“What’s next here, Jay-Z?”
The reunited semi-replaced Replacements are coming to NYC. I feel slightly uneasy about that fact, but I’m quite excited about the venue: the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium! The old home of the US Open is a legendary rock concert venue. It’s legendary mostly for time and place. The sound system was apparently awful, the aisles and backstage cramped and the streets and train stations overwhelmed by the throngs of rampaging kids. But at a time that rock-n-roll and youth culture were surging and there wasn’t much in the way of non-classical concert venues, the stadium served as a useful home for some of the first big New York concerts by The Beatles, Dylan, the Doors, the Stones – you name it. When I lived a few blocks away, the stadium had long been supplanted by Arthur Ashe at Flushing Meadows. It was a quiet relic. I’m not sure what went […]
Developmental Diversity
My hometown’s getting a bit of a black eye from the NY Times this weekend. On Friday, the Grey Lady published a profile of Bellerose (a few blocks from my Floral Park and “across the street from Nassau County,” take note), where our local drive-in Frozen Cup ice cream shop is being bulldozed to make way for a new sex hotel. This is one of many changes, notes Times scribe James Angelos: The closing of the beloved neighborhood spot strikes many residents as simply the latest sign of the death of old Bellerose. The bowling alley, another local hangout that some considered the beating heart of Bellerose, closed a few years back, to eventually be replaced by a Staples, among other stores. Several years ago, the nearby movie theater closed, and the building now houses a martial arts supply business. I played in a youth league at the Bellerose Lanes, […]
Goodbye, Queens. Hello, Brooklyn
I’m not a well-traveled person. I secured a reputation of sorts in grad school, on the first day of Elaine Bernard’s global labor movements class. As we went around the room for introductions, and everyone explained who they were and where they came from (yes, yes, they were the union, the mighty, might union) and discussed their various international contacts and trips abroad, I introduced myself with a flip “Shaun Richman, AFT, Queens, NY. Frankly, I’m uncomfortable leaving Queens.” I’ve spent my entire life – nearly 30 years of it – in this fine borough, but all things have an end. I finally received an acceptable offer on my apartment. I signed the contract of sale on Friday and will be gone by November. I’m looking to move to Brooklyn, someplace close to the Belt Parkway and the Verrazano Bridge, and within an hour of midtown by subway. Someplace quiet, […]
The Land Where It’s Never Christmas
The Guardian of London has a heart-warming seasonal story about a small town called North Pole in Alaska, where it’s Christmas 365 days a year and all the town’s residents (including the school children) answer “letters to Santa” that come in from around the world. Last spring, a group of about a dozen of North Pole’s sixth graders were caught “making a list and checking it twice.” Their Columbine-style massacre plot was narrowly thwarted. Perhaps the incessant holiday “cheer” drove them to it, writer Jon Ronson wonders? I was thinking about North Pole while doing some grocery shopping this morning in Kew Gardens, the Land Where It’s Never Christmas. All the shops are open as normal. Perhaps they’ll close an hour early for the big day in deference to the rest of society. There are no Santas around, the streetlights are plain and unadorned and almost no houses are decorated. […]
Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman
Given my relentless campaign to promote “the Q” (that’s the totally rad nickname that all the hipsters will soon be calling my neighborhood, Kew Gardens), I was delighted to find that Hollywood produces blocked off much of the intersection of Austin St. and Lefferts Blvd. this past weekend to shoot scenes for Spiderman 3 (there’s already a teaser trailer, even though the movie won’t be out until next summer). Hopefully, Spidey will swing past the Kew Gardens Cinema slowly enough for viewers to admire the fine selection of independent and art house flicks being offered, grab a knosh from Baker’s Dozen (which Alan Amalgamated promotes as “Scrumptious Bagels” – oh, yeah, he’s on “the Q” team!) and land for a slice at Dani’s House of Pizza. That way, next summer, throngs of movie fans will swarm to “the Q,” and raise the property value of my own real estate empire. […]
Left Field Day at Shea
Join the Socialist Party on Tuesday, September 13 at 7:00 for “Left Field Day at Shea.” We’ve got a block of seats for the Mets vs. Nationals baseball game, so the New York Mets will welcome the Socialist Party on the scoreboard! Tickets are only $5, and we’ll all be sitting together way out in the left field upper deck. Despite a few bad games lately, the Mets are in a wild card race, so the game itself should be exciting, but we’ll also be taking the opportunity to protest the war in Iraq, public money stadium giveaways and corporate sponsorship stadium names. Bring a sign. Bring a kazoo. Bring your wacky commie newspapers. To sit with the Socialist Party, get in touch with me ASAP. There are a few tickets left.
The Soul of Street Art
It’s hard to decide which side is more annoying in the recent furor over subway graffiti, art and New York’s bad old days. On the one side, you have Mark Echo, a former graffiti artist and current clothing designer and mini-mogul. Echo recently held a ‘graffiti party,’ in which a couple dozen artists tagged up a totally fake-looking cardboard facade of a subway car, in a supposed celebration of the street art and hip hop that sprang out of City Hall’s abandonment of black and latino neighborhoods during the fiscal crisis in the 70’s. In reality, Echo is repackaging and commodifying that old youth rebellion in order to relive a bit of his youth and, well, to sell a bunch of clothes and stuff. All youth rebellion eventually gets coopted, but it’s far worse when it is self-inflicted, even if delayed. On the other side is Mayor Mike, and the […]
The Column That Never Was
The column that I was hired to write for a certain Queens weekly has been canceled before the first piece was even published. That piece, a critical look at the fall-out from Congressman Greg Meeks’ support for CAFTA, did not appear in this past Thursday’s issue, although an editorial lavishing praise on the Congressman for his championing of banks over people, was featured rather prominently. I called to find out what happened, and was told the next day that Rep. Meeks had called the newspaper to complain about the previous post that appeared on this blarg. That’s all, she wrote. The managing editor – who hired me – explained over and over that “integrity” is really important to the paper, and that I had really crossed a line by posting the Congressman’s voicemail message to me, without explaining that I had called him first. Of course, I explained that I […]
Meeks and CAFTA: Follow the Money
Gregory Meeks is catching well-deserved heat for his support of the Central American Free Trade Agreement – a NAFTA-style trade deal that narrowly passed in Congress last month. Defeating the bill was the top political objective of organized labor this summer, and Meeks was one of only 15 Democratic congressmen to join with Bush and the Republicans in supporting the bill. Meeks has enjoyed dependable support from labor – over a quarter of all financial contributions to his 2004 re-election came from unions and his name has appeared on the Working Families ballot line for the last three election cycles – but now there are many in the labor movement demanding that he be cut off from any further support. The Working Families party, and many of the city’s labor unions, will be sending mailings to 75,000 union members who live in Meeks’ district, documenting the damage of CAFTA, while […]
Congressman Meeks on the Defensive
On July 27, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed CAFTA by a vote of 217 to 215, thanks to 15 Democrats who went to the other side and voted with the Bush regime for multinational corporate interests. My representative, Gregory Meeks was one of the “CAFTA 15”. Like any good citizen, I called his office before the vote to express my opposition to the bill. Now that the bill has passed, I have a new card to play. I have recently been hired to write a new bi-weekly column for the Times Ledger newspaper group in Queens (Queens’ largest community newspaper, with over 50,000 paid subscribers). My first article should appear either this Thursday or next and will focus on the fallout from Meeks’ vote. On Sunday, I attended a press conference organized by the Working Families party, and attended by representatives of labor unions in the AFL-CIO and […]