by Daniel Gauss
This story goes back to a time when Williamsburg was just starting to become the hipster promised land and just before 9/11. It can be classified as an obscure but, hopefully, interesting part of previously untold Brooklyn history, history which still resonates as gentrification continues its relentless march across the city. It’s basically about how I accidentally triggered a small, neighborhood political crisis by doing something no one expected: trying to clean up a neglected city park that had the same name as my old dog.
In 2000 I was looking for an inexpensive apartment to finish graduate school at Columbia. Contrary to any stereotypes, not every student who goes to Columbia has a trust fund, especially at Teachers College, where the student body was and still is more racially and economically diverse than at Columbia’s main campus. Yes, 120th street is still one of the widest streets in academia.
Colleges of education often draw students with a strong sense of social commitment and a desire to be of service. Diversity, thus, emerges less from institutional efforts and more from self-selection: people who choose this course of life tend to bring a wider range of backgrounds and experiences with them.
Each time I needed to move it was so difficult because I was living on such a small amount of money, from a little community center where I worked. So, I inadvertently became the type of person who becomes part of the first stage of the gentrification of a neighborhood. Like many struggling students, teachers, artists, and social‑service workers, I was just looking for a place I could afford.
I eventually found it on Ellery Street, near the Marcy Houses and the JMZ subway line – an area referenced in lyrics by Jay‑Z, who once lived around there. Geographically it was between Williamsburg, Bushwick and Bed-Stuy. Some well-heeled wag I knew at Columbia once sardonically quipped that the neighborhood formed a kind of “fertile crescent of economic deprivation.” Times have changed; that type of wag probably lives there now. Read more »
I was 12 years old when I walked down a street in my Bronx neighborhood and saw the poster in the window of Cappie’s. Cappie’s was a certain kind of corner store common in 20th century New York. It sold newspapers and magazines, candy and soda, lotto tickets, cigarettes, and various tchotchkes aimed at kids and teens. Cheap toys, baseball cards, posters, etc. Most of their posters were pinups of the era’s sex pots such as this or that Charlie’s Angels in various states of near nudity. But this poster featured a cartoon mouse, a clear copyright infringement on Walt Disney’s famed vermin. The caption read: Hey, Iran! The mouse held an American flag in one hand. The other flipped the bird.
A couple months ago I wrote that we should not feel blame-worthy if we can’t do all the most courageous things in order to protect our neighbours or help stop a war or try to undermine the entire system. There are less courageous things we can do within our capacity. While that’s true, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t 
OpenAI released 
Utkarsh Makwana. Detail from ‘Finishing Touches’, 2022. Courtesy: Akara Art.
In his Confessions, Augustine remembers his state after the death of a beloved childhood friend. He writes: “Everywhere I looked I saw death. […] My eyes sought him everywhere, and did not see him. I hated all places because he was not in them.” An unfailingly moving passage, and a testament to Augustine’s power as a thinker – for profound as his account of his loss is, we are already being led along for a much bigger point. Almost immediately, Augustine moves on to chastise his former self: “fool that I was then, enduring with so much rebellion the lot of every man”. A soul that tethers itself to mortal things, rather than lifting itself up to God, will naturally be bloodied when it inevitably loses them.
Something about Hamlet makes us want to love him, some mysterious quality of his being. I was maybe 15 or 16 when I first met the Prince and sitting next to Boots Schneider at the Olivier movie which had just opened in New York. Yet Hamlet held my attention even more than her hand because somehow he was saying things I had always wanted to say, but not only did I not know how to say them, up to that moment I didn’t know I wanted to say them. What I wanted to say had something to do with authority, something to do with those large figures who hold in their hands the powers of the world, something to do with the joy of saying to Polonius “Excellent well, you are a fishmonger,” and some kind of recognition of Hamlet’s deep sense of betrayal. This is the Prince’s dominant emotion, the feeling that lacerates his being, and his perception of the world is accurate; he has been betrayed.