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Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives July 30, 1958, Vol. III, No. 40
Keg Party for Square
Beer drinkers and all those who would like Washington Square to be a park rather than a parkway are invited to a “keg party” tonight (Wednesday) at the home of Mrs. Mary Perot Nichols. An admission charge of $2 will entitle you to as much free beer as you are capable of downing.
The address is 48 Carmine Street, second floor (near Sixth Avenue and Bleecker Street); the sponsors are the Joint Emergency Committee to Close Washington Square to Traffic.
Cary Conover captured some powerful images from the Sean Bell protests yesterday, including this photograph of the hands of the father of Nicole Paultre-Bell as an NYPD bus got ready to pull away from the Brooklyn Bridge. Check here for a full gallery of Conover's shots.
Upon hearing that the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of a New York Post reporter, a coworker quipped "The NYCLU and New York Post joinning forces? What next? Cats playing with dogs? Yankees hugging Red Sox? Cylons and humans calling the war off?"
But the matter is far too serious, as the above video will attest. Leonardo Blair's account is chilling and his ordeal only came to an abrupt halt when informed police that he was a reporter—an option that most New Yorkers don't have.
Facing mounting pressure amid whispers that he driving to see his mistress and three-year old love child when he was busted for DWI in Virginia last week, Congressman Vito Fossella (R-S.I.) issued a statement today admitting to his extramarital affair and secret daughter:
I have had a relationship with Laura Fay, with whom I have a three-year-old daughter. My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly sorry. While I understand that there will be many questions, including those about my political future, making any political decisions right now are furthest from my mind. Over the coming weeks and months, I will to continue to do my job and I will work hard to heal the deep wounds I have caused.
CNN’s John Roberts this morning, trying to get a typically squirrelly Scientology spokesman, Tommy Davis, to answer some basic questions about L. Ron Hubbard’s outfit...
Roberts: “There are some people, and one of them is a correspondent for the Village Voice, who says the basic tenet of the Church of Scientology is to rid the body of space-alien parasites, to clear oneself.”
Davis: “Well, John, does that sound silly to you? I mean it’s unrecognizable to me.”
The shout-out from CNN makes us feel warm and fuzzy (even if he’s talking about the ed-in-chief and not a “correspondent”), and we’ll also point out that the space-alien nature of Hubbard’s wacky upper-level “OT” materials isn’t something that just a few of us “say” is the case. It’s been documented again and again over decades of court cases against Scientology. And every high-level Scientologist who “blows” (leaves) has the same exact story to tell. We’ve talked to dozens of them over the years. This is actually one of the better-documented facts about Scientology, that it charges outrageous amounts — up to $1,000 an hour — to have space-alien souls removed from high-level members.
When it comes to the Sean Bell trial, verdict and aftermath, the Daily News continues to place this story prominently in the paper, including a full-color photo of Al Sharpton and Nicole Paultre-Bell's arrest at the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge and photos of other protestors and shooting victim Joseph Guzman on the bus that carried protestors away. The Post again trots out its cover from the initial incident and devotes 2/3 of page 7 to the events.
Both papers comment on the preparation the protestors were given from Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network, which included a list of "dos and don'ts" that included "do have valid ID" and "don't be on parole, have an open warrant or owe money to the city." The Post gives a rundown in the sidebar, while News columnist Michael Daly provides a "slice-of-life" description of the protests outside police headquarters, referring to it as "the most civil of disobedience."
A cynical person might wonder why the Vito Fossella DWI arrest and subsequent rumors of a potential love child aren't making the front page of the tabloids. But despite the lack of page-one play, the papers are beginning to ask questions about why Fossella chose to contact retired Lt. Col. Laura Fay after the arrest.
The Daily News decides to play one of its photo games with Fossella. This on is "Did Vito wear his wedding ring today?" and shows the congressman at several public events with and without his band of gold. Yesterday he was sans ring when he arrived at his office. The News also reports on the Republican rumblings that it may be best for Fossella to not run for re-election, and that some officials have told donors to withhold their checks to Fossella.
Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives July 23, 1958, Vol. III, No. 39
A Matter of Record
By John Wilcock A few weeks ago I installed one of those recording devices on my telephone—the Bell system rents them for $12.50 a month—and since then I’ve been having a great deal of fun when I set home at night, playing back the messages people leave for me. Anyone who calls my home number (WA 9-123*) when I’m out hears my recorded voice and has about 20 seconds in which to leave a message of his own. Many of the callers make wisecracks about how they’re coming to me in “live, stereophonic color” or about how they want to my “first poison-pen telephone call.”
There aren’t too many of these machines in use—around 2000 in the N.Y.C. area—but a Bell official, while giving me a brief tour of a roomful of softly purring phone devices last week, told me about some of their varied uses.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, Nicole Paultre Bell, Joe Guzman and Trent Benefield were among scores of people arrested at a series of demonstrations throughout the city protesting the acquittal of three cops charged in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell.
