot’s family wrote that the atmosphere is warm and loving, and that the staff gives parents a sense of security when they leave their kids.

The center currently offers many different services to families, including accepting HRA vouchers, ACS Early Learn vouchers, universal Pre-K, Head Start, and a partnership with Early Head Start. It also offers weekly extension courses, like music and movement, Spanish immersion, and yoga in some programs. Family Workers meet with families individually to help them accomplish their goals and host monthly parent workshops to give information to families on relevant topics.

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Osteoarthritis You get osteoarthritis when cartilage—the cushioning tissue within the joints—wears down. This produces stiffness and pain. The disease affects both men and women. By age 65, more than 50 percent of us have osteoarthritis in at least one joint.

You can get osteoarthritis in any joint, but it usually strikes those that support weight. Common signs of osteoarthritis include joint pain, swelling, and tenderness. However, only a third of people whose x-rays show osteoarthritis report any symptoms.

Treatments for osteoarthritis include exercise, joint care, dieting, medicines and surgery. For pain relief, doctors usually start with acetaminophen, the medicine in Tylenol, because the side effects are minimal. If acetaminophen does not relieve pain, then non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen and naproxen may be used.

The dietary supplements glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate are used by many who say the supplements can relieve the symptoms of osteoarthritis.

Rheumatoid Arthritis Rheumatoid arthritis, which is characterized by inflammation of the joint lining, is very different from osteoarthritis. It occurs when the immune system turns against the body. It not only affects the joints, but may also attack other parts of the body such as the lungs and eyes. People with rheumatoid arthritis may feel sick.

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Some drugs for rheumatoid arthritis relieve pain. Some reduce inflammation. And then there are the DMARDs (disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs), which can often slow the disease.

Gout Gout usually attacks at night. Stress, alcohol, drugs or an illness can trigger gout. It’s caused by a build-up of crystals of uric acid in a joint. Uric acid is in all human tissue and is found in foods.

Often, gout affects joints in the lower part of the body such as the ankles, heels, knees, and especially the big toes. The disease is more common in men. Early attacks usually subside within 3 to 10 days, even without treatment, and the next attack may not occur for months or even years.

Most people with gout are able to control their symptoms with treatment. The most common treatments are high doses of oral non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or corticosteroids, which are taken by mouth or injected into the affected joint. Patients often begin to improve within a few hours of treatment.

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April 2019, Page 39

Meet the Miccio’s New Director Roland Knight, by Nathan Weiser

T

he Miccio Center has a new program director. Roland Knight, who grew up in Red Hook, replaces the popular Trequan Bekka, who was promoted to a Good Shepherd facility in East New York.

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Knight, who wants to be present at as many community events as he can, has seen Red Hook change very much over the years, and in his opinion, it has changed for the better.

“It is a lot safer,” Knight said. “When I grew up in the early 90s there was a lot of volatile activity and a lot of drug activity going on. Those things have simmered down, which is really good.

Over the years we have more programs that are catered to getting our kids off the street and into something that is conducive for their success.”

The Red Hook Star-Revue is the community newspaper that goes both ways.

Before he accepted his current role at the Miccio Center he managed the COMPASS program at a charter school in East New York. His role consisted of being the director of programming for elementary school students.

This community center was around back when Knight was growing up, but back then it was run by the Police Athletic League. Good Shepherd has it as their mission to lead, provide and advocate for the participants and provide the services that are needed.

The new program director believes the Miccio provides a great space for the community, and one of his goals coming up is to partner with various organizations in Red Hook.

“I think there are a lot of resources here and we might not always communicate with each other,” said Knight, who’ll be “trying to figure out ways we can bring everyone together and see what is being provided for our youth and what ways we can collaborate and provide more services and things for our participants to be exposed to.”

At the Miccio all the programs are free. The participants are given a place where they can feel safe and learn something and develop socially, emotionally and physically.

the red hook

They have an after-school program throughout the school year for elementary and middle school students and they have evening and weekend programming for older ages.

The Rebound program, which is a work readiness program that uses basketball to help youth focus on their future, has operated at the Miccio Center. This is for ages 17-24.

“The Rebound program is a really good program,” Knight said. “I am checking in with them and chatting with them to see what kind of ways we can continue to collaborate.”

Another resource that the Miccio provides is summer camp for the community starting on July 2. They will be doing registration until the end of the school year.

The kids are taken on a trip once a week, are provided breakfast and have various activities scheduled throughout the day that Knight was in the process of putting together.

Various organizations also can sign up to use the space at the Miccio Center. They generally want about a one month warning from the organization, but if something comes up sooner they will try to make an accommodation.

“If someone wants to use the space, you would have to fill out a space request form or core locator form if you

want to provide services for a continuous amount of weeks,” Knight said.

“That has to be approved by us. For example, we have a coach that uses the gym for his basketball team, and he does it twice throughout the week.”

The core locator is a person or organization that regularly comes in to provide a specific service. There is a core locator that does a cooking workshop twice a week at night with teenagers.

This organization is called Teen Chef.

“They learn how to cook different dishes that are nutritious,” Knight said.

“Nutrition is something that humans need to be more conscientious of. We want them to be more conscientious of what they take in as far as food.”

There is also a regular weightlifting activity at the community center, they have a lounge where kids can play video games, there is a space where kids can do arts and crafts, and the gym is also regularly open for basketball tournaments or pick-up games.

