I walked over to the Brooklyn Public Library to get a book and a DVD and read magazines and stop sweating. That’s when the death themes picked up again(dead TV producers (Aaron Spelling), dead squirrels(2) and rats (1), a much-needed Volvo dying, a camera battery going kaput, a lease terminated). I narrowed my new book choice down to: Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster or White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I usually decide based on a combo. of the cover, some jacket reviews, friend’s endorsement, thickness, wornness, but this time I read the opening paragraph of both. Smith: “…He was prepared for it. He had flipped a coin and stood staunchly by the results. This was a decided-upon suicide. In fact, it was a New Year’s resolution. Auster: “I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain. I hadn’t been back in fifty-six years, and I remembered nothing. My parents had moved out of the city when I was three, but I instinctively found myself returning to the neighborhood where we had lived, crawling home like some wounded dog to the place of my birth. A local real estate agent ushered me around to six or seven brownstone flats, and by the end of the afternoon I had rented a two-bedroom garden apartment on First Street, just half a block away from Prospect Park. I had no idea who my neighbors were, and I didn’t care. They all worked at nine-to-five jobs, none of them had any children, and therefore the building would be relatively silent. More than anything else, that was what I craved. A silent end to my sad and ridiculous life.” Huh. Look at that. Aside from the similar leitmotifs of my two potential reads, my parents moved out of Brooklyn when I was 3, too. I chose Auster. It was a good book. SPOILER ALERT. DON’T READ NEXT SENTENCE IF YOU WANT TO READ THE BOOK. He doesn’t die. I finished the book and then was promptly handed another death book — Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Everyone but her, dies, so far. I was trying to see if I was a “read a book while sitting on a park bench” kinda a guy so I went to Cobble Hill Park kitty korner to my new apartment and peeled open the joan death book. 5 minutes later, a woman on a stoop 30 feet away started sobbing out loud, loudly. People in the park looked up. Head buried into knees, she held a steady rhythm of somatic groans. A mom pushed a stroller by me with her son holding on. The kid said out loud, loudly: “What a little crybaby”. Pleased no doubt, that he wasn’t the one crying and getting the undesired attention. The mom and me exchanged upward turned eyebrow looks of “I hope she’s okay”. I tried to read more Didion but I Didnot, the words couldn’t compete. I tried to catch her glance but her pose was perpetual, an ostrich head in sand of sadness. After 15 minutes or so the mom passed by again and, noticing the sobbing woman was now gone, asked: was she okay? I said someone stopped and asked and I heard a muffled deflection of what was probably “yeah I’m…yeah…fine…thanks”. She walked on and I got on my bike to get to the Fairway in Red Hook where you can eat on their back deck and watch a huge body of water and the ships that push through it. A lot of things were dying but my hunger wasn’t. It was supposed to be raining soon.
Death can be good, also.
The death of the political career, for now, and by his own hands, of Sharp James of Newark NY is a good thing. 2 years back a POV documentary called Street Fight aired and made me cringe. It chronicles a young Yale Law graduate (Cory Booker) running for mayor of Newark, N.J. against Sharpe James, the four-term incumbent twice his age. More from their site: …this insider’s chronicle of the 2002 race for mayor in Newark, New Jersey is riveting, delivering a dramatic account of youthful energy and ideals running headlong into old-guard machine politics and racial demagoguery. These opposing forces are, of course, nothing new in American elections. But, in Newark in 2002, a black mayor was using these tactics against a black challenger.
Early on, a staffer for Cory Booker, the upstart challenger in the race, warns that this election will be decided in the streets. “Street Fight” lives up to the staffer’s prediction — and to its own title — as the campaign between Booker and four-time Mayor Sharpe James devolves from dirty tricks to intimidation to the threat of worse. The film crew itself becomes a target for Mayor James’ supporters — and the mayor himself — who see everyone as either for them or against them. The race turns uglier as city police show up at public housing projects to bar Booker from canvassing for votes. Local merchants who display Booker signs, or hold house meetings for him, find their businesses raided and closed down for code violations. Anyone doing business with the city is made to understand they must support the mayor. Public housing residents fear eviction; city employees fear demotion.
These are brutal machine tactics; livelihoods are on the line. Booker’s team has to run a “stealth” campaign that shields the identity of many local supporters. But this is only the beginning of James’ bare-knuckle tactics — which turn menacing when the mayor’s bodyguards accost Street Fight’s film crew at a rally. Despite director Curry having gotten permission and encouragement from the mayor’s campaign press director to attend, Newark police in suits eject him.
So, James won. But that was then.
There was another election this year and James pulled out at the last minute. Booker won and his party swept the council seats.
