Of the sophisticated, Symphony Space is usually impressive, with their Bloomsday on Broadway “celebration of life, language, and lust.” The event, which runs 7pm-1am and is simultaneously broadcasted on radio, is in its 29th year.

Symphony Space’s 2008 Bloomsday featured the penultimate chapter of the book, whose humor was elicited by the many actors (over 50) involved; although an absent Stephen Colbert made the playbill into a liar. (Colbert is often seen reading Ulysses in his show’s sketches.) Most interesting about the performance is the two and a half hour rendition – this year by Fionnula Flanagan (most well known for her Joyce work in theater and film) – of the novel’s last chapter, an interior monologue by Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife.

Elsewhere in New York, Bloosday on Staten Island promises to “gather neighbors to read selections …to make a little music, and to share ideas.” On the Upper East Side, the American Irish Historical Society (and the Consulate General of Ireland) is gathering to honor the decision by Judge John Gleeson to allow the publication of Ulysses, in 1933.

On June 15th the NYTimes wondered about the popularity of Bloomsday in the city. “Why New York? Aside from the obvious — a preponderance of Irish and Irish-American writers and actors and publicans — New York makes a cameo in the book,” pointing out that the novel was first published in New York, references the General Slocum disaster, and was defended against obscenity in New York City courts.

But Bloomsday in New York is so sensible most simply because of the familiarity of Joyce’s Dublin to New York. To the city, clean and dirty; begrudging and resplendent. It may be that instead of being served milk from a jug by an old woman (or fried kidneys, for that matter) in place of breakfast, many New Yorkers drink coffee and scoff at food until afternoon, but the constant stimulation and struggle of both cities reaches the heights of fiction; and the density. “Every life is many days,” another Ulysses character, Stephen, thinks, “day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.” Well, and that guy on the 1 train who keeps asking Where is the moon?, Where is the galaxy?

Most New Yorkers will honor Bloomsday in the most American way: by working. And ignoring it. This is wonderful. Ulysses is a book of action, after all, not “the thing” Henry James wrote of when explaining why he tried to remove his characters from the quotidian. From Buck Mulligan in the morning; to Bloom attempting to see what is beneath the dress of a statue in the afternoon; to Stephen’s collapse, Bloomsday is today. Wherever it is; wherever it is not. As Bloom thought when exiting cemetery grounds after an acquaintance’s funeral, Thank you. How grand we are this morning.

(originally published at thenewyorkgrapevine.com)

New York certainly looks good. As reported last week, the Mayor’s office glorified an FBI report which placed New York as the safest big city in the United States. Anyone who grew up watching New Jack City or The Warriors or Seven can remember New York to be the dirtiest, cruelest, most dangerous city imaginable. (My father recalls our family trip from the upstate NY sticks to Manhattan, where my siblings and I rolled up all the windows of the car on a hot August day to avoid pedestrians.)

The police state created by the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, and the public relations promoting the city, have sought to curb this unflattering reputation. The cost of such security is no glib question. Ben Franklin noted that those willing to sacrifice freedoms for security deserved neither. And while freedoms in the U.S. have generally been constricting – particularly in light of the PATRIOT and Military Commissions Acts – New York City has constricted with its citizens’ sacrifice.

Stephen Colbert once called Washington D.C. the marshmallow city, with a graham cracker crust of corruption. As New York has become more “gentrified” (a fancy word for ethnic cleansing?) Manhattan has marshmallowed. (See the recent NYTimes article, “No longer Majority Black, Harlem Is In Transition.”)

In 2008 the NPYD made 530,000 stop-and-frisks. (When an officer stops a civilian and frisks them for contraband.) A record. And 80% of them performed on Blacks or Latinos.

In 2009 the stop-and-frisks hit 575,000. A recent New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) lawsuit seeks to force the NYPD to purge its records of over 3 million people “whose personal information is being kept in the NYPD database,” contrary to state law. “The names and addresses of those stopped,” the report continues, ” “have been entered into the department’s database, regardless of whether the person had done anything wrong.”

Even The Daily News – after a laudatory and defensive opening paragraph – admits CompStat to be a “valuable crime management tool [which] has been subject to misuse.”

The NYPD database known as CompStat (Computer Statistics), is a particular organizational system that keeps track of the city’s crime almost as it happens, analyzes the data, and seeks solutions. A map, illustrating where crimes occurred – and with information about them – allows the Department to see where most of the crimes are occurring, and plan around it.