Bell's fiancee, and Guzman and Benefield—the two men shot with Bell in a hail of 50 NYPD bullets—were among the first people to be taken away by police after blocking traffic on Centre Street, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, just minutes before 5 p.m.
On December 6th, thousands of protesters filled Foley Square to express their outrage over the Sean Bell shooting. Today, the Rev. Al Sharpton is promising civil disobedience, slow-downs and pray-ins at six locations around the city to protest the acquittal of three cops charged in the shooting.
From a press release:
Reverend Al Sharpton, President of National Action Network, will lead a citywide "pray-in" on Wednesday, May, 7th at six locations around New York City to lead up to an eventual citywide shut down this Spring. Joining Rev. Sharpton in civil disobedience will be Nicole Paultre Bell, Joseph Guzman, Trent Benefield and other community and religious leaders to call upon the United States Department of Justice to intervene in the case.
According to Rev. Sharpton, participants in Wednesday's "pray-ins" at six locations across the city should be prepared to go to jail to protest the acquittals of the three detectives. "If you are not going to lock up the guilty in this town, then I guess you'll have to lock up the innocent," says Rev. Sharpton. Rev. Sharpton said protesters at each location would get down on their knees in prayer.
The protest will begin at 3:00 p.m. at the following locations:
Uma Thurman's stalker Jack Jordan was convicted on two counts of stalking and harassing the star. He faces up to a year in jail. The Daily News puts the conviction on the front page, while the Post employs Andrea Peyser's special brand of moral outrage to report the verdict. Peyser tells us that Jordan sleeps on the street and that we should "Look for him on your doorstep in six months, movie fans!" The News might win for the creep factor, however, as the paper publishes an "exclusive photo" of Thurman emerging from her Village townhouse. Um, the woman's stalker was just convicted! Is it really in good taste to camp out in front of her home to get a reaction? Yeah, yeah, it's the media's job, but it's still unseemly. I'm just pointing out the irony.
The Post continues to beat its "Lindsay Lohan might have stolen a mink!" story into the ground. After yesterday's front-page declaration that Lohan is a "Hijacketer," the paper trots out paparazzi shots of Lohan on the night in question. She clearly starts out the night in a black coat and ends up in a blond fur coat, which Columbia student Masha Markova claims was her grandmother's. Markova got the coat back three weeks later after Markova's lawyer got in touch with Lohan's people. It appeared at the club where it went missing.
Here come all the food and cooking clichés for Hillary Clinton's loss in the North Carolina and possibly Indiana primaries: "STICK A FORK IN HER -- SHE'S DONE" she's "TOAST!" The editors of the Post must have been dancing a jig last night as the numbers rolled in: Clinton lost North Carolina with 42 percent of the vote to Barack Obama's 56 percent. As the tabloids went to press, Indiana was still too close to call. (Clinton eventually eked out a 2-point win over Obama, CNN reports.) The votes from the heavily African-American Lake County had yet to be fully counted, and most experts said the county would go for Obama.
So now, we get the analysis of what went wrong with the Clinton campaign. The coverage is fairly similar to that of when Rudy Giuliani's presidential bid went south: the implications of hubris, the subtle way that pictures of the candidate are no longer prominent inside the pages of the paper. (In fact, the Daily News doesn't even bother to put a picture of Hillary on the front page. Uma Thurman is the woman on page one today.) We see smiling photos of Barack and Michelle Obama in the pages of the Post; they look like the photos of a nominee. The News does put two photos of Clinton inside, but one is a dorky, cheery photo of her at her "victory" speech in Indiana, and another is above a headline that vows to get to the "Ugly truth behind Hil's persistence."
Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archivesJuly 16, 1958, Vol. III, No. 38
The Lively Arts
By Gilbert Seldes
For over six months now a book called “Anatomy of a Murder” has been on the best-seller list—during the past eight weeks or so it has led the list. The book has the quality, consistency, and attractiveness of a wad of Kleenex which has inadvertently dropped into the bathtub. It was a selection of the Book of the Month Club.
When I first read this book I thought Eric Stanley Gardner ought to sue the BOMC. Not because the book is in any sense a plagiarism—there isn’t a line in it that has the brisk clean style of a Perry Mason story. It’s just that the BOMC has passed over 50 Perry Masons and has given its accolade to a third-rate imitation.
Posted by Chloé A. Hilliard at 3:32 PM, May 6, 2008
Harlem’s first green luxury apartment building (located directly across the street from the peejays) is open and ready to help already skyrocketing neighborhood rents go even higher.
The Kalahari will be affordable to households earning middle- and moderate-incomes, ranging between $63,810 to $131,165 for a family of four and $44,640 to $91,760 for a single person, according to a HPD press release.
“The Kalahari shows that affordable housing can also be sustainable housing,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “As we work to build housing for the million new people expected to come to New York by 2030, we need to ensure that we are building homes that people can afford and that allow the city to grow in an environmentally responsible way."
That's Mike Vitale. Guess the costume didn't work too well.
