The comedian Louis CK vamps on a theme all-too-familiar to pedestrians and bicyclists: the ethical gulf between drivers and those without the two tons of armor: “It’s amazing how nasty we can get as people… If you put people in certain contexts, they just change. Like when I’m in my car I have a different set of values — I am the worst person I can be when I’m behind the wheel, which is when I’m at my most dangerous. When you’re driving that’s when you need to be most compassionate and responsible of any time in your life, because you are f-king  driving a weapon amongst weapons — and yet it’s the worst people get…”

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Were the 9/11 attacks an “inside job”—a controlled demolition of the World Trade Center and a missile strike on the Pentagon, planned and executed by a nefarious cabal within the U.S. government? Or were they, as the officially sanctioned story goes, the work of Islamofascist evildoers who hate us because of our freedom and precious American way of life?  Is the United States well on the way to becoming a militaristic Empire, loathed and feared the world over, or is this nation still a beacon of democracy and liberty, defending itself against a worldwide conspiracy of terrorists? These are the questions that strain against the tissues of the American body politic—at least those of us whose flesh is not too numbed by Prozac and high-fructose-induced diabetes. read more…

Time Out's death sentence, May 2007

Somebody needs to get a message through to the Times that Williamsburg long ago lost its cachet as the epicenter of what marketers call “cool,” and that the “hipster” as a cultural icon is dead—that, in fact, the hipster was already embalmed and buried six years ago when Time Out New York pronounced his death sentence (see left). Then, perhaps, the Times would spare us—we who actually live in Williamsburg and must pay the rents this newspaper helped inflate—spare us yet another cutesy/snarky trend-piece like Henry Alford’s “How I Became a Hipster” (Weds., 5/1/13). Hasn’t the Times done enough to ruin this neighborhood? Must it rub salt in our wounds? And can’t its writers even get the facts straight anymore—or was the Judith Miller WMD fiasco its truth-Rubicon? (Ooops! A million dead Iraqis? So sorry—our bad!) read more…

The Alliance for Justice has given us this documentary about the rise of the 1% Court. One reason to vote is to prevent clowns like Bush from doing this kind of damage.   The 1% Court is an activist court for the right, and it will take years to get rid of them.

The Right Bank Café -- New York Magazine, June 22, 1992

Ten years ago, on April Fool’s Day, 2003, the Right Bank Cafe served its last drink and, for the final time, closed its doors to business. Some eleven years before, New York magazine had featured this legendary watering-hole on its cover as an icon for “The New Bohemia” — a reputation which would soon curse Williamsburg with an invasion of  real estate developers and other such predatory creatures. Indeed, future Brooklyn historians may well mark the closing of the Right Bank as a key moment in Williamsburg’s transformation from a low-rent, multi-ethnic haven for working-class artists, anarchists, and other misfits into a “bohemian” theme park for New Age yuppies and twenty-something IT workers. Another “temporary autonomous zone” was about to be smothered by the machinations of Kapital. read more…