March Madness

Last week, in East Flatbush, two New York cops shot 16 year-old Kimani Gray eleven times, believing Gray held a weapon while making threatening gestures towards the undercover officers.  Eyewitnesses claim the boy was fired on while lying on the ground, and that he was unarmed, though a .38-caliber Rohm's Industry revolver was reported to have been found at the scene. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly spoke to the press about the investigation.

The killing inspired a mass vigil by local Brooklyn mourners, but soon reports of looting at a nearby Rite Aid escalated police response.


A community march was organized the following evening from 52nd Street and Church Avenue to the 67th Precinct, and included activist members of Stop Stop-and-Frisk, the Malcolm X Grass Roots Movement, the New Black Panthers, Mothers Resist, and Picture the Homeless.  The march was blockaded by riot cops, mounted police and two helicopters.

The next night “nearly four dozen” people were arrested demonstrating in East Flatbush.  On Saturday, District 45 City Councilman Jumaane Williams organized a student workshop called "Students Taking Action Today," at Samuel J. Tilden High School.  The community event offered students "know your rights" training and primers on social activism, gang violence and police action.  There was also a radical performance by teen step dancers Limitless Regime.  “We decided to come because we wanted to show love for the person that died,” said 16 year old Kristina Agosto, “and inspire people through our step and the message we give in our step.” 


Last week also marked the anniversary of the 1965 Selma-Montgomery marches in support of black voting rights in Alabama. 

When SCLC field secretary James Orange was arrested in Marion, Alabama, demonstrators marched from Zion United Methodist Church to the city jail.  The marchers were pushed back by police and took refuge in Mack’s CafĂ©, where 26 year-old Jimmy Lee Jackson was beaten and shot by police while shielding his mother and father.


Jackson suffered eight days before dying from the stomach wound, and 45 years later retired state trooper James Bonard Fowler was sentenced to six months in jail for the shooting.


In response to Jackson's murder, civil rights groups SCLC and SNCC organized a march from Selma to the state capital.  As with last week's marches in East Flatbush, where factions of demonstrators split between Councilman Williams, who sought to corral mourners at a local church, and the rowdier outsider group End Stop and Frisk agitator Jose LaSalle, who called on followers to confront the police at the barricaded precinct headquarters, members of SCLC and SNCC often clashed on tactics.  SNCC wanted to avoid association with the politicking of the much larger and mainstream SCLC, while SCLC was cautious to adopt SNCC's bruise-browed ethos and backroads militancy.



The Selma marchers were besieged by Alabama law enforcement at Pettus Bridge.  


A white Unitarian minister, James Reeb, who had come from Boston to participate in the Selma protests, was later attacked at a local “integrated” restaurant by white thugs, and died two days later from club wounds to the head.  Reeb’s death made national headlines and was eulogized by Martin Luther King.   



President Johnson sent a private plane to escort Reeb’s widow, and made a speech in support of the Voting Rights Act which in his signature Texan drawl co-opted the archetypal mantra of the movement, "We Shall Overcome."  



As SNCC organizer and intellectual James Forman noted, "we felt that federal government should be utilized to break the power of the reactionary racist state governments, because people were living in a climate of fear from the state governors and sheriffs and so forth. And that we had to have some fire to break this grip of fear and this torture and terror inflicted throughout the South... and we were successful in that."

The resulting national attention to the unrest in Alabama, triggered by Reeb's death, served to popularize the President's signing of the Act in August. 



Issues related to Section 5 of the Act, which allows federal intervention in the election process of States where voter discrimination is “disproportionately concentrated,” will be decided by the Supreme Court this June.  In Shelby County v. Holder, local districts in Mississippi are disputing the oversight of the Justice Department which the 1965 Act initiated in State voting laws to ensure racial disenfranchisement would abate.


Also this past week was the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.  When the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, allowing black men to vote, Harper's Bazaar satirized the change by comparing ethnic politics to a mud-pit of Irish brats.  Anglo city fathers saw no difference between the freed slave and County Cork boglander...



Faith & Begora

"I'd rather hold
my Irish rose
than handcuffs
made of whiskey,

And anyway
I'm outta punts
and Farley's pub
won't miss me!"

