O hai Charlie

Breaking news if you’re into this kind of thing:

New York’s 27th congressional district will likely find earmarks a lot harder to come by soon, as a House investigative committee has found that longtime congressman and lord of Harlem Charles Rangel “violated a range of ethics rules.”

The eighteen-month-long investigation was investigating whether the former Ways and Means chairman “improperly rented four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem at a price well below market value” and “improperly used his office to provide legislative favors for an oil-drilling company that pledged a $1 million donation for an academic center named for Mr. Rangel and improperly failed to report taxable income received from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic.”

And if precedent’s any guide, Rangel won’t have a happy ending: the last congressman to face equivalent violations was expelled from the House. On the sort-of-bright-side, Rangel still looks better than his predecessor, Adam Clayton Powell, who not only had his own corruption scandal, but was also a homophobe. A step up!

A visitor to the Livin’n'Learnin’ Center noticed something odd about a new poster welcoming students to Wallach 5. The floor’s new poster is ostensibly intended to help residents get to know New York by introducing them to all tha Big Applez‘ ethnic enclaves. You know, like the Upper West Side.

The poster highlights neighborhoods across the five boroughs, and arranges them according to ethnicity. For example, Astoria is known for its large Greek population and delicious souvlakia; Little Egypt is self-explanatory. All neighborhoods have a subtitle or explanation, save one: our very own Harlem! Another picture after the jump.

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Does anyone actually know what anthropology is?

What does Evo love more: nationalization of oil or speaking at Columbia? 

Should GS deans be chosen in the same way as GS students–far too late?

Did you know that, like, East 116th is TOTALLY less gentrified than, like, Columbia?  I think she actually saw a poor person!

Can Columbia sports only win through not telling anyone about injuries to players?

Last night, Bwog enjoyed the literary and cuisinary culture of the Latino-Caribbean  with the volunteers and novice poets of Voices UnBroken.

Bwog arrived to the Voices UnBroken Poetry Slam a little late last night, but there were still plenty of maduros to be eaten and plenty of amateur poets to be heard. The reading drew a relatively small group of socially inclined and literary minded students to pay tribute to the work of the Voices Unbroken volunteers, whose mission is to bring creative writing workshops to prisons, residential treatment facilities, and various other transitional settings in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx.  Despite its small size, the event lasted a solid three hours and filled the auditorium on the fifth floor of Lerner with  the smells of what could be called pan Latino-Caribbean cuisine and the sounds of what it is to be young and of color in New York.  

Although the poetry of isolation and ethnography can often air on pedestrian side of things, last night the poets expressed a remarkable sense of honesty and cogency. The student poets embraced the open-mic and unabashedly read, rapped and sung work that ranged from highly crafted mediations to recent observations to spur of the moment improvisations.   

It seemed all too auspicious that moments after Bwog arrived that one Stephan Vincenzo, infamously of CC ’12, stepped up to the mic to read his lengthy Bildungsroman styled poem, “Where I am and Where I would be.” And indeed his poetry is as epic as his persona.  

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Bwog correspondent Coogan Brennan caught up with chess legend Garry Kasparaov in Harlem this afternoon.

United Civil Front leader and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov made an appearance at the Harlem Children’s Zone today starting at around 2 PM. Kasparov is the fifteen-year reigning chess champion who also currently holds the highest ranking of any living chess player anywhere in the world. Children’s Zone CEO Geoffrey Canada introduced Kasparov, referring him as “an individual who led the fight against the autocratic regime of former President Vladimir Putin.”

The gymnasium at Promise Academy was packed with chess boards, clocks and players, all of which were encircled by enraptured onlookers. A hearty-looking senior man challenged your Bwog correspondent to a blitz match in the midst of the mayhem. Feigning intrigue and intelligence, your correspondent managed to seem like a master for the first eight moves. Later, the senior man walloped him on the diagonals, resulting in a sound endgame for your correspondent’s opponent.

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Harlem affordable housing: “The sugar on a sour pie.”

On asthma: “Ninety percent of time is spent indoors.”

Director: What “nobody else had was my unique view about stuff.”

Columnist: “we’ve been doing so much, trying so much, and experiencing so much.”

Reporter: “It’s clear that the Obama-Wright controversy rests on race.”

Director, on the best aspects of her show: “Short.”

