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David Freedlander

By David Freedlander 1/31 9:18am

books

Tea Party members hold a Tax Day protest. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Teatime: A Wave of Books Anatomizes the Tea Party Movement

The most memorable moment from the first major Tea Party rally in front of New York’s City Hall, in April 2009, wasn’t the woman chain-smoking cigarettes by a guard rail, there, she said, to defend “smoker’s rights.” Nor was it the machismo menace that hung in the air, or the “Don’t Tread on Me” signs held by untrod-upon-looking junior insurance executives in for the afternoon from Glen Cove. It wasn’t even the palpable anger at Mayor Bloomberg, who (presumably) sat in his office a few feet away and, his efforts toward gun control and bike paths notwithstanding, was the only chance Republicans had of holding onto City Hall that November.

No, the most memorable moment of that afternoon was the speaker who took to the microphone and urged everyone present to put down their tricorner hats and give a round of applause to the people who had made the rally happen: the New York City Parks Department, the sanitation workers, the police guarding the barricades.

These were “the working people,” the ones lionized by this movement for the screwing they had been taking from the Obama administration and  assorted powers-that-be, but they were also government workers, their salaries and pensions paid for with hard-earned taxpayer dollars, their very existence dependent upon public largess.

In the two and a half years since that gathering, there have been hundreds like it across the country. In 2010, Tea Party protesters and their ilk not only took out the Democrats in Congress, but even managed to squelch the ambitions of a few Republicans who were deemed insufficiently conservative by the latest right-wing litmus test.

But by late 2011, Glenn Beck, once the Cassandra of this crowd, had been shuffled off the stage. The town hall meetings that first alerted the mainstream media to this new substrata of the body politic are now filled not with conservatives yelling at Democratic congressmen to keep their government hands off of Medicare but with liberals yelling at the Republican reps to let the Bush tax cuts expire. The debt ceiling has been raised, budgets have been passed. The likely Republican presidential nominee is as far removed from this tumult in the streets as the average CEO is from the jobs he outsourced.

Into this breach have slipped a couple of books that attempt to explain this new world we now find ourselves in. Read More

By David Freedlander 12/20/11 9:09pm

The Religious Life

Students during the inauguration of Bara

Come All Ye, Faithfully: Tourists Mob Harlem Churches For A Glimpse of The Gospel

A little before 9 a.m. Sunday morning, the wind chill was 11 degrees and the line to get into the Abyssinian Baptist Church already stretched down Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, and was beginning to turn down 136th Street. And still they came. Out of the subway they marched, in purple puffy jackets, blood orange sneakers, blindingly yellow scarves, in two and threes, like a rainbow coming unspun on the streets of Harlem, exotic cigarettes in one hand, foreign language guidebooks in the other, all pointing them the same direction: Abyssinian. Read More

By David Freedlander 11/25/11 10:00am

The Academy

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L’Affaire DSK To Get Academic Conference

Tired perhaps of discussing the Jersey Shore's heteronormativity and its power dynamic, academics at New York University are next taking up the scandal of the summer--the case of former IMF head Dominique Strauss Kahn and his alleged rape of a maid at the Sofitel Hotel in midtown.

Called, "The DSK Scandal: Transatlantic Reflections on Sex, Law, and Politics, the two day conference "aims at interpreting the transatlantic dimensions of this event."

"On the one hand," organizers write in an email that went out last week, "The mutual misunderstandings revealed important differences between France and the United States – not only between the legal systems, but also between the media cultures, as well as the political ones. On the other hand, the political dimensions of the story – in terms of gender, class, and race, and even sexuality – did transcend such national differences." Read More

By David Freedlander 11/16/11 4:35pm
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Staying Alive: With A New Memoir On The Shelf, James Wolcott Discusses The Writing Life

For a fellow practitioner of the journalism craft, meeting James Wolcott for lunch is a daunting prospect. It’s not just because at various times in a long career the TV critic-turned-movie critic-turned-rock critic-turned-media critic-turned-political blogger has secured regular gigs at such totemic outlets as Harper’s, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, where he now writes a regular column, but more so because the withering quality of his prose is enough evidence to assume the man carries a disemboweling knife in his frontal cortex. Read More

1 By David Freedlander 10/11/11 5:25pm

Occupy Wall Street

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Uptown Grr! Protesters Start Occupying The Upper East Side

Protesters from the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Lower Manhattan took the rolling, roiling march up to the Silk Stocking District this afternoon with a raucous protest in front of the homes of some of New York's wealthiest residents.