R. valeria Treves reported in Z Magazine in 2004 that, “A central aspect of CompStat is regular meetings … where precinct commanders are grilled by the NYPD top brass,” those without their boots on the ground, to use the Presidentially popular phrase. “The rhetoric and procedures center,” she continued, “center on the idea of ‘accountability’ and precinct commanders are rewarded or punished, depending on their performance,” noting how similar this is to contemporary practices in the U.S. educational system, of rewards and punishment; of success and failure measured by numbers.

An ongoing Village Voice series (“The NYPD Tapes”) details corruption in the NYPD, as gathered from recordings made my whistle blowing police. The tapes feature “NYPD superior officers encouraging street cops to manipulate crime statistics by downgrading crimes and intimidating crime victims.”

As the pressure for better numbers increases from the top on down, the ability for officers in the field to use discretion decreases. Quotas are quotas, and you’ve got to meet them. And not all policies are public, which is a tight spot for officers who will need to defend their actions to both a stated and unstated policy. Perhaps in 2010 we’ll hit 600,000 stop-and-frisks in New York. And it won’t be the stopper or the frisker who owns the responsibly.

(originally published at thenewyorkgrapevine.com)

Across the East River, there is talk of new construction on the squalid BQE; though when you ride the mogul-strewn FDR or pretty much the rest of the city, how much difference is there on the city’s highways?

The Brooklyn Paper is reporting on a “long overdue effort to shore up and modernize the aging BQE.” The DOT’s wonderful announcement stated that they were planning to “rehabilitate” the downtown Brooklyn section of the Interstate, at a cost of a cool $255 million. And even then, the BPaper quoted the DOT’s Peter King as saying, “To the extent that we can, we’ll bring it up to standards. But sometimes it’s not possible.”

But it is dangerous. “From 2004 to 2007, a total of 674 accidents were reported between Tillary and Congress streets – a figure that is 10 times the statewide average,” the article reported. And it is no less dangerous to the areas the BQE traverses.

One might be inclined to assume that neighborhoods around the BQE have higher rates of asthma, chronic bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses. The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOH), found this to be true in some areas, but not in others. Greenpoint residents, where the BQE was first put into play connecting Queens and Brooklyn at the Kosciusko Bridge, have less chance of having asthma than the rest of the borough, and all of the city. In Williamsburg and Bushwick, however, residents were almost twice as likely to have asthma. The DOH did not directly trace the asthma to the Interstate, but with the Earth itself sick from the fumes of automobiles, what chance has Brooklyn?

Many people who live close to the BQE, from Greenpoint to Fort Green, claim to have fresh dustings of black soot on areas near open windows. (I suppose they should follow the advice I received from one of the free doctors at the city health clinic when I myself complained of respiratory problems: Close your windows, always.)

Whatever happens with the BQE – and it will be years before the happening – the best that could come about is that community interests are considered chiefly; with the vision of another Robert Moses or two, but the sensibilities and optimism of George Washington Plunkitt in an 1882 NYTimes: “Once let a man grow up amidst Brooklyn’s cobblestones, with the odor of Newtown Creek and Gowanus Canal ever in his nostrils, and there’s no place for him except Brooklyn.” And may God keep our nostrils.

(originally published at thenewyorkgrapevine.com)

“High-foreclosure neighborhoods are at risk of experiencing a breakdown in their fundamental community structure,” the report continued, illustrating with charts and grafts that Southeast Queens, Bed-Stuy, and Easy New York were suffering the most through the hard times, with home auctions almost tripling.

Nevertheless, across Newtown Creek, in Queens, the city is moving forward with the waterfront plans at Hunters Point South. “After four years of planning and delays, the city will start soliciting bids” for the project, the NYTimes reported Monday.

(Fortunately, Bloomberg did agree to concede to the huge public disgust at his administration’s proposal to charge the homeless rent, so this massive building project in the face of hard times does not seem so hard-hearted.)

And in Manhattan things are really going wonderfully. A Reuters release Wednesday noted the increase in office leasing in the borough during May, seeing the least vacancy since 2006. Apartment sales in Manhattan, also, are “rebounding” and “surging,” with more apartments sold in 2010 than this time in 2009; a 57% increase, says Crain’s.

And in Midtown, Extell is moving ahead with the $1.3 billion skyscraper that will make Trump Tower look like a 3-story railroad. NYCurbed reported that the building, to be on 57th Street overlooking Central Park, is primarily funded by “Aabar Investment, a company controlled by the Abu Dhabi government” who “paid Extell for a majority stake in the project.” Hopefully the emirate will bring some of its good fortune (if not Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan) to the Apple, with the IMF recently predicting that Abu Dahbi’s economic “growth will return to 3.4%.”

