Quick Reminder: This Saturday, October 6, 2012: You Can Catch Buskin & Batteau and Freebo at First Acoustics (Rather Than Head To The Barclays LIBOR Center)

Here is a quick reminder: This Saturday, October 6, 2012 at 8:00 PM you can you can catch Buskin & Batteau and Freebo as part of the First Acoustics music series.  That’s instead of going to yet another one of those Jay-Z concerts being held that night in the Ratner/Prokhorov Barclays (LIBOR) Center, that place Jay-Z helped to promote in selling the community out.

More about the First Acoustics series (so you don’t even consider going to the corporatized  “Barclays” Center) is available here: Wednesday, September 19, 2012, Alternatives To The Scandalously Spawned, Scandalously Named Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” Center: Protest & Locally Nurtured Concerts.  All the links you need are there.

The season just opened with Roosevelt Dime and Honor Finnegan.  Writing when that last concert was upcoming, I concentrated on my excited expectations of seeing Roosevelt Dime.  You never know exactly what to expect!:  Roosevelt Dime was great, but I had no idea how blown away I would be by Honor Finnegan who has an unusually beautiful voice combined with some great song-writing talent and performance skills.

Honor Finnegan at First Accoustics

I’d heard Honor once before as part of a night of Joni Mitchell's Blue: A 40th Anniversary Celebration.  (That performance evening, a different women singers paying tribute to Joni Mitchell, is scheduled to conclude this year’s First Acoustics season.)  Nevertheless, I wasn’t prepared for how marvelously Ms. Finnegan could handle a whole set by herself.

Ms. Finnigan’s “Life Is Short” (also on her CD- All her best songs are) is morbidly funny, and her bluesy, “Internet Junkie” which I had heard her sing before is . .   mordantly amusing.  You may want it as a regular song cycling through on your play list.  Hearing it again reminded me how good it is.  Honor can also evoke classic Billie Holiday.  Too bad if you weren’t there.

Roosevelt Dime at First Accoustics

One surprise about Roosevelt Dime was a knowing riff we got from the stage about the virtues of Red Molly (coming at next at the First Acoustics on October 12th).  I handed out a Noticing New York rave for Red Molly in the last post I put up about the First Acoustics series.  It turns out, as we were told that night, Roosevelt Dime and Red Molly participate regularly with some other musicians in a "new compositions" workshop.  It’s something I am going to try to be around for at least once.

I am looking forward to being pleasantly surprised again this Saturday.  Visiting their sites it looks like we’ll hear some wonderful warm guitar music from Buskin & Batteau and something similar but maybe a little jazzier from Freebo.

Meanwhile, I am wondering how many performers and how many of us of the public for very good reasons are going to be shunning the “Barclays” Center: I am suggesting for at least the next seven years.

Media and Activists: Putting The News Of The Jay-Z Concert Opening Of The “Barclays” Center In Context

Could we, over the past weeks, have been more awash in well-financed hoopla for the opening of the Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” (LIBOR) Center arena?  (The hoopla is paid for by the taxes the arena doesn't pay--- The arena pays no taxes.)

I was amongst those protesting outside Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” (LIBOR) Center arena on the Friday night of its celebratory opening with a Jay-Z concert.

Before the concert, the new plaza was filled with lines of people waiting to go into the Jay-Z event at the moment right before the arena’s doors were opened. They reached almost into the new subway entrance.  (Earlier in the day the plaza belonged more to the protestors who were now outnumbered.)  Media people were also in the crowd, milling around with TV cameras and microphones looking for what they could report about the long-hyped event.

Then the doors opened and in virtually no time the plaza largely cleared, leaving again the protestors and the media now high and dry of concert fans.  This is when one of the network reporters proceeded directly to where I was standing with Lucy Koteen, Lucy being another of the protesting crowd that now remained.  I recognized the reporter from earlier in the evening though I can’t tell you which network he works for.  (I don’t watch much network news: It’s fluffy and there are so many commercials.)

The reporter was easy to recognize: He had the kind of telegenic jut-jawed good looks for which I remember the young Mayor John Lindsay.  He also had the sort of voice I figured he could depend on sounding relaxed no matter what.

The reporter remembered me from earlier in the evening too.

He cocked his head sideways and said: “You were in back of the shot I was filming earlier this evening.”