Several hundred demonstrators gathered in front of the Plaza Hotel at the bottom of Central Park chanting, "We are the 99 percent! And We Are On The Upper East Side!" and made their way north, first to Rupert Murdoch's building at 834 Fifth Avenue, then on to David Koch's building on Park Ave, and later to Howard Milstein and John Paulson's homes further uptown. They carried signs which said, "Tax the Millionaires," and some carried homemade signs that said "Koch Brothers--Dem Belly Full" and "No More Cake--Off With Their Heads!" Read More

12 By David Freedlander 10/10/11 4:14pm
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Native American Writer Reminds Occupy Wall Streeters Who The Real Occupiers Are

John Paul Montano, a Native American writer and activist posted online late last week an open letter to Occupy Wall Street activists reminding demonstrators that they too are interlopers of a sort.

Hoping and believing that you enlightened folks fighting for justice and equality and an end to imperialism, etc., etc., would make mention of the fact that the very land upon which you are protesting does not belong to you—that you are guests upon that stolen indigenous land. I had hoped mention would be made of the indigenous nation whose land that is.

[...] Read More
By David Freedlander 9/20/11 7:10pm

Art

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The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side: Curator Nato Thompson Has the Whole Essex Street Market to Play With for His Latest Show

Last month the Essex Street Market—the original one, not the current one across the street with the cilantro sellers and handcrafted cheese mongers—betrayed no indication of what it will look once the public art presenters Creative Time get ahold of it this week, transforming the abandoned warehouse into part exhibition hall, part gathering spot and part guidebook on how to live off the grid, for the exhibition “Living as Form.” A few laborers laid electrical wire, or hauled materials into place. Nato Thompson, the chief curator of Creative Time and the driving force behind the show, walked through the empty room, pointing out what was to come. Read More

By David Freedlander 9/07/11 10:54am

Our City Since

A Call for Neutral Corners

Political campaigns in New York are like a mile-long sprint. Beginning in January, when the likely candidates start raising money and meeting with neighborhood groups, they round a corner in the summer months and hit full stride as September starts and New Yorkers start paying attention to politics again.

Except for one day, every year, when those running pull up short, only to start again 24 hours later.

That day, of course, is September 11. Read More

By David Freedlander 8/30/11 1:09pm

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Keith Wright Calls In The Troops for David Weprin, 1199 Slated to Meet Today

A reader passes along the follow letter from Manhattan Democratic chairman Keith Wright, urging members of the local county party to cross the river (a big ask for Manhattanites) to help get out the vote for David Weprin the closing days of the Congressional race between Weprin and Bob Turner.

The letter is further proof that the race for this Brooklyn-Queens seat is closer than expected. Want further proof? According to a source, the powerhouse political operation over at SEIU 1199 is meeting today to decide whether or not they need to get further involved in the race as well.

Wright letter after the jump. Read More

36 By David Freedlander 8/24/11 9:47am

Hipster Runoff

Illustration by Drew Friedman.

O-Bummer! Hipsters O-Bandon Obama

As Election Day 2008 approached, if you were an urban organic kale farmer, or a crochet enthusiast or a vaudevillian with a new song to sing, and you wanted to support Barack Obama for president, you were in luck.

The streets of New York were crowded with “Walks for Change,” “Bike4Barack” groups, “Karaoke We Can Believe In” sing-alongs, “Get Out the Laughs and Votes” comedy shows and “Art for Change” auctions. The days leading up to the election saw Pasties for Peace, a Cowboys for Barack Wild West Burlesque Show Fund-raiser, a Yo La Tengo fund-raiser at McCarren Pool, and a $1,000 fund-raiser in Dumbo featuring They Might Be Giants, which sold out.

Richie Fife, who helped lead the Obama effort in the run-up to the primary, estimated that 10,000 New Yorkers had contacted his office to get involved and that three times that many were out on the streets on their own initiative. Read More

By David Freedlander 7/27/11 7:54am

2013

Non-Candidates Top 2013 Poll

New Yorkers want Ray Kelly to be their next mayor, a new poll out by Quinnipiac today found.

Also high on their list is Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

The only problem is that neither Kelly nor Markowitz are thought to be likely candidates. Neither, for example has been raising money for a potential run. Read More

By David Freedlander 7/26/11 9:24pm

Attorney General

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The Left’s Last Hope: Eric Schneiderman Carries the Mantle During the Right’s Resurgence

On Sunday morning, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sat in a back room of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of Harlem’s most storied chapels, and prepared to give his first Sunday sermon. Hundreds of parishioners sat in the pews, along with a few hundred more tourists, expecting to hear the kind of stirring oration for which Abyssinian has long been known.

A deacon, dressed in a gray, striped, seersucker suit, tried to reassure him. “Just go up and be yourself, man,” he said. “You ran a righteous campaign. People know you, and people need you, and once you get on a roll, people aren’t going to let you sit down.” Read More