If it seemed funny a decade ago to name a dessert after an addictive drug, the joke was one of privilege. The crack epidemic of the 1980s hurt largely poor, largely black communities, not the people who were heading to the East Village to spend $5 on a slice of pie (the price has since gone up to $6).
Now the country is in the grips of an opioid crisis, and a double standard. This addiction affects white communities as well — 78 percent of those who died from an opioid overdose in 2017 were white, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation — and our cultural response to it has been very different, with dialogue often centered on treatment rather than incarceration.
Regardless, here we are. Americans are now more likely to die of an opioid overdose than in a motor vehicle crash, according to a report from the National Safety Council. A bakery would never try to market something called Fentanyl Cake, and the name Crack Pie feels offensively tone deaf.
What do you look for when you photograph an apartment?
I go in totally blind. With these apartments, I don't know most of the people. They don't send me pictures. We don’t talk about it. There is a text that has always been important to me. It's called the Poetics of Space, and it’s basically about how the house is a metaphor for the mind. There are few things that informed this work and that is one of them.
To get into these people’s homes and see how they arrange their jewelry, their clothing, and their books — it’s people's arrangements that make them feel safe and secure in their home. When I walk into home, I can tell a really important arrangement. It's one thing to live in a house: A house has a basement and an attic and all those rooms and closets. It's another thing to live in an apartment for 40 years, where do you house all those memories and belongings?
To all the young geniuses breaking into this building:
This building is equipped with numerous security cameras that record directly to HDD.
We see you in the mornings, we see you in the afternoons. If you are reading this, we see you right now.
Some of you are dumb enough to wear the name of your school right on your shirt.
This is your one and only warning, any future footage gets forwarded to your headmaster and NYPD.
Make no mistake — you will be expelled, we will press trespassing charges, and you will cry when Mommy and Daddy find out.
Jumping over fire is a symbolic gesture to start a fresh new year. This tradition is celebrated for ringing in the Persian New Year and has been celebrated since at least 1700 BCE of the early Zoroastrian era. There will be music, dancing and snacks; wear your best fire-proof pants.
The Rude Mechanical Orchestra will also be playing.
For me, this event is very spontaneous each year. It comes together because the community loves it. The very first time I did it was 2010 and people came to the garden, helped make the fires and we jumped and had a wonderfully freeing time doing it.
This year will be like every year and the change of space should not impact the experience. We strive to make it a powerful and fun and safe event.
It will be the 10th time I've worked on having this spiritually elevating, spring welcoming event. The way I experienced it in my youth, in Iran, was as a spontaneous event that the community felt necessary to do to welcome and get ready for spring. It was done without permits from any government entity or such. We would go out into the street and community members would gather tumbleweed and build fire's together. Then we would jump over them.
On my street, we had about 15 fires, from the entry of our street, down to the end of it. All the neighbors would come out. It was an energizing, freeing experience and community building, and that spirit is what I've tried to preserve each year.
It is clear that this exhilarating event speaks to people not only who come from the Zoroastrian tradition but also brings together folks from across the spectrum of cultures. What binds us is the connection to the earth and the elements.
As in past years, many people and groups are helping ...The folks from the Fireman's Garden, who have been at our event and cherish it, have generously offered their garden to us.A lot of expats from the various Middle-Eastern communities, including Armenians, Iranians and Afghans, are going to be there as well as the folks from MoRUS and Time's UP, who in the past two years have helped a great deal to make this happen.
As in the past years, the event is organized to be a lot of fun, but also safe for all members of the community, especially children and families. As in every year, I plan to have the customary dried fruit and nuts available for people to enjoy. Since about five years now, there also has been a band present at some point of the evening, so we can dance and be merry after jumping the fires and cleansing our souls from the winter blues and from last year's troubles.
Wednesday, March 20, is the vernal equinox, which marks the beginning of spring and Nowruz or New Year for people of Iran, Afghanistan and other places. We will be making ourselves ready for that.
"I decided to keep the mural on, for a few reasons:
First, because the mural itself is not a simple tribute to MJ. My entire idea was to show the transformations he went through during his entire life: from black to white, kid to adult, from natural to unnatural. The whole project that I did in NYC last year was about peace, and in that mural in particular I was trying to describe that people sometimes have to go through so much to be able to reach their own peace of mind.. and even then, sometimes doesn’t matter what people do, they can never reach that peace.
In the second place, I believe MJ is part of American History, and also part of the world’s music history. You can catalog music Before and After MJ, so much was his influence. He still is the biggest pop star that has ever lived, and that we have ever seen, and I believe we are never going to see another pop star like him again.
Therefore, we can’t just erase him from history. These new allegations can be true or not. It is not up to me to judge if MJ is guilty or not — and now, since he is dead, he won’t be judged by justice anymore. So I really hope that mural can do it’s part and bring us to think about it all and how we, as persons and as a community, will deal with this new fact concerning MJ’s life.
Hopefully this discussion leads us all to the desire to be a better person everyday."
It's bad. The patio is destroyed and the back of the lounge has major damage. No one in building was hurt. Smoke is dissipating. Power is back on.
— Revision Lounge (@Revisionlounge) March 19, 2019
MAN ALL HANDS 340 E 13 ST, MULTIPLE DWELLING FIRE ON 5TH FLR,
— FDNYalerts (@FDNYAlerts) March 18, 2019
MAN ALL HANDS 340 E 13 ST, MULTIPLE DWELLING FIRE ON 5TH FLR, UNDER CONTROL
— FDNYalerts (@FDNYAlerts) March 19, 2019
🗓 Make a note to yourself... our next Community Council Meeting will take place this Tuesday, 3/19 at 7:00pm, at the 9th Precinct—2nd Fl., 321 E. 5th Street. Come, be heard, and meet your Neighborhood Coordination Officers. #NYPDConnecting pic.twitter.com/fbJi2s0Bon
— NYPD 9th Precinct (@NYPD9Pct) March 17, 2019
[C]hefs Nahid Ahmed and Arjuna Bull have joined forces to open their first restaurant, Luthun, this spring.
Named for Ahmed’s mother — the name means “something new and unexpected” in Bengali — the 800-square-foot restaurant will have 30 seats in the former Teshigotoya space ...
The global menu is influenced by the countries and top eateries where the chefs have worked — from Lespinasse and Café Gray to El Bulli, The French Laundry and The Fat Duck.
The plan is to offer two tasting menus, one of which would be vegetarian, both seasonally driven and well-priced along with a small and “world-focused” wine list, the chefs say.
The land trust proposed a price of $18.5 million. Of that amount, $5 million would be paid to the archdiocese upon closing. The remainder, which would use a combination of federal tax credits and state and local funding, would be paid in installments over a 20-year period.
David Brown, the church’s director of real estate, told Val Orselli [a project director with Cooper Square Community Land Trust] he would get back to him.
Several months later, Orselli returned to Brown's office. In a show of support, representatives of city councilmembers Carlina Rivera and Margaret Chin, as well as the Manhattan regional representative from Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office, accompanied him.
But Brown was unmoved. The offer was insufficient, he told them. Among the sticking points was the land trust’s inability to pay upfront.
“He told me, ‘A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow,'” Orselli recalled.
Orselli took the rejection as a sign that the church, a tax-exempt institution, was more interested in getting top dollar for its property, which has been estimated as being worth as much as $50 million.
“I was a bit naive,” he said. Referring to the land trust’s pitch to do something with the property that was aligned with papal doctrines, he added, “They couldn’t care less.”
