archive
Revelers toast at One Stop Beer Shop. Photo by Benjamin Lozovsky
The baby boomers had their revolution—civil rights, women’s rights, anti-war, anti-poverty—and now their children are having their own: the craft beer revolution. Thank God, because for a while there, everybody was worried that kids born after 1975 were becoming permanent slackers.
By Phil DePaolo
The latest contested issue in Williamsburg is the attempt by former Manhattan City Council Member Eva Moskowitz, who turned entrepreneur, to open her brand of for-profit charter school (Brooklyn Success Academy Charter School) at the same location as JHS 50, at 183 South 3rd Street. The school, which houses 470 middle school students, also houses another public school, the Academy for Young Writers, which is scheduled to move elsewhere. At a recent hearing, hundreds of local residents came out to oppose the opening of the Success Academy charter school. It’s been documented that Moskowitz bussed in hundreds of Harlem residents to give the appearance of community support.
Charter schools in New York were started by the late Al Shanker, the former president of the American Federation of Teachers, among others. Shanker believed that charter schools couldn’t change education if they were disconnected from regular public schools. He wrote in a 1994 column in the New York Times: “Charter schools must have autonomy to get where they want to go, but they must also be part of a system that has a central purpose, and that means a system that has decided what kids need to know and be able to do. Otherwise, they will end up like all those alternative schools of the 1960s, relevant only to themselves and useless to the system as a whole.”
Soulful singer-songwriter Nicole Atkins writes her songs on her own terms. She was dropped by Columbia Records, and picked up by Razor and Tie. Photo by Lucia Holm
Nicole Atkins’ music has always leaned heavily on early 70s psychedelia and heaping doses of guttural blues and leaping, honeyed soul, but her latest album Mondo Amore is also infused with compositional experimentation that makes for an exhilarating concert experience. Songs like album opener “Vultures” sweep you out and back in fits of lull and crash, like a blustering sea storm. On “Heavy Boots,” Atkins’ cryptic lyrics and coppery voice, at once coy, seductive, and pleading, simultaneously lift your breath to the top of your chest, and pull your heart down like a thousand anchors. And when Atkins finally unleashes the full power of her Joplin wail on “The Tower,” you aren’t ready for the blinding light it shines. You need a pair of cataract glasses to see this woman live.
Part quick-witted Jersey girl, part North Carolina flower child, and part savvy, social Brooklynite, singer/songwriter Nicole Atkins curses, loves, and leads in equal measure. A high priestess of what the soul-driven chanteuse has termed, “psychedelic crooner blues,” Atkins’ latest album, released by Razor and Tie, documents the breakup that prompted her most recent exile from her home state of New Jersey, back into the arms of McCarren Park. The album also marks her newfound freedom from her old label Columbia Records, and the formation of new backing band, The Black Sea, whose musical dexterity adds a darker, denser hue and effortless fluidity to Atkins’ brooding compositions.
American scholar Philip Gould. Photograph by Fred Yu
I didn’t realize Professor Philip Gould was a few days away from turning 90 years old when I requested he meet me outside the Plaza Hotel. Were it me, I probably would have responded with something like “that’s quite a shlep for me, young lady.” But not Gould. He was cordial, vibrant, and more than happy to meet me on my own terms. After all, it was Gould who’d given the now infamously incarcerated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei his first-ever U.S. group show. To my reporter’s mind, interviewing him while sitting somewhere between the bronze rooster and bronze dog’s head of Ai Weiwei’s newest public sculpture seemed just the ticket.
Gould’s dossier is an impressive one: 33 years as a professor at Sarah Lawrence, along with teaching tenures at Columbia, Pratt, and Teachers College in Beijing; and a personal collection of some 6,000 objects from Africa and the East. I’d prepared some pretty generic and academic questions for him, but Gould wanted to stay on point. He was passionate about politics: the East and its love of ancestors and the West’s compulsion to topple cultural heroes as fast as we mint them. And he had more insights into Dada-ism’s reach than I’d previously imagined possible.
