Flynnie wrote: I love the Albert Shanker mentions, I think we discussed him in previous pages about how the Jews became white (I think on page 7) in the Brownsville teachers' strike of 1968.
Interestingly enough there was a government memorandum specifically aimed at breaking the 'Jewish-Black alliance'.
Well that would certainly explain the extremely questionable wisdom of black community school boards firing loads of leftist Jewish teachers without cause, setting in motion a chain of events that gave you Ed Koch.
Up on the iPlayer at the moment, an Omnibus from 1976 which is really just some film of some things happening in NY at the time. The first half gives you SoHo with excruciating vocalising, Kids From Fame dancing, and generally v poor lentilly under-bearded/sensible skirted fannying about. Some nice city scenes all the same.
But the second half follows graffiti writers across town (with a ripping funk soundtrack in places) and is pure ace.
Breslin lost his fastball in later years, and had a very unpleasant racist blow-up with a colleague that got him turfed from Newsday, but during his peak, he was the one that every ethnic Catholic kid who thought he could write wanted to be.
The Lennon column was reported and dictated within three hours of Breslin getting a call at home (in Queens) that the Beatle had been shot. Anyone who has ever worked on deadline will know just how impressive that is (Breslin himself said that he didn't think anyone else could do it).
I didn't like coming to america. I thought it was childish, predictable, and shitty in the way it represented africa. I was 10 years old, and in hindsight already far too grown up for Eddie Murphy.
I didn't see "Eddie Murphy:Raw" until I was at least 20. It's hard to watch that without thinking that eddie Murphy is an utter cunt.
Borat got some good laughs out of some awful people, but Brass Eye managed to do that, without making you think that everyone involved in the show was as bad as the people they were lampooning.
I don't get his targets. Deluded suburban kids, Foreigners with funny voices and now the fat lolz morons of shit coastal towns. Way to go with the cutting satire. Truth to power Sasha.
Breslin lost his fastball in later years, and had a very unpleasant racist blow-up with a colleague that got him turfed from Newsday, but during his peak, he was the one that every ethnic Catholic kid who thought he could write wanted to be.
The Lennon column was reported and dictated within three hours of Breslin getting a call at home (in Queens) that the Beatle had been shot. Anyone who has ever worked on deadline will know just how impressive that is (Breslin himself said that he didn't think anyone else could do it).
In light of some recent chats on the ever-present OTF topic of who the fuck are the Irish-Americans, he had some fantastic thoughts on Irish-American identity.
For as they prayed over the body of Richard J. Daley, the immigration of the Irish to this country officially ended. The Irish came here out of the famines and the death boats, out of the denial and ridicule, out of the stockyards and the trades unions, out of the political clubs and the city halls of the big cities of the nation, and yesterday, Dick Daley, the last boss, took the meaning with him into the ground. The word Irish now means grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, and as it goes beyond this, as it does with each year, the meaning of the word fades and the people are American and nothing else.
A lieutenant of police, Bob Reilly, came in for a drink. “This is the end of the trail,” he said. “This affair today was Celtic. Last time you’re going to see it. Forget about the Irish. They went to Notre Dame. They all came out different. Now they’re all out in the suburbs wanting to be Wasps. It’s not that good either, you know. I’m with the mayor. The mayor says, ‘You don’t move out of a great city.’”
Later down he slips in a rather astonishing tidbit: Daley was increasingly anti-war after a neighbour's son was killed, and he was going to endorse Bobby Kennedy.
He was physically strking in his prime too, a big round face with enormous pork-knuckle hands and fingers. He seems to have lost a significant amount of weight in the late 80s and early 90s, for reasons I can't find out (ticker troubles?).
He had particularly distinctive way of smoking, looking like a cross between a kid sneaking a smoke and an attempt to find a more offensive hand gesture than the finger.
Ruling that graffiti — a typically transient form of art — was of sufficient stature to be protected by the law, a federal judge in Brooklyn awarded a judgment of $6.7 million on Monday to 21 graffiti artists whose works were destroyed in 2013 at the 5Pointz complex in Long Island City, Queens.
This has the potential to be a big thing. The development of this site has been particularly contentious, as the developer has used the building's history to market his condos after having destroyed the vast majority of the art.
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