For SEAS Class Day speaker engineering is the new liberal arts.

FaCU, SGB funding meetings should be open to all.

The New Harlem, its a happening place.

The mayor of Brigadoon bids farewell.

Gandhi scholar to hang it up after 40 years of teaching the same course.

Jeffrey Sachs goes back to the future.

 

It’s a sad day for artists and art enthusiasts: Today marks the final day of existence for the Triple Candie Art Gallery on 126th. Triple Candie was once—and still is, until 5 PM today—home to some of Harlem’s most promising young artists.

To commemorate its 7-year history, the gallery is featuring a retrospective of its life in the main show space.

No word yet on what will be moving into the Triple Candie’s old home, but Bwog’s bets are on a mediocre, over-priced Italian restaurant or perhaps some refurbished apartments.  

In which Bwog correspondent Alex Weinberg survives to tell the tale.

A few weeks ago, I found a small postcard on 114th Street. It read “No Dew, Nor Rain / No Pain, No Gain: A Three Year Boycott of Harlem,” and it explained that the Honorable James David Manning PhD, head of ATLAH World Missionary Church on 123rd Street, is calling for a boycott of his own neighborhood in order to save it from gentrification. Suffocating Harlem’s businesses and forcing its people into homelessness will prevent it from being destroyed, according to a leap of logic that could only be advocated by a true man of God. 

 

After perusing the website and watching some of his videos, I knew I had to witness the madness firsthand. Last Thursday night, I strolled to 123rd and Lenox for an open sermon about the boycott.

 

Let it be known that there is nothing like the sight of armed Black Panthers to remind you of your completely irrational fear of armed Black Panthers, several of whom had attended the event for the specific purposes of standing and looking angry. As I approached them, I imagined my poor Ma receiving my corpse in the mail. She would insist that I have a gravestone that reads “Alex Weinberg: shot in the mouth because he is a damn moron.” There would be nobody to write this article, and there would be nobody to change my Facebook status to “dead.”  Read more…

In which Bwog freelancer Kate Linthicum discovers soul food that’s actually good for your soul.

I’ve been a vegetarian since I was four, when my family’s mischievous Labrador puppy attacked my pet hen. Her name was Pearl, and she was the softest, sweetest chicken in the whole world. I stopped eating meat the day I discovered her feathers strewn across the flowerbeds. 

Morally, it was the right decision for me. Socially, it kind of sucked. Growing up, I always felt like an outsider at lunchtime, munching quietly on home-packed lunches of carrots and peanut butter sandwiches while the rest of the kids loaded up on chicken nuggets. I pretended to know why people went crazy for Happy Meals, sloppy joes and soul food, but I just couldn’t relate.  

But then I dined at Uptown Juice Bar, a little Harlem gem that specializes in vegetarian Caribbean fare. It’s one of the only restaurants in New York that serves soul food that’s actually good for your soul.  

Since 1995 the Juice Bar has occupied a narrow storefront on 125^th street between Lennox and Fifth Avenue. It’s about a half hour walk from Columbia’s campus. The restaurant is nestled next to a store that sells specialty wigs, and outside men with long dreads hawk reggae cds.   Read more…

In which Bwog freelancer Catherine Chong attempts to find spirituality in tourist purgatory.

At 2:00 AM last night, I set my alarm clock to wake me up at the obscene hour of 7:30 AM. The next morning, I was going to church. Specifically, I had two churches in mind. The first is the most famous church in Harlem, the Abyssinian Church on West 138th Street, and the second, Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, was the first black church in the area and is only one block down from the former.

Under the impression that services started at 10 AM, I left around 9 AM and got to 137^th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd an hour later. There was a huge line outside of what seemed to be an abandoned building, which was ostensibly the line to get into the Abyssinian.

Mimicking an elderly woman I had just seen walk in, I tried entering one of the red front doors. But the man who was standing idly in front of the door was actually something of a church-bouncer. As I walked by, he cleared his throat loudly. I pretended not to notice and kept walking. Apparently I didn’t look like a regular. “Excuse me,” he interrupted. “You need to wait with all the others, down the block.

