A certain magic whirled around a particularly windy night in Bushwick recently as winter pushed its way into spring, if only briefly. Along with a mix of sidewalk debris, groups of people hovered near featured galleries, marking their otherwise undetectable entrance ways. The light of the full moon was a nice extra as I made my way to view the participating galleries in Bushwick’s Beat Nite.
“Great reporting and great journalism have always been the exception to the rule,” Carl Bernstein said after a screening of All The President’s Men at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Saturday night. For more of the discussion, click through to watch a short video clip.
Tracy Westmoreland called us with an update on his the ongoing saga of his bar, the Manhattans, in Prospect Heights.
Must all good things come to an end? The English proverb, it seems, should not apply to dive bar aficionado Tracy Westmoreland yet again. With the economy in shambles, the main investor in Mr. Westmoreland’s Prospect Heights bar, the Manhattans, has started to get cold feet.
The morning after residents of Crown Heights took the Police Commissioner to task for drug dealing, prostitution and quality of life issues in the neighborhood, Ray Kelly was awarding the Deputy Inspector of their local 77th precinct a unit citation at Medal Day ceremonies.
The same precinct where, according to department statistics, crime has plummeted 18%.
“If you look at statistics at this precinct, they are very, very impressive,” Commissioner Kelly had told the crowded basement of Berean Baptist Church. “If you’re the victim of a crime, you don’t want to hear about statistics, I understand that, one crime is one crime too many – but the numbers here are really an indication of the work that’s being done.”
With all the talk about statistics, it sounded like the crowd was watching The Wire.
At some point, my email address (which is publicly available) was added to receive daily missives from Urban Daddy, a restaurant and nightclub advertorial list that operates in a few cities, including New York. I often delete them without reading, but today I opened their message to find something truly abhorrent, besides their claims of editorial integrity.
“The frank depiction of anti-Semitism on the part of ostensibly sympathetic characters can make watching it an unsettling experience for modern audiences. Here the play’s religious overtones are almost entirely obliterated,” New York Times Theater critic Charles Isherwood wrote of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which runs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Sunday.