As a recent front-page story in Greenpoint’s The Greenline made evident, the city is making the decisions around here, and the community’s preference does not much matter. The Greenline story, “Community Pushes Back,” details the fate of the site of the former Greenpoint Hospital, and “the city’s baffling decision to choose a private developer with no community history to develop” the site.

When the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) finally acquiesced to a community meeting – after making the decision on the developer without community input – the conflict was explained. The Greenpoint Gazette wrote that HPD’s “process makes no stipulations about prioritizing community groups for designation of city-owned sites.” Only the deranged might remember a government of the people, by the people, for the people. A government that is the people.

(originally published at thenewyorkgrapevine.com)

Further, while at Goldman, Steel “steered the firm’s strategy, oversaw its training and diversity initiatives, and served as its point person with regulators and key clients.” And then he became a regulator himself, just like Warren G. When called before Congress to defend the actions of the U.S Treasury during the bailouts, Steele claimed that the Fed had encouraged low prices for the dying banks because “the government did not want to encourage risky behavior by other large institutions.” This after years of not exactly oversight or restraint.

In the position of Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, Steel is replacing Robert Lieber, a former investment banker at Lehman Brothers, who is “leaving City Hall to return to the private sector.” Exactly as Bloomberg’s first appointee to the position, Dan Doctoroff, did; Doctoroff is currently earning for Bloomberg L.P.

In May, Steel made AlterNet’s America’s Ten Most Corrupt Capitalists list, pointing out that when the “FDIC wanted to put [Wachovia] through receivership ….Steel’s buddies at the Treasury and Fed intervened …and arranged a merger with Wells Fargo,” noting that Steel now serves on Fargo’s board of directors. Small world.

The Mayor hopes that Steel will “create jobs today and implement innovative measures.” One imagines they will be measures like those implemented at Goldman’s Equity Capital Markets, which Steel founded. The Mayor’s office boasts that while in this position, Steel was a “trusted advisor to European governments and corporations trying to privatize major state-owned enterprises.” With efforts to make private the cost of everything from homeless shelters to the schools and the sidewalks, the Steel choice is appropriate.

Incidentally, when I read the name Steel, I can’t help but think of Michael Steele, the GOP’s top goof. He is very humorous to recall. In the same laughable way that Steele has, Steel appeared on the Jim Cramer show in 2008, being introduced as “a visionary and a hard worker. Someone who gets it, and knows that the banking system is in big trouble.” Big enough to, as Matt Taibbi reported in Rolling Stone, obtain “himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as [Wachovia] was self-destructing.”

When Cramer sought Steel’s opinion about how we ended up in the mire that was 2008, Steel pointed out that for the last 6 to 8 years, “There was no penalty without risk” in the economy. “So everywhere people were taking on more risk.” So much so that, “people thought of their homes as ATMs.” Any fool can tell you the ATMs are at the state house.

Steel did show a heavy heart for Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, saying, “This is about people and their careers,” assuring Cramer that, “We’re working through this and we’re making progress,” defending the actions of the Fed, while cautioning with prescience about, “Unattractive unemployment signs coming forward.”

All that is missing from Robert Steel’s resume is the Hoover Institute and a sports franchise. That he’ll continue the Mayor’s policy of favoring private financing of the city is certain. As Jim Cramer said when greeting Steel for their interview, “You’re a reassuring face. Maybe you shouldn’t be, but you are.” And Steel’s response? The inexorably confident, “Well, I’m here.”

(originally published at thenewyorkgrapevine.com)

Elsewhere the pamphlet instructs that “it is very important to dispose of your trash properly. If you litter, your trash sadly can end up in places like Newtown Creek.” (The poetic phrase “your trash sadly” should be the name of the Plant’s house band.) “Sometimes,” the pamphlet continues, “you can see DEP skimmer boats collecting this floating materials from our waterways.” Or you can see what there was to be seen that fine afternoon on the Creek: huge barges of trash floating on the filthiest waterway this side of everywhere. (See accompanying photo.) Whatever DEP employee gets stuck skimming trash off of Newtown Creek must agonize in daily existential crisis.

The digesters are also known as “eggs” and even “shit tits.” This is well known by the staff at the Visitor Center, which was so very new and clean it was like an enormous photo op that no one showed up for.

The Visitor Center sits on Greenpoint Avenue, facing the public but, given the digesters and the enormous funnels that hover over a large part of the 53-acre site, not really the face of the Plant. The first floor of the Center is full of large colorful murals explaining what the Plant does, and how. Much attention is given to the New Croton Reservoir, upstate.