“If there are any families that are looking for free services from Good Shepherd, please come on out,” Knight said.

We work hard to present you with an information and entertaining package of news, events and advertising that makes living in Brooklyn a little more intimate and friendly.

We are also here to listen to you.

You can send us letters to the editor, that we gladly print, we accept op-ed submissions on interesting topics, and if you have ideas for stories or tips we can use, please let us know.

If you happened upon this paper by chance and would like to be able to pick it up near you, drop us a line and we will get a stack of our free newspapers at a convenient location.

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STAR REVUE

THE NEW VOICE OF NEW YORK

StarRevue Greenwich Nursery

FOCUS

on Spring Planting

Gowanus Nursery’s been at three different locations since May 2003, but it currently has its roots at 9 Carroll St. It reopened on March 23 with business hours temporarily set for 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekends.

The nursery grows plants from seed that are rarely seen in the trade, such as talinum paniculatum (fame flower), dianthus cruentus, scutellaria ovata (heartleaf skullcap) and many others. Additionally it carries annuals, perennials, trees and shrubs that are also purchased from wholesale nurseries. Owner Michele Paladino said they’ve had some success this year with their native bluebells, which can be tricky to take care of and maintain over winter.

Paladino noted that her customers have been purchasing more perennials lately (which will come back year after year), rather than annuals (which last for one season). They usually come to the nursery mid-spring season and purchase plants that are in flower already because they’re color-starved after a grey winter landscape. But she recommends trying something new, like one that’s not in flower yet.

“Don’t carried away with all the things that are blooming now,” she said. “You’ll be much more fulfilled with plants that arc in different timetables: it’s better to purchase things that will surprise you and that you can observe in it’s full cycle rather than buying in full bloom.”

with Erin

GRDN

GRDN (103 Hoyt St.), a specialty garden and home in Boerum Hill, will be celebrating its 15th anniversary on April 2. It offers practical and stylish products for the urban gardener, including handmade pottery, outdoor containers, garden ornaments, tools, and garden furniture. There also offer a selection of outdoor and indoor plants.

People can purchase and enjoy forced indoor bulbs – like tulips, hyacinths and daffodils – now to really get into that springtime feeling. Owner Susanne Kongly also said customers can start to plant their seeds indoors at this time, so that they can be ready when the warmer weather finally comes.

“It’s exciting to watch the grass grow, so to speak,” she said with a laugh.

May is a good time to find and purchase perennial geraniums, columbine flowers, some early allium bulbs, bleeding hearts and viburnums. GRDN will also have lilac shrubs in June and will carry echinaceas (coneflowers), sages and grasses that usually peak in July.

Kongly told us that she’ll be focusing on annual and perennial herbs this year due to customer interest. She hopes to provide them with more information about different herbs, including different ways to incorporate culinary and medicinal ones in their lives.

For more information, visit grdnbklyn.com or call 718-797-3628.

Chelsea Garden Center

Paladino’s personal favorites are spring flowering shrubs – corylopsis (winterhazels), willows, sarcococca (winterbox), lindera (spicebush), prunus maritime (beach plum). But she also loves seeing perennials unfurl, including all the native woodland wildflowers, as they are a unique East Coast experience. For more information, visit gowanusnursery. com or call 917-716-8713.

Chelsea Garden Center, which currently has two locations in Red Hook and Williamsburg, has been in the plant and outdoor garden installation businesses since 1984. Its Red Hook spot (444 Van Brunt St.) just reopened on March 22 and received its first shipment of the season – which included Olga Mezitt rhododendrons, Japanese holly, blueberry bushes and weeping Japanese cherry trees. Seeds and windowsill kits will be available this month as well.

The nursery sells everything, from small succulents to large indoor trees – but a majority of customers’ purchases are nursery-grown bedding and vegetable plants. It also offers pansies, diascias and forced bulbs, which last seven to 10 days inside and two weeks outside. Unique indoor tropical plants get shipped up here from their trusted growers in Florida. Those plants, according to owner and Red Hook resident David Protell, are grown under shade (at different percentages) for a minimum of six months.

Protell told us that houseplants and greenhouse plants have increased in popularity. He also noted that tropical plants are just taking off, but more so at the Williamsburg location. Shade-loving ivies, phlox and hellebores have become more popular over the years and are “reasonably indestructible,” according to Protell. Herbs (such as Italian basil, Thai basil, rosemary, tarragon, and mints in five cultivars) are primarily available in four-inch pots.

They’re expanding their garden store in Red Hook, which will offer more houseplants, houseplant materials, and containers. For more information, visit chelseagardencenter.com or call 718-875-2100.

Home Depot

Fresh plants, garden flowers and trees are delivered weekly from local growers to the Home Depot located near the BQE (550 Hamilton Ave.). Their first shipment of the season, which included hundreds of different indoor and outdoor plants, arrived on March 27. Customers can also start from scratch with various seeds or purchase seed starter kits and mats, which were currently in stock as of the end of March.

Fairway

It’s open Mondays through Saturdays (6 am - midnight) and Sundays (8 am - 10 pm.)

Page 14 Red Hook Star-Revue

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Fairway Market (480-500 Van Brunt St.) has potted houseplants right when you walk through the entrance on the right-hand side. At the end of March they sold pink tulips, celestial night roses and cyclamen persicums. It’s open daily from 7 am - 10 pm.

April 2019

Red Hook Star-Revue

www.star-revue.com

April 2019, Page 27