When Queens resident Mike Vitale was outed as a member of Anonymous by the Church of Scientology last month, he specifically asked Church members if they planned to prove his criticisms correct by declaring him “fair game” and subjecting him to the threats and intimidation that are said to be inherent in that Church policy. Would they threaten him or show up at his house?
A lesbian couple's marriage in Canada should be recognized in New York State, the state's highest court ruled today by letting stand an earlier appellate court decision that recognized the validity of the couple's Canadian nuptial.
“Today is a great day for fairness in New York State,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “This is a victory for families, and it’s a victory for human rights. Congratulations to all gay and lesbian couples validly married outside of New York State. Now we need to work toward a New York where you don’t have to cross state or country lines to get married.”
The Vito Fossella DWI scandal just keeps getting juicier and juicier. The Daily News reports the congressman and his buddy got kicked out of a Washington, D.C., bar hours before Fossella's arrest. Waiters at the Logan Tavern tell the paper that both men were incapable of driving and that at one point, Fossella's pal—known only as "Brian"—passed out in front of the men's room.
This scoop comes hot on the heels of both tabs trying to figure out more about the mysterious "friend" who sprung Fossella from jail. She's identified as Lt. Col. Laura Fay, a retired Air Force officer. (The News boasted an "exclusive picture" of her yesterday.) Both papers report that Fay and Fossella attended an Air Force-sponsored dinner back in 2003 that Fossella's wife, Mary Pat, was absent from.
Now, I know that I fall on the wrong side of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry for this fair city, but really, I ask our two tabloids: why is this story news in this area? Yankee fan Ivonne Hernandez ran down some hecklers who chanted "Yankees suck!" in the parking lot of a Nashua, N.H., bar. The Post reports on the page-one incident:
"Five rabid Boston fans screamed the anti-Yankee venom at Ivonne Hernandez, also of Nashua, when they spotted the New York Yankee logo on her 1997 Dodge Intrepid during an argument outside a local saloon.
"According to authorities, Hernandez, 43, then drove from the Nashua City Hall parking lot and through a nearby tire store's dirt parking lot before doubling back, gunning her engine—and aiming it straight at the Bosox fans, who'd walked over to another lot."
Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives July 9, 1958, Vol. III, No. 37
Achieving the Obvious
By Nat Hentoff
A Boston city-planner I know recently returned from a Washington conference on metropolitan affairs and reported as the quote of the conference: “Politics is the art of achieving the obvious.” Not only politics, as some of these variations on that theme may indicate.
On June 25 the New York Times finally—and effectively—commented on the outrageous House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. “To what purpose?”—asked the Times—were these scarecrow Congressmen in New York. “To emulate Communist and other kinds of totalitarian societies by persecuting people for holding radical beliefs?” But when will the Times also score NBC and CBS for their quivering collapse before the committee? The Sarnoffs, father and son, William Paley, and Frank Stanton have a lot to make up for. And where were the voices of Murrow and Sevareid? It’s always safer to put down hooligans when your own pay check isn’t affected.
Posted by Chris J. Petropoulos at 4:34 PM, May 5, 2008
As the protests following the Sean Bell verdicts continue throughout the city, one Brooklyn man is more concerned with the resolution of charges related to another police shooting: his own.
Robert Ramirez, 29, faces up to seven years in prison on Tuesday morning in Brooklyn Supreme court. He was convicted on April 15th of one count of second-degree assault.
It all started with a summer BBQ. On July 24th, 2006, two police officers were attempting to deal with some amplified music without a permit at an informal gathering in a courtyard at the Glenwood Houses in East Flatbush. According to police documents, Robert's stepfather Jose Morales approached the officers "muttering obscenities, acting belligerent, and…intoxicated."
But a according his stepson, his lawyer and Jose Morales himself, his English isn't exactly great, he trembles as a result of a surgery some years back, and his knees are wobbly so he lurches as he walks.
Beer drinkers and all those who would like Washington Square to be a park rather than a parkway are invited to a “keg party” tonight (Wednesday) at the home of Mrs. Mary Perot Nichols. An admission charge of $2 will entitle you to as much free beer as you are capable of downing.
Uma Thurman's stalker Jack Jordan was convicted on two counts of stalking and harassing the star. He faces up to a year in jail. The Daily News puts the conviction on the front page, while the Post employs Andrea Peyser's special brand of moral outrage to report the verdict. Peyser tells us that Jordan sleeps on the street and that we should "Look for him on your doorstep in six months, movie fans!" The News might win for the creep factor, however, as the paper publishes an "exclusive photo" of Thurman emerging from her Village townhouse. Um, the woman's stalker was just convicted! Is it really in good taste to camp out in front of her home to get a reaction? Yeah, yeah, it's the media's job, but it's still unseemly. I'm just pointing out the irony.
Harlem’s first green luxury apartment building (located directly across the street from the peejays) is open and ready to help already skyrocketing neighborhood rents go even higher.
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