Celebrating Community
I get on the B61. 2 stops up a tiny lady, maybe Mexican, gets on with a 60 inch tv, holding it the way you march with a rifle. It soars 2 feet above her head. The tv that makes you feel like you’re in a movie theater. The tv that also makes your neighbors feel like they’re in a […]
The 2024 Red Hook Locals Softball League (RHSL) began on April 18. This is their third season since the ballfields were re-opened in 2022, after being closed due to post Sandy rebuilding and continued lead remediation. Bait & Tackle will look to defend its Colucci Cup after an impressive playoff run in 2023 which concluded with a victory over B61 […]
Every month while distributing newspapers, one of the most exciting places to go for me is Frank’s Bike Shop, because there are a couple of very cool-looking parakeets there. I spoke to Frank about his birds, the shop, and his move from 80 Delevan to his new location at 138 Pioneer Street. “I’m not from Red Hook but I’ve worked […]
Summit Academy’s girls basketball team won its first citywide championship last month as it pulled away in the 4th quarter to win the 1A girls basketball playoffs over Manhattan’s School of the Future, 53-45. The game at Long Island University’s Steinberg Wellness Center was packed with fans from both teams. In the semifinals at Queensborough Community College, Summit beat No. […]
Stan Mack is one of the most prolific story tellers of the 20th century. He’s told over 1,500 tales using thick white paper, a pen and black ink to create comic strips about ordinary people, sometimes in extraordinary locations. A thousand were published in the Village Voice every week for two decades. Now 275 of the best of those will […]
Jean-Paul Sartre was right! (maybe) We’ll skip the millennial interview and let a Boomer rant this month. The main threat to society, from my born in the ‘50s point of view, is the trending reduction in human contact. The millennials I have spoken in the past few months don’t seem to be bothered by this, i.e. the dating apps and […]
Sweden is to Europe like the Amazon is to South America. It is a land full of lakes and forests that hug you the very moment of your arrival. Getting on the bus to leave the airport you are driven through a nature scenario, with snowy trees extending miles. If you were sweating in the plane because of your ski […]
Tim O’Brien’s 1990 auto fictional novel based on his time as a young soldier in Vietnam remains a popular choice in high school curriculum across the country. Teaching at a rural school in northern New Hampshire, the average student is removed from the horrors of war and mostly, blessedly, from extreme levels of violence. Although some students do have grandparents […]
Old timers might remember an urban gardener from the last century. Adam Purple, who dressed in purple and drove a purple bike, created a large spiraling garden on the lower East Side which became famous as it was threatened and eventually destroyed by real estate developers. These days, many community gardens in the city are safe from development due to […]
One of the great TV shows was Public TV’s Cosmos. Originally broadcast in the 1980’s, produced by scientist, astronomer and writer Carl Sagan, younger people know the successor shows, Cosmos—A Personal Voyage and Cosmos—A Spacetime Odyssey, both created by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Sagan devotee and astrophysicist, author and science communicator in his own right. Sagan is described in […]