Shaun Richman

June 20, 2009July 17, 2023

Life in Brooklyn / I Like Birds

I’m slowly getting accustomed to life in South Brooklyn. Bay Ridge might wind up being the perfect neighborhood for me, in all of its remote and eccentric charm. It’s very quiet and beautiful down here, with the stately Verrazano bridge towering over everything. My own view of the bridge is minimal. You have to crane your neck out my bedroom window to see the very tippy-top of the eastern spire over an abandoned construction site.

The fog rolls off the harbor and blankets the neighborhood with a strangely comforting regularity. It can make driving over the Verrazano feel like walking through the London streets of a Jack the Ripper story. The foghorns of passing ships lull me to sleep, or gently awake me like the distant clickety-clack of the Long Island Rail Road in the house in which I grew up.

I can’t look at the rocket launch
The trophy wives of the astronauts

Bay Ridge is about as old timey as Brooklyn gets. The bridge connects two military bases. I’m not sure what’s still housed at Fort Hamilton except for a VA hospital, but the neighborhood is dotted with armed forces recruitment centers. The local barbershops offer free haircuts to servicemen, and front lawns still display their “Support the Troops” signs, faded and yellowed.

And I won’t listen to their words
’cause I like birds

I spend most of my time in New Jersey, or on the road, for work, so, so far, Bay Ridge is more of a bedroom community for me than much of a real home. I haven’t checked out nearly enough of the local restaurants and bars. I’m a little too reliant on take-out (particularly for a nabe lacking in any Mexican food).

I don’t care for walkin’ downtown
Crazy auto car gonna mow me down

The whole driving-between-Jersey-and-Brooklyn thing has made me even less keen on ever going in to Manhattan. My car’s been in the shop this week, so I’ve been having to take the N/R to Penn Station to take the Jersey Transit. It’s an inhuman squeeze.

Look at all the people like cows in a herd
Well, I like birds

Our Congressional district is lumped in with Staten Island, and, until last year, we were the only district in NYC to send a Republican to Congress. Early on, while at brunch at a local pub, I overheard a bunch of middle-aged bellyachers complaining about the upcoming MLK holiday and speculating that with our new (BLACK!!!) president it was the first of many such holidays. Next up, Huey P. Newton Day!

I can’t stand in line at the store
The mean little people are such a bore

duck took a while to get used to the new digs. While our we were in storage, waiting to close, we stayed in a studio apartment, which greatly comforted the clingy little beast. Now in a far more spacious two bedroom, she spent her first weeks getting lost in each new room and crying. Eventually, she rediscovered the joy of windows.

Although we are once again on the second floor, this time our windows face the quiet parking lot of a church, as opposed to a busy boulevard with buses driving noisily past. Up on the window sill, duck gets calmer and actually shuts up for a change. She seemed to take a particular interest in the birds.

But it’s all right if you act like a turd
’cause I like birds

I bought a bird feeder to encourage the wee winged ones to gather by our fire escape. The bird feed label promised to attract blue jays, cardinals and other “attractive outdoor pets” (as opposed to those dead common finches and pidgeons), and, boy, did it deliver.

If you’re small and on a search
I’ve got a feeder for you to perch on

I can’t yet name every variety of bird that’s stopped by my fire escape for a quick meal. I’m not quite at the point of buying a book to recognize them, although, it occurs to me that since grandma died it does fall to someone to be the family’s resident birdwatcher.

For now, I may content myself with hanging up a second feeder and filling it with a different kind of bird feed, just to see if I can increase the biodiversity of the fire escape. Maybe I’ll add a small plant, who knows?

I’ve got a feeder for you to perch on
Yeah, I’ve got a feeder for you to perch on

(Apologies to Mark Oliver Everett)

May 10, 2009July 17, 2023

“Ever Get The Feeling…”

Finally watching Julian Temple’s revisionist Sex Pistols documentary, “The Filth and the Fury,” I get the feeling that perhaps I wasn’t cheated after all. Like many 15-year-olds, the Sex Pistols for me were a gateway to new rebellion and new friends. I bought every officially released note of music and a goodly amount of bootlegs, eagerly read every book or article I could about them and sought out every interview I could with John Lydon, as he was legally obligated to call himself back then. (In fact, I was tuning in to W-DRE for an interview with Lydon on the occasion of the publication of his new memoir when I learned of Kurt Cobain’s suicide.)

The Pistols had the kind of attitude that only a 15-year-old could love. Spitting, sneering swagger. Vague contempt for authority (who? why?). Non-conformist and no respect for rock-n-roll as an “Institution.”

