It turns out that a few locals are willing to engage in a little self-promotion after all. This is just as well; I was starting to worry that the spirit of the '80s had finally died out.
Bushwick singer-songwriter
Chantilly, who's already done more than her part in service to our local music scene by co-producing the BOS MUSIC Fest alongside Goodbye Blue Monday proprietor Steve Trimboli, is about to release her debut album,
caught light, itself the culmination of two years of work. The sweet-voiced musician celebrated last week with a listening party at her apartment. "It was a cute little gathering of friends and a few random drop-ins," Chantilly told me on Monday. "The wine flowed. The red velvet cupcakes were delicious. Somehow the term 'anal sangria' got invented. It was good times." This is exactly how I've always imagined a singer-songwriter's apartment-based listening party would go down. At any rate, our neighborhood... I'll call her a songstress as I'm running out of terms... uh, songstress... also has a CD release party coming up on December 6th at Caffee Vivaldi in the West Village.
Artist
Jim Stanis moved to Bushwick from Chicago three years back to take a job doing medical drawings and 3D modeling for a firm specializing in visualized medical collateral. Having already been extraordinarily well-versed in the more technical aspects of art even before specializing in such things for a living, he now draws heavily upon anatomy in the course of his own work - except in such cases when his work is far too Dali-esque to incorporate any anatomy other than
the ultra-surreal sort.
On a totally unrelated note, I was recently speaking to a neighborhood crackhead/petty thief/drug dealer who told me an anecdote that's somewhat better than the anecdotes I get from, say, people who are not forever engaged in stealing, selling, and smoking things. It seems that one evening about a year ago, back when the laundromat at Broadway and Park was still a major node of the local drug trade, that this fellow and his partner were just minding their own business, selling crack in the laundromat parking lot, when the two of them decided to step in to the deli across the street, presumably to buy The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, another incorrigible young local was attempting to steal "eighty cans of tuna fish" from this same deli; the omega 3 enthusiast was promptly captured by the proprietors and knocked around a bit. Afterwards, our antihero and his accomplice gave the thief another, more ironic beating by smacking him upside the head with a couple of the very tuna fish cans that he'd just been trying to lift. Upon being told this story, I asked the guy why he'd bothered beating up a thief insomuch as that the storyteller is himself a notorious neighborhood booster in his own right. "We don't want that going on in our neighborhood, though," he explained, before going off to crack in our neighborhood.
After verifying his story with the proprietors of the deli in question, I gave the crackhead a notebook and a pen and told him to write down anything interesting that happens to him in the course of his daily adventures. The next time I saw him, he was sitting on a bench, writing furiously. And thus it is that I have outsourced my journalistic responsibilities to the dregs of society, just like The Washington Post does with Charles Krauthammer.
Notes from the Outside World
If status was given out in the scientific community as haphazardly as it is among journalists and commentators, everyone would still be dying of polio and lions. This increasingly-evident and terrible fact has been hammered home for years by Duncan Black of Atrios, Glenn Greenwald of Salon, and other now-prominent bloggers who focus in part on media criticism - to no avail, of course, as the sort of people who read Glenn Greenwald tend to already know that such people as Charles Krauthammer are full of shit.
Incidentally,
Charles Krauthammer is full of shit. The inexplicably Pulitzer-winning columnist was interviewed recently by
Der Spiegel regarding his thoughts on the Obama Administration thus far and made the following observation about the alleged naivety of our most rising president's foreign policy fundamentals:
I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure hes able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldnt elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.
Krauthammer might end up being right about this, just as that crackhead may very well not end up trying to sell that notebook to random passerby. Whatever the case, there are few pundits less worthy to pass judgement on another person's foreign policy acuity than is Krauthammer, whose body of work from the last decade I have been going over recently in preparation for my second book. When Clinton tried to force Milosevic to end his degenerate forays into Kosovo by way of an air campaign, Krauthammer assured the nation it would fail; it worked. When violence flared a few years later in Macedonia, Krauthammer assured the nation that this would lead to regional chaos; it didn't. A bit into the latest Iraq conflict, Krauthammer deemed it "The Three-Week War;" that was, of course, almost seven years ago. He ridiculed other journalists for worrying over our strategy in Afghanistan back in 2001 and 2002 and has done the same with regards to pessimistic Iraq analysts from 2002 up until two years ago, when he joined the worriers in opposing the surge on the grounds that it would probably fail; Krauthammer now deems the surge to have been a success.
This man won a Pulitzer, as I noted. A Pulitzer in commentary.