Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

The Children’s Defense Fund’s New York chapter is holding a one-day summit in Central Brooklyn called “Connecting the Neighborhood Dots: Promoting Solutions to Dismantle the Pipeline to Prison.” Hosted by CUNY’s Medgar Evers College in partnership with the Casey Family Programs, the day has been scheduled full of panel discussions and presentations by leaders in the children’s advocacy and juvenile justice organizations.

I will be chronicling the start of the conference and the back-to-back morning sessions that focus on the disproportionate impact of prison and the criminal justice system on specific communities in New York City, mainly in the Bronx and Central Brooklyn, and how community-based strategies can promote healthy children, families and neighborhoods.

Read and watch the full coverage here.

Sunset Park, NY – With flu season here and January/February peak times just around the corner, health providers at Brooklyn’s Lutheran Medical Center and in hospitals and clinics throughout the city are trying to get both children and adults – including those over 65 years of age – to get their flu shot.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) named last week National Influenza Vaccination Week. Tuesday, December 9, was Children’s Vaccination Day. Thursday, December 11, was Senior’s Vaccination Day.

“[Parents and grandparents] may bring in a child for immunization, but they won’t for themselves,” said Norma Villanueva, M.D., M.P.H., the Network Chief of Child and Adolescent Health at Lutheran Medical Center.

Read the rest of the article here…

It’s 6 a.m. at the crack of dawn and people are just starting to trickle into southeast Brooklyn’s Kings Plaza Shopping Center. There were no massive stampedes and looping lines outside their doors like at other malls, Targets and Wal-Marts in the region, but for thousands of Black Friday shoppers here, the experience was similarly exhausting and, at times, disappointing.

I have had enough of hate crimes. They make me so sad and mad, and must be the stupidest thing ever invented. Aren’t there enough people dying in accidents and of illnesses already? Do you really need to add more bodies to the pile just because you want to vent your anger?? Next time you are mad, how about harming yourself rather than others?

I have been thinking about hate crimes a lot ever since I heard about the case of the Ecuadorian man, Jose Sucuzhanay, who died in the hospital last Friday. He had been hit in the head with a beer bottle five days earlier and beaten with an aluminium baseball bat nearby Bushwick in Brooklyn.

It’s not clear whether the motive of the guys who attacked him was hatred towards Latinos, or towards gays, or both. Apparently they at least thought that Sucuzhanay was gay, when they saw him walking arm in arm with another man on the street. In reality that man was his brother and  Sucuzhanay was a married father of two. The brothers were on their way home from church and had stopped at a bar for some drinks. What a horrible ending for their day. I makes me want to cry, but I guess I should be a hardcore reporter who is immune to emotions.

The most recent consensus seems to be that race was indeed the more important reason for this hate crime. FBI statistics show a 40 percent increase in hate crimes against Latinos during 2003-2007, and this is already the second Latino man killed in a month’s time. The other one was Marcelo Lucero, beaten and stabbed to death in Long Island by seven teenagers, who considered it their “hobby” to mug people. This time they were looking for a “Mexican” when they found Lucero, another Ecuadorian immigrant.

Obviously Latinos are not the only victims of hate crimes, although they accounted for 60 percent of those attacked in 2007. Victims come in all colors, all do the attackers. The attackers in Sucuzhanay’s case are said to be black (although they are still at large) and in Lucero’s case they were white.

As I said earlier, hate crimes drive me mad. I understand that a multicultural society is not everyone’s cup of tea, but why don’t these people then move somewhere where they don’t have to face people of other cultures or races?? Believe it or not, there are still PLENTY of homogeneous towns on this planet where you can choose to be surrounded by only “your” people if you so wish. Do these people in Long Island or Brooklyn or wherever really think that they can get rid of EVERYONE that they don’t like in their communities?? I don’t think so.

There are always going to be people in your community that you are not going to like, or who you don’t want to get to know. That’s fine. You are not expected to like everybody anyway. But why don’t you just ignore the people you don’t like and pretend that they are not even there rather than kill them? By committing a hate crime you are ruining many people’s lives, including your own. Do you really hate these people SO much that you would rather sit in jail for the rest of your life than let them live their lives? THAT is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

Hobotech, a new sub-genre of techno music made its debut at the Jalopy Theater in Red Hook on Thursday, Dec. 11.  Music producer Jon Margulies started it all as a joke, but after a bit of research, he realized that mixing “hobo” (folk, bluegrass, and other music that grew from the Depression era hobo movement) and techno, wasn’t such a crazy idea.