“Yes,” I acknowledged. He had been filming a shot with a young couple where he had been trying to get them to tell him about why they were excited to be holding their tickets and going in to the arena.  I stood behind them in the crowd.  I said nothing but my “I'm Still Calling it Atlantic Av- Pacific St” T-shirt was visible.  It seemed fair.  I’d watched another TV reporter with her cameraman whirling around in the crowd, apparently trying to set up a shot without any protestors in the background.  She kept flipping her angles this way and that.  I’d walked behind one or two of her attempted angled shots as well.  I never saw her get around to filming anything.  Most of the protestors were not paying too much attention to these media people; they were just there in the bigger swirl talking with regular citizens in the crowd.

I do believe it is a time-honored tradition, no matter what the news media is shooting, for people to want to play the game of being in the behind-the-scene crowd shot.  (Sometimes they waive, like on Thanksgiving.)  I admit, however, I was playing a bigger game.  I had a message to get across.

I don’t know if the reporter who now came up to Lucy and me previously realized that my “I'm Still Calling it Atlantic Av- Pacific St” T-shirt conveyed, by implication, the message that I am not calling the subway hub “Barclays,” the promotional renaming of the station that the MTA gave away as a virtually free present to Bruce Ratner, but now, as I stood next to Lucy who was wearing the same T-Shirt while holding aloft a protest sign, he must have recognized that the shirt conveyed a message of community dissatisfaction.*

(* Interestingly, when I went around to the VIP entrance where fans were jammed in to see sports figures speaking into microphones for the press before entering the arena I got a lot of compliments on my shirt- so I guess you can be a sports fan yet not be a fan of the subway station’s renaming.  As a general litmus test, I find when wearing the T-shirt around Brooklyn, the subway system, or the rest of the city that I get lots of thumbs up and questions about where to buy the Ms. Wit-manufactured shirt from people wanting their own.)

The reporter looked at Lucy and then cocked his head toward me.  “So you want to be interviewed on TV?” he said, fixing me in his grey-eyed gaze.

“Sure,” I said, sounding definite enough but I hope not silly or overeager.

“Well, don’t get into my shots,” he scolded.

“Just providing some context,” I said.

“I’m the news media,” he said.  “It’s my job to  provide the context.”  He was very firm about emphasizing the words: "my" and "job."

“I’m an activist,” I said, “and I think it’s my job to provide context.” I think I was less emphatic and a bit more friendly.


He and his cameraman then quickly set up, a bright light flicked on and a microphone appeared in front of Lucy’s face, “Why are you protesting the opening of the arena?” he asked, a professional uplift in his voice.

Lucy said something about how Ratner hadn’t kept his promises, how eminent domain had been abused to give a huge amount of land to him, and perhaps something about how it all had been a rigged deal at the expense of the community- I don’t remember exactly what she said.

Then the lights flicked off again.  There was something about how the reporter collected his things and coolly indicated the rest of the gear should be stored away, something about the way he then ignored me, that gave me the feeling that he thought he was teaching me a lesson: I had gotten in his shot and now he was showing me how he could dispense justice by leaving my life on the cutting room floor of reality.  He could consign me to nobody-ness.

Of course the interview with Lucy could actually have been play mere acting: She never showed up on the news that night.  I somehow doubt that he ever considered that she would.  He was done for the day anyway.
           
As I looked down as the newsman gathered up his things I could see at our feet one of the “Daily News” bricks implanted in the plaza.  The bricks are implanted there (along with "Barclays Center" bricks) to remind us that the plaza has been named “The Daily News Plaza” after the New York daily newspaper (owned by a real estate developer) that is now in a publicity partnership with Forest City Ratner, the arena and plaza’s owner.  As may be expected, the Daily News is reliably friendly to the messages Forest City Ratner wants conveyed.

Yes, the media absolutely does get to decide a great deal about what people hear and don’t hear, see and don’t see: Just how easily people can discarded on the cutting room floor of media reality is demonstrated by the way that New York Times, the city’s most important daily newspaper, disowned, and banished into oblivion, an article it had published about the community protests.  (See: Saturday, September 29, 2012, Report: How The Times Expunged Its Own First Draft Of History On “Barclays” Center Opening To Replace It With The Pro-Ratner Narrative It Favors and Monday, October 1, 2012, New York Times Ghost Article: The Searchable Remnants On The Web Of Banished (Anti-Ratner/Anti-Jay-Z?) “Barclays” Center Opening Article.)

Writing Noticing New York gives me a crack at the last word, something the newsman might not have counted on.  Nevertheless, I know that the audience I get is at no given moment anywhere near equal to a single night’s television network viewership.  Still, maybe by writing thoughtfully, keeping the truth in mind, and providing something more carefully etched and permanent I can achieve a degree of catch-up.

I don’t know what would have come of anything if the reporter had actually interviewed me before departing.  Here are the remarks I was ready to offer to all comers from the press that day:

I think the message is getting out that Ratner’s promises don’t get honored and people should have paid attention that this was his reputation.