Ascending the stairs to the upper floor, we found a guide (whose name escapes) who was happy to show us her workplace. The upper floor, aside from more murals and the restrooms (which seemed out of place at a sewage plant) features a conference room for lectures, replete with a large model of the plant.

The Visitor Center, and its literature, are so clean as to be suspicious. Greenpoint has one of the richest and most polluted histories in the U.S. – from the Greenpoint Oil Spill to the Meeker Avenue Plumes; from Standard Oil to National Grid; from waste transfer stations to shit tits. This history is ignored by the Center, and seemed unknown to the staff. But this industrial havoc is the history of The Garden Spot of America, as Rep. John Rooney termed Greenpoint so many years ago.

While it does make one shudder to imagine, all I really wanted to see at the Plant that I did not see – somehow – was sewage. But I suppose that is what the Creek is for.

(originally published at thenewyorkgrapevine.com)

What is meant by “affordable”? The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) states that the “generally accepted definition of affordability” is housing costs not exceeding 30% of the family income. A report released this month from Citizens Budget Commission found that of households making less than $35,000, “citywide about 10 percent had affordable housing.”

The Working Families party, which supports the various Vacancy Decontrol bills, claims that the city and environs have lost 300,000 apartments “from rent and eviction protections and are no longer affordable.” Applying pressure to middle and low-income renters is no difficult thing for large and wealthy realty firms and their arsenal of lawyers and contracts, perhaps most notably Pinnacle Group, which is Praedium Group, which is Credit Suisse. A big company with these resources can, as was reported back in 2006, come at tenants with “threatening letters, eviction notices, and lawsuits.” Sure, the tenants can combat these in a David vs. Goliath adventure; but in the world of NYC realty, the small stone usually misses the mark – or strikes and bounces off the giant’s head.

Fortunately, May 3rd was officially New York City Affordable Housing Day, “marking the financing of 100,000 units of housing created or preserved” under Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan. (Like all American solutions, it must be market based.)

However, even the U.N. has gotten into the action on New York housing. In 2008, Special Rapporteur Raquel Rolnik visited New York and other U.S. cities, and cited the tactics of vacancy decontrol in her report. Citing specifically buildings with securitized mortgages that were sold and resold in what become the current bursting of the real estate bubble, the U.N. report found that “new owners [of these buildings] engage in aggressive tactics to evict residents in order to raise rents to subsequent residents, and eventually remove the building from the rent stabilization scheme.” The report also noted that these problems, “the impacts of predatory equity,” were being felt hardest in New York of all U.S. cities studied.

The Vacancy Decontrol bills are being pushed by many community minded politicians. The New York State Conference of Black Senators has included it on their 2010 Signature Agenda – which seeks to bring attention to bills not being voted on in the Senate. But without support of powerful Senators like Dilan and Espada, the bills do not look to be anywhere close to a vote; much less implementation.

(originally published at thenewyorkgrapevine.com)

(In an amazing display of NYers patience, “Lack of public transportation” was at the bottom of the list.)

Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group for pedestrians, ranked the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods in a 2004 report. East 33rd Street & Park Avenue taking the gold; and Utica Avenue & Eastern Parkway topping the list for Brooklyn.

A recent New York Post article, however, details that at 256 traffic deaths, 2009 was the safest year in New York history. A 2009 “Dangerous by Design” report from Surface Transportation Policy Partnership and Transportation for America, ranked New York 50th in most dangerous cities for pedestrians. New York is off the charts, at 6 percent, regarding the “percent of workers walking to work.” The only other city on the list coming close being Boston, at 4.6 percent.

Fortunately, City Council, the Mayor’s office, and many campaign groups are uniting to take action with the campaign, Complete Streets Week: Making New York Walkable for All Generations. This campaign seeks to study and collect data on the city’s most dangerous intersections; the data to be put towards refinement in traffic organization in the city.

The study, the City Council states, aims to detail the “factors that impact walker safety including traffic and crossing signals, crosswalk markings, and speed limits.”

Neighbors Allied for Growth-Brooklyn (NAG), a community group, hopes that the study will “provide the local police precinct,” as well as state and city governmental departments, “with data that shows the desperate need for both traffic enforcement and traffic calming” in the most hazardous locations.

Kings County need the attention, and no mistake, with NBCNY reporting that Brooklyn has the highest number of pedestrian fatalities of the five boroughs.