It was only 10 AM, and the line already seemed too long. Most of the people waiting looked like tourists or area-hipsters searching for soul. Read more…

He may have baby-sat New York as the crack epidemic left pipes and vials all over city sidewalks and the Crown Heights riots fissured West Indian-Hasidic relations in that neighborhood, but David Dinkins’ opinion still holds sway. A politician with firm roots in the Harlem political establishment, Dinkins wrote an op-ed in support of Columbia’s Manhattanville expansion in the City section of this Sunday’s Times.

“Columbia’s Manhattanville proposal takes the best of these ideas to gradually create a new kind of open, urban campus that will improve local streets; bring back commercial life to Broadway, 125th Street and 12th Avenue; and better connect the residential areas of Harlem with the waterfront park now under construction along the Hudson River.”

As the Neighborhood Retail Alliance (a.k.a momandpopnyc) points out in an item published Monday (that curiously does not mention the Dinkins op-ed), Dinkins is also on SIPA’s payroll — he teaches classes and has hosted a forum on urban policy there for the last dozen years. Meanwhile, other Harlem politicians, community groups, and Borough President Scott Stringer (who actually has some measure of oversight in this whole process) remain skeptical.

Gothamist has a handy little digest of the op-ed with some links.

In case you hadn’t heard, PrezBush made a surprise visit to a charter school in Harlem today, and Bwog biked up to 144th and Adam Clayton to see what kind of welcome residents and activists had in store for him. Despite the massive security, which included snipers on every building, streets completely blocked off within a three-block radius, cadres of NYPD on every corner, dozens of motorcycles, secret service hiding in dump trucks, and metal fences lining every street, a sizable number of dissidents managed to show up and locals congregated to express their opinions and see why their neighborhood was shut down for the day.

The most striking part about the event was the effectiveness of the metal fences, copious police presence, and constantly changing rules for where one could walk. Any chance of picketing for more than a couple of minutes was precluded by the sheer overwhelming power of the NYPD and their vehicles. Nevertheless, residents shouted “GO HOME! WE DON’T WANT YOU HERE!” to Bush’s motorcade, while a band of about 30 picketers, largely Columbia students, led chants of “Bush out of Harlem, US out of Iraq!” and other anti-war slogans, as they were followed by a few dozen police on the sidewalk and a rolling van of at least eleven officers. Said one Columbia protester, “This is a traveling ‘free speech zone,’” mocking the fact that they couldn’t remain stationary. Others were more confrontational, yelling at the NYPD, “These are our rights being violated!” The NYPD circled the group but they stayed silent. Read more…

First, CUIDs actually becoming prepped for off-campus use, now somewhat sensical advising reform? The student council legends were true!

Which of course means the councils get to pat themselves on the back

Changes are coming to Harlem too: a W hotel might be opening

Meanwhile, Saigon Grill employees still treated like shit

SENIOR COLUMN: After four years, Spec’s better, but College Walk still eats Prada pumps

On Friday, lecture hopper extraordinaire Josh Mathew took the walk down to St. Mary‘s Episcopal church in Harlem to hear two scholars duke it out on the question of Israel and Palestine.

After making my way past the numerous activists handing out fliers condemning the war in Iraq and the U.S.’s conceivable Iranian escapades, I grabbed a seat in one of the old wooden pews of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 126th in Harlem.

After recognizing a few familiar faces amongst this unusual congregation, I saw sitting up at the altar Dr. Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, and his cospeaker Dr. Tanya Reinhart, Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and the University of Utrecht.

Massad and Reinhart’s co-lecture “Channeling Israeli Apartheid” capped off Israel Apartheid Week’s series of lectures, which focused on topics like divestment, marriage laws, and the media.

Although Massad’s lecture began with an acknowledgment of Israel’s “substantive and psychological” desire for peace, he soon added that Israel has simply requested that the world recognize its “right to be a racist state.” Followed by a round of laughter, the phrase became the central rhetorical device of Massad’s speech, serving as the semi-sarcastic tagline to many of his sentences. Massad criticized all existing solutions proposed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as having accepted Israel’s racist nature, racist laws, and system of apartheid. For example, after the 1993 Oslo Accords, the late President of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat recognized Israel’s “need to be a racist,” and following Arafat’s death, his successor Mahmoud Abbas has also been persuaded to recognize this “right to be racist.” In his conclusion, Massad, rejecting the proposed two-state plan, and recommended a “decolonized, binational state” as the only acceptable solution. Read more…