And then you grow up, and you start to think that instead of being some kind of truth-telling iconoclastic leader, that maybe John Lydon (nee Rotten) is a wee bit autistic and just generally a prick. And perhaps a bunch of nabobs wearing identical black leather jackets and purple mohawks are victims of the worst kind of conformity. And perhaps rebellion requires a specific target and grievance. And, worst of all, perhaps punk rock, as ritualistic rebellion against record labels and Elvis Presley has become a kind of institution itself. And then the Sex Pistols regroup for a couple of cash-in nostalgia tours, and you put away your Pistols records for fifteen years or so.

Well, the music still packs a punch. And Lydon can still focus his withering rage with a laser-like focus (if only Temple could more specifically place the Pistols and the punk rock movement in their particular geopolitical moment). But, mostly, “The Filth and the Fury” finds surprising pathos in the pathetic story of John Simon Ritchie (nee Sid Vicious). Throughout the film, Temple weaves in an interview with Vicious recorded after the Pistols breakup but before his New York adventures. With a stupid bloody scab on his face, Vicious comes across as both a pathetic junky and the scared little kid (he couldn’t have been more than 19-years-old). He just seems so tragically overwhelmed by circumstances. The poor kid can’t even manage a poker face, a facade or even a no comment. Instead, he plainly and meekly complains that he doesn’t want to be a junky all his life, and describes in excruciating detail the pain of junk withdrawal. Elsewhere, some prescient videographer documents, the uneasy co-dependent co-existence he shared with groupie/murder victim Nancy Spungeon. If the tears that John Lydon chokes back in remembrance (far more effectively recorded in the shadows than if Temple had focused a spotlight) don’t get you choked up, then maybe you’re as black-hearted as the film’s villain, Malcolm McClaren, who profited from Sid’s pathetic end.

The film was good enough that it inspired me to rip my old Pistols CDs onto my digital audio player (no brand names, comrades). Would that someone would do for Nirvana for today’s 15-year-olds, fifteen years hence.

April 21, 2009July 17, 2023

Sussex CCC: Respect Your Employees!

Nearly three years after organizing their union, the professional and support staff at Sussex County Community College have had to endure union-busting efforts and attacks on their free speech rights.

Take action by telling the college administration to respect their employees’ rights and bargain in good faith with the American Federation of Teachers, and join us on Tuesday, April 28 from 4:30 to 6:00 for a rally in support of the union at Sussex CCC.

One College Hill Road, Newton, NJ 08760.
Call 413-627-6490 for more information.

April 11, 2009July 17, 2023

Pirates of the New Economy

Skylar Deleon should have waited five years. The former child actor (he was a bit player on “The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” not, alas, an actual Power Ranger) was sentenced to die by lethal injection for the murder of Thomas and Jackie Hawks. In November of 2004, Deleon responded to an advertisement that the Hawks had posted to sell their yacht, the Well Deserved (and, no, I’m not making this up), and joined them for a test drive (or whatever the nautical equivalent of a test drive is). When they got out into the ocean Deleon forced the Hawks to sign over the title to the yacht, tied the couple to an anchor and dropped them to the bottom of the ocean.

Deleon planned to get away from his financial problems and sail to Mexico. Apparently, after the “Power Rangers,” Deleon had a Forest Gump-like knack for stumbling through the cultural zeitgeist and swindled a living as a mortgage broker and “entrepreneur.” Today, a lot of us have financial problems, and owning a yacht is a luxury that people seem all-too-willing to walk away from. According to the NY Times, as boat owners face difficulty making payments on loans and dock slips, many owners are simply unmooring their boats and letting them float out to sea. These abandoned boats are an environmental hazard, and localities are rushing to pass laws to outlaw the abandonment of a sea vessel.

Florida officials say they are moving more aggressively to track down owners and are also starting to unclog the local inlets, harbors, swamps and rivers. The state appropriated funds to remove 118 derelicts this summer, up from only a handful last year.

In South Carolina, four government investigators started canvassing the state’s waterways in January. They quickly identified 150 likely derelicts.

[snip]

Crab Bank, a protected bird rookery in the harbor within sight of Fort Sumter, is home to a dozen derelicts — two sunken, two beached, the other eight still afloat. They range from houseboats to a two-masted sailboat.

It’s not hard to see where this trend will end up: Piracy! I’m only half-kidding. If a two-bit punk like Skylar Deleon could resort to double homicide and theft to realize a fantasy of sailing away to Mexico to continue a career of pettier larceny and confidence schemes during a relatively decent economy, what we’ve got now is a whole lot more desperate unemployed people out there, a small flotilla of houseboats, yachts and speedboats and the compelling example of the very successful Somali pirates.

I’m almost tempted to spit on my hands and hoist the black flag, myself. Of course, as a pacifist, I need to tweak the Somali model of piracy. Perhaps I could sail alongside civilian yachts, climb aboard, look really menacing and then announce that I have Snickers bars for sale “not to raise money for my basketball team or my school, but to put money in my pocket and keep me out of trouble.”