He found that the culture of hoboing (transience, non-participation in society, values of freedom) were appropriate to ressurect at a time when millions of Americans, he says, are being failed by their pursuits of security (buying a house, supporting wars abroad).

Here’s Margulies at his apartment in Manhattan sampling a few hobotech tracks.

(more…)

Zemi 17 has created the “the world’s first and only fully robotic Gamelan orchestra.”

Zemi 17, whose real name is Aaron Taylor Kuffner, was a DJ of electronica music in San Francisco in the 90s. With a fascination with east Asian culture, he spent time in Japan and traveled to Indonesia while being overseas, where he came across these beautiful, brass Indonesian gongs. Gamelan, a type of music made on these gongs, has been part of the traditional, music and dance that dates back to hundreds of years ago. The sound the gongs produced was atonal to western musical scales, which appealed to him because he had and continues to have a fascination for orchestrating sound in a way that stretches conventional definitions of music and musicality. In Bali, he began to study the ancient music of Gamelan and managed to get a Fulbright grant to support his training.

Now, he has made the first robotic orchestra, which he named the GamelanTron. He brought hundreds of pounds of brass from Indonesia and has set them up in a studio in Brooklyn with mechanical arms of mallets that play the notes and arpeggios that he controls with a laptop. He is part of a musical collaboration known as the League of Electronic Musical Robots.

Zemi 17 composes a fusion of the ancient Gamelan with experimental minimalist electronica, incorporating organic soundscapes of forests, jungles or even Prospect Park, Brooklyn.
stay tuned for original video of Zemi in his studio…

Some residents in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood have already chosen their president: Daniel Dory, a local 23-year-old who previously served as unofficial “mayor” of their street.

Danny, as everyone calls him, has trisomy 21 Down Syndrome, where each gene has an extra chromosome.  But his outgoing and independent personality, combined with a love of life and all the people in it, make him a natural friend and leader.  They also challenge commonly held public preconceptions about what someone with this most common of genetic conditions is capable of achieving in life.

Sarah Palin’s nomination as the Republican vice presidential candidate promised to broaden that awareness.  As Americans met  the Alaska Governor and her family, including her newborn son Trig, who has Down Syndrome, Gov. Palin declared that if she and John McCain were elected, families of special needs children would have “a friend in the White House.”  In that large and tight-knit community whose voices often go unheeded, such promises have sparked contrasting feelings of hope and circumspection.

“As a mother, your heart goes out to her because even in this day and age, it’s hard,” said Mary Dory, Danny’s mother and a nurse for almost 30 years at Beth Israel Medical Center in Brooklyn.

In the 1980s and 90s, Ms. Dory and her husband’s efforts to find strong school services for their son were helped by doctor’s referral and the word-of-mouth among supportive parents in Brooklyn’s Catholic school network.  Last year, Danny graduated from Bishop Ford High School in Park Slope and is now at the nonprofit Guild for Exceptional Children in Bay Ridge, where he has occupational therapy and works at businesses throughout Brooklyn, earning a small stipend.

But in the public school system, it is more difficult to find similar programs. Mei Fung Zhang knows this from personal experience. She spent the last 10 years helping her brother and sister-in-law find programs in their Sheepshead Bay neighborhood to challenge and educate their now 17-year-old daughter, Lily Zhu, who also has trisomy 21 Down Syndrome.

“She started special education classes when she was two [and] she learned a lot in elementary school, especially when she had [a bilingual] paraprofessional” said Mrs. Zhang, referring to the teaching aides for children with special needs. But now Lily is enrolled in a program where students of different grade levels learn the same material together. “ She’s learning things she already knows, like third grade level math,” said her aunt.

“The summer-only training does nothing and she’s going to graduate high school soon.  We are looking for programs [that provide] job training and social benefits,” said Mrs. Zhang.

When it comes to the presidential election, Mrs. Zhang says her family has been pretty apathetic, but she wonders how the country could afford any additional services for students.

“I hope the government or the education department can do more for hoever wins the election,

“I think it’s great that [Trig Palin is] in the public eye,” said Mary Dory.  “It’s going to make people more aware, more educated and less judgmental.  I don’t really know if it’ll do anything for education programs, though.”

Others are even less optimistic. In a September column in the Phoenix New Times, editor Amy Silverman, the mother of a 5-year old girl with Down Syndrome, writes that