More important to remember is that Ratner’s promises were all insanely tailored for his benefit at community expense: stealing, shutting down streets and avenues for absurd density, deep subsidies diverted from competing developers and so-called “affordable” housing that would be pretty much what the market, tax code and subsidy programs would bring anyway . . . Then there’s the notion that Ratner gets exclusive development rights over 30+ acres for 25, perhaps 40 years . . .

   . . .  That doesn’t just wipe out Ratner’s competition; it's intended to knock out the public’s negotiating power.  Until Ratner’s monopoly is taken away from him nobody has the power to enforce promises, to demand quality, keep costs in check, or to get back our public streets and sidewalks.

If the reporter had interviewed me he might have found out that I am a lawyer and an urban planner and a former high level government official, that I worked for the government in the areas of development and public finance and used to negotiate major development deals with developers with my eye on public benefit.  I might therefore know something about what I am talking about.  Would that have been of interest to him?  . . .  Maybe not.

. . . . That’s my last word for today with respect to setting the context.

Scourge of Sidewalk Cracks, Once Used As Excuse To Clear Neighborhood For Ratner, Now In Evidence At Brand-Spanking-New “Barclays” (LIBOR) Center

(Above, photos of two "Barclays" Center sidewalk cracks- click to enlarge)

The frightful scourge of sidewalk cracks, the excuse that was used to clear a neighborhood for its takeover by Forest City Ratner is now very much in evidence around the brand-spanking-new Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” (Libor) Center arena.  Oh my!  Wasn’t everyone promised that if the neighborhood were eliminated, Ratner’s munificence, exemption from taxes, and superior ownership abilities would mean that we wouldn’t have to continue to live with sidewalk cracks?

Seriously, it’s not that sidewalk cracks are the worst thing in the world: After all, they can be found everywhere. . .  There are all sorts of sidewalk cracks around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. You can find some really bad ones around Borough President Marty Markowitz’s new home. Noticing New York found some cavernous sidewalk cracks around Senator Charles Schumer’s home on one of the best blocks on Prospect Park West. You could even find sidewalk cracks besetting other Forest City Ratner properties, including such properties in my own neighborhood of fashionable Brooklyn Heights.  If sidewalk cracks were a real problem then I’d be in a thicket of of difficulty because sidewalk cracks are everywhere in my neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.

No, it’s not that sidewalk cracks are truly so frightful.  What’s terrible is that the bane of sidewalk cracks was used by the ESDC, now going by the shortened acronym of ESD (the Empire State Development Corporation, aka UDC or New York State Urban Development Corporation) was used as a pretextual excuse to find “blight” when it scornfully pointed out sidewalk cracks so that it could clear out and turn a whole neighborhood over to politically-connected Forest City Ratner.

The mega-monopoly that Forest City Ratner was shooting for, and which government handed over to Bruce Ratner, is more than 30+ contiguous acres in the area of this most recent taking and more than 50 acres in all that government has assisted Ratner to acquire over Brooklyn’s key subway lines.  In terms of aggregate buildable square footage, FAR, (as opposed to just square feet) it constitutes an even more extreme government-supported monopoly given the density (and government subsidies) being preferentially assigned to the Ratner properties.

The way it worked was that, in order to constitutionally justify the taking of property to compile Ratner’s mega-monopoly, the ESDC board sent out the firm of AKRF and told it to find blight and AKRF, complying with its contract’s specifications and following instruction went out and found blight. It did so, in important part, by pointing out sidewalk cracks, notwithstanding that Senator Charles Schumer, who likely doesn’t think his sidewalk crack-ridden neighborhood is blighted and probably doesn’t think that Brooklyn Heights is blighted either, said that he knew that the neighborhood that AKRF found was blighted (very close to his own, and one he bicycles through) was similarly not blighted.

Notwithstanding the pretext of blight used to take the property for Ratner, and notwithstanding that Schumer declares that he recognizes and opposes the evils of monopolies, Schumer was a supporter of the Atlantic Yards/“Barclay” (LIBOR) Center project because it would provide affordable housing.  He said he relied upon the Ratner-financed ACORN to reach that conclusion.

Well, it is now clear that Ratner is not honoring many promises, including those with respect to housing.  Forest City Ratner might, with deepening preferential subsidies, start building one residential building next year and, if it does, that 32-story, 363-unit, perhaps modular, building is supposed to contain just nine 2-bedroom units of housing that's truly affordable to low income families.  Maybe Schumer will be backing away from his support of the mega-project.  Local politicians stayed away from the events celebrating the opening of the Ratner/Prokhorov arena.  Schumer, likewise, was not reported to be in attendance although he was present for the festivities announcing Ratner’s mega-project in December of 2003.