Mrs. Murphy's Chowder(.mp3)





 

Madison Square Park

The Metropolitan Life Tower, Napoleon LeBrun and Sons, 1909. Take a guess which of the two installations was created by the same designer of Schuylkill County Prison?





Tadashi Kawamata, 2008-09 and the Flatiron Building, Daniel Burnham, 1902.

The Croisic Building, Frederick C. Browne, 1910.

Wisdom, Frederick Wellington Ruckstull, NY Supreme Court Appellate Division, the late Mauve Years.

Clock, Fifth Avenue Building, green light.

Conjoined and Fifth Avenue.

Public Bathroom, Madison Sq. Park Conservancy, 2008.
Clock, Fifth Avenue Building, red light.
MetLife Tower, 17th Floor of The Croisic Building.

Managing Mailer, by Joe Flaherty (1969)


Joe Flaherty invokes the gravely droll figurative acuity of Henry James and the sweepingly intellectual semantics of Edith Wharton in reconvocating the experience of running the Mailer/Breslin Democratic primary ticket for New York City Mayor in 1968. Such a traditionally imaginative manner of prose is an effective inversion of the riotous Situationalism of the Mailer/Breslin campaign – student takeovers of Queen College; chic Fitzgeraldian post-populuxe cocktail parties at Gloria Steinem’s silk stocking district apartment; Jimmy Breslin’s typically macho Irish fragile alcholic sensitivity breakdown and almost abandoning the cause for good when Mailer wins the Pulitzer Prize; fundraising bashes at the hippie dippie Village Gate where Mailer treats the staid psychedelic stage like a dingy Southern front porch and tirades in his favored blowzy redneck Sheriff voice against liberal youths and Jews and uses un-idioms strictly from the old barracks like “up your screw.”

The book is a rare document of the mid-Lindsay era, when WWII and Korea vets grew thick sideburns and styled their hairs as do the caricatures on the paperback cover art. It is a time when American identity might have been at its most uproariously confused since the 19-oughts, and the nexus of that absorption of beinghoods was New York City, the turf clubs of Right & Left, the 50% polyester suits and 3/4 leather boots, the Forty Deuce grindhouses and Fun City Ivy Leaguers on the City payroll, when a novelist persona might exalt as a controversial media lark and command the resources to formulize a platform. It is of course absurd and totally inaccurate to future thinking that the platform is reduced to transforming New York City into “The 51st State,” but a radical idea by a radical personality during radical times. And Mailer does act like a brute hamfisted jester, with his orotund full-page ads and silly radio jingles and profanity-splotched zingers (the campaign slogan: “No More Bullshit”).


Flaherty keeps his hero continually sincere – Mailer may appear a dadaist but only beMailer in actioncause on stage he debates a bunch of dry stiffs. For all Mailer’s theatrics, he seems to perform best in quiet settings, like the Union Theological Seminary, and before NYPD administrators in a classroom on East 20th Street. Mailer is least sardonic about the idea of city neighborhoods put in charge of themselves, where communities are enabled to answer to their own cultural infrastructures, set-up with their own City Halls, rather than the usual Big Apple methodology of all areas hovering in on the grand nub of Manhattan like the last open bunker before the bomb drops. Mailer is much more articulate by way of rambunctiously nuanced rhetoric than about how particular philosophy might be executed (though Flaherty claims various position papers drafted by the campaign were later mined for bullet points by other U.S. cities). Just after Mailer was pushing for City statehood, Leon Panetta – Obama’s CIA director – would intimate the same proposition from Lindsay’s camp, but without also pushing for free interborough bikes and Sweet Sundays when city-wide electricity is turned off for a spate.

Wyckoff Heights, Queens, New York City

Old Bar Sign, Cypress Avenue & Stockholm Street.



 Onderdonk Avenue. 

Wyckoff Avenue & Broadway.


Liquor Stor, Onderdonk Avenue. 

Bodega, Wyckoff Avenue. 

Cafe Europa, Cypress Avenue.

Front hallway, 426 Himrod St.