On the other side, a 2007 NYTimes article chided the concerns of “groups like Transportation Alternatives,” reporting that, “There were 232 pedestrian deaths in 1910, when records were first kept.” Only 24 less than today’s numbers, and this with mostly horse and buggy. The numbers “soared to the 700s in the 1920s and peaked in 1929, when 952 were killed on foot,” over two-and-a-half deaths per day. One can take solace that such an outrageous number of pedestrian fatalities is no longer with us. But the need to reduce the number further, and make a walking city safe for walkers – both agile and not – is such a credible concern that it seems (forgive me) pedestrian.

(originally published at thenewyorkgrapevine.com)

The Wall Street Journal reports on accusations that Cuomo’s chosen running mate, Rochester Mayor Patrick Duffy, is a “‘double dipper,’ …the practice of government employees collecting salaries and public pensions at the same time.” Cuomo had previously chastised the practice.

Reporting on a tit-for-tat between opponents Cuomo and Rick Lazio, the New York Post feeds into the ongoing between the two: Cuomo’s too much a government insider, and Lazio is a corporate hound. However, given NYPIRG’s point about the “revolving door” when “Top legislative staffers and political party leaders are allowed to become lobbyists without a suitable ‘cooling off’ period,” this is an irrelevant argument.

The two candidates’ argument is a wonderful fog of war, similar to the great attention given to the differences between Republican and Democrat, instead of their vast similarities. When billions where being dished out during the financial crisis, without a minute to spare, to enormous financial institutions, who had seen similar bailouts in the past, the revolving door could not have been more apparent.

Meanwhile, the NYTimes recently reported in a shocking headline, “Adviser to Cuomo Is Also Top Lobbyist,” referring to Jennifer Cunningham. The Times quoted Phil Singer, a Cuomo campaign consultant, as saying “She has never been paid by Andrew’s campaign, nor has she ever lobbied him or his office on any matter whatsoever.”

“Lobbying” makes it sound official, as though to mean, “She never called the secretary and made an appointment with Cuomo and came to see him during office hours.” Okay, but did they go out and dinner and discuss their working lives? I sometimes get to thinking that if my friend Derik ended up in City Hall, the city might start taking an interest in my preferences.

It is worth mentioning that Cuomo’s work as Clinton Administration Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is not well remembered. The Village Voice reported in 2008 that Cuomo “took actions that … helped plunge Fannie and Freddie [Mac] into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments.” To be fair, the Voice also called Lazio “a loyal servant to Wall Street … a patsy for profit.”

Cuomo’s campaign ads are heavy on the employment aspect. The scary to sunny “Works For You” claims that Cuomo does not work for insurance companies or banks, but instead for homeless, students, consumers and taxpayers who “are outraged by Wall Street bonuses.”

Rick Lazio’s campaign site, meanwhile, does not feature campaign ads exactly, though is pretty heavy in the “Andrew Cuomo is a liar” field, charging that Cuomo has been “Too political for too long.” And then Cuomo will tell Lazio that he’s a corporate drone, and back and forth…

(originally published at thenewyorkgrapevine.com)

The “broken windows” strategy means, as the University of Chicago Law Review stated, “More aggressive enforcement of minor misdemeanor laws, also known as ‘order maintenance’ policing.” What any authority knows is that to allow one to disobey (however slight the offense) is to allow all to cavort and misbehave at will. It is what, in international affairs, Noam Chomsky calls “The mafia principle,” that every offense must be quickly and harshly punished, “so that others understand that disobedience is not an option.”

It is difficult to imagine much disobedience in neighborhoods as thoroughly policed as most of Manhattan and much of Brooklyn. Gothamist recently reported (admittedly unsubstantiated) that the NYPD referred to hipsters as marshmallows, as the privileged are often very sweet….

Meanwhile, The Daily News is reporting that much of the upsurge in murders and shootings is taking place in East New York, where the infant mortality rate (IMR) is 10.5%; as opposed to Manhattan’s 4.4%; and Williamsburg-Greenpoint’s 4.1%. Only Brownsville and East Jamaica top East New York in the statistics from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Maybe the privileged are not desperate and disparate enough for the necessity of or vulnerability to crime. Or, like a beautiful yeast or phoenix, their rising is preferential, and needs no suppression.

New York is, of course, often paradise in comparison to say, Afghanistan, where the IMR is 151.5%, while a recent report from Citizen’s Council for Public Security ranks Ciudad Juarez, Caracas, and New Orleans (respectively) as the murder capitals of the world, the U.S. city at 95 murders per 100,000, outranking Baghdad.

The best suppression of crime is opportunity, as the recent World Bank report (the Human Opportunity Index) demonstrated: education, access to resources. Yeast, like raisins in suns and phoenixes, rises and rises, and spills over, and again.

(originally published at thenewyorkgrapevine.com)