 As Schumer, with a knowledge about monopolies and their evils, should know there is a key interrelationship between monopolies and the lack of benefit: Noticing New York has emphasized this before.  . .  Giving Ratner a mega-monopoly:

    . . ..  doesn’t just wipe out Ratner’s competition, it's intended to knock out the public’s negotiating power. 

The “Barclays” (LIBOR) Center sidewalk cracks, visible in the evening gloom, were pointed out by Patti Hagan on one of our first walks around the newly opened arena.  Patti was also the community resident who, activist-style, first sounded the alarm in 2003 that there was a neighborhood (and competing development!) that Ratner wanted to remove from the footprint of the mega-monopoloy he sought.

It’s ironic though: The mega-monoply was given to Ratner because we shouldn’t have sidewalk cracks? . . . But with Ratner we still have sidewalk cracks?  Brand-spanking-new ones on the sidewalk of a building that doesn't pay taxes?

Let’s consider the “Barclays” arena sidewalk cracks just one more reason to take the mega-monpoly away from Ratner so as to restore the community’s ability to negotiate for real benefit.

Here are some more pictures (click to enlarge).

(Below, next two pictures, a crack even outside of Jay-Z's  Rocawear store.) 

 

New York Times Ghost Article: The Searchable Remnants On The Web Of Banished (Anti-Ratner/Anti-Jay-Z?) “Barclays” Center Opening Article

(Ghostly image above is explained below.)

My lawyer’s counsel to clients has always been that with computers and the internet you cannot expect that anything will truly disappear, so that what is most important is what you do in the first place; what you try to delete is likely to come back to haunt you.  Hence, the image above: a ghost fashioned by arrangement of the searchable scraps that still turn up of reporting the New York Times published about the protests on Friday that accompanied the weekend’s opening of the “Barclays” Ratner/Prokhorov Center.  (Community protest events were held from Wednesday through Saturday.)  Friday was the official opening of Barclays Center with a Jay-Z concert although the night before, also evoking community protest, was the heralded but more private, opening of Jay-Z’s “40-40 Club.”

Jay-Z is the superstar rapper with roots in Brooklyn who was made a small-fraction partner of the developer/subsidy collector, Forest City Ratner, in exchange for help selling the developer’s mega-monopoly to the community.  In this regard the developer’s divide-and-conquer strategy, with which Ratner had appreciable but mixed success, involved an effort to create racial division in the neighborhood.  Having enlisted Jay-Z in a front man role early on, a Jay-Z event opening of the arena was almost a forgone conclusion.

The Times reported the community’s organized objections to the arena’s opening that occurred on Friday and then deleted that reporting, apparently because it was too anti-Forest City Ratner, and maybe because it was too anti-Jay-Z.  The developer built the Times headquarters in partnership with the Times and now owns it.  The Times has used Jay-Z to promote its sales (see below) and conversely has promoted Jay-Z (see below).  The reporting that was deleted served to make clear that, to whatever extent the developer had succeeded in creating racial divisions in the community, the community was now far less divided in its opposition to the Ratner mega-monopoly and to Jay-Z's promotion of it given the outing of the developer’s bad faith in regard to nearly every one of his "promises."

The haunting part for the Times is that the deletion of the article that contained the reporting critical of Ratner and Jay-Z was apparently a violation of the Times own policy.  For a complete and easy read of the description of the protests the Times deleted from its web site compared against the pro-Ratner, pro-Jay-Z narrative it substituted that was much more disparaging in tone to the community’s objections see: Saturday, September 29, 2012, Report: How The Times Expunged Its Own First Draft Of History On “Barclays” Center Opening To Replace It With The Pro-Ratner Narrative It Favors.

When you click on the searchable links to the deleted Times article still on the web you now get either that substituted article or something like the image below that also isn't what you are looking for:

To see how pieces of the deleted article can still be stitched together for an ectoplasmic remanifestation of the original, now-deleted, article summoned out of the internet ether, a reassembling of what still appears when the reporting is web-searched—  even though it is no longer corporeally available on the Times web site itself—  see the arrangement of those assembled scraps that conclude this article.

Promotional Hype For Jay-Z Linked To Community's Criticism

Some of what appears in a web search for the article’s deleted reporting is mildly amusing and instructive.

In the words of the original Times reporting Umar Jordan is “a community organizer from Bedford Stuyvesant who also once supported the project.”  He spoke decisively about how he now opposes it.  When you search for Umar Jordan’s deleted criticisms you find out that, because he addressed himself to Jay-Z, his statements were picked up by a slew of sites that robotically snip and incorporate into their feeds mentions about Jay-Z, making, in this case, the automatic (and incorrect) assumption that the Times was issuing more of the promulgated Jay-Z hype these sites are designed to traffic in.  See below:

The above pro-Jay-Z oriented sites (“Jay-Z rocks Brooklyn arena he helped get built,” “Jay-Z Pays Homage to Notorious B.I.G. At First Barclays Center. . .,” “Jay-Z christens Barclays Center with Brooklyn Iove,” “Backstage With Jay-Z at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center,” “Beyoncé Says Hello, Brooklyn At Jay-Z’s Big Barclays Bash”) that come up when you search for the deleted Umar Jordan statements would, had the Times not expunged the reporting, linked to these paragraphs in the deleted reporting:

    Umar Jordan, a community organizer from Bedford Stuyvesant who also once supported the project, addressed himself to Jay-Z and told him that he should have made the arena “affordable for young children who grew up in the projects like you did.”
   
     “We’ve been robbed; Brooklyn’s been robbed,” he told the crowd. “I’ve seen people go to jail for less.”

(* Someone should look at the suspicious economics of these robotic sites, who finances them and what they are designed to do in churning out such headlines.)

While the Times chose to delete these most recent statements by Jordan opposing the project, the Times still makes available, as part of its undeleted records, statements Jordan made in 2006 in favor of the mega-project.  The Times prominently featured and relied upon those comments as evidence of a racial divide in the community.

It Was International News!

Looking for some of the deleted reporting what I found was Asian news sites (see the searchable scraps at the end of the arrangement below) that were recycling for a faraway foreign audience (with accompanying cuneiform characters) Times reporting you could now no longer find, headlining how: “Brooklyn Barclays Center grand opening with mixed . . . " (And then something inscrutably missing at the end to complete that thought: Who knows?)

The reporting of the community’s Friday protests wasn't the only reporting on the entire web, but in terms of the importance of readership in shaping public opinion and the “Times Effect” it was likely the most important.

Other Reporting of Weekend Protest Events On The Web

I thought my image of a ghost assembled from the scraps of disappeared reporting on the web should have a face and eyes so I used my image (originally available here) from Thursday night’s Candlelight Vigil, about 150 people led by local politicians and clergy:

A mega-bright Barclays “oculus” promotion for the opening of the Jay-Z 40-40 Club, the mega-wattage illuminating it paid for by the tax bills Jay-Z and the “Barclays” Center don’t pay . . .  and candles walked counterclockwise twice around the arena in community protest illuminating the alternative message for the evening.

Atlantic Yards Report coverage of that Thursday evening is available here: Friday, September 28, 2012, As 40/40 Club opens the night before arena debuts, a vigil and march draws 150 people, James, Montgomery.

The Times banished coverage concerned Friday protests, but aside from reading the Times reporting in Noticing New York, you can read more about Friday’s protests in Atlantic Yards Report, see: Friday, September 28, 2012, Under Barclays Center oculus, groups challenging Atlantic Yards call for reform, joined by Occupy and two who "drank Ratner's Kool-Aid" but changed their minds

Atlantic Yards Report video coverage of the Saturday protests is here: Sunday, September 30, 2012, Second night of Barclays Center operations: no traffic jams, lots of cops, Atlantic Avenue overrun post-event (with NYPD coordination/dismay), idling vehicles proliferate nearby.

Preserved Image From The Deleted Times Article

I found that I could also Google up an image that went along with the deleted Times reporting, but again when you clicked on the Google link it was not available (see below).

Atlantic Yards Report actually has preserved scrib document version of the banished Times article that shows it came complete with that photo of all the protesters.  I have cribbed from it to provided the image below.  Interestingly and ironically, it includes a “Switch” advertisement (see below) . . .  entirely by coincidence! 

Parting Word On Impartiality Of The Times

Arthur Ochs (“Punch”) Sulzberger, former publisher of the Times and scion of the prominent publishing family that owns it, died Saturday.  Today the Times ran on its editorial page a signed piece by Andrew Rosenthal, "an appreciation," in which it lauded Mr. Sulzberger, and by extension, took the opportunity to revere the Time's own heritage. Mr. Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, expressed his certainty that the paper “was the best newspaper that ever existed.”  The point he offered was that the paper became great by not taking sides, that the Sulzberger family had bought it in1896 “determined to produce high-quality, dispassionate journalism at a time when newspapers were openly partisan.”

Is the paper still above taking sides unfairly?  That greatness looks as if it is also a ghostly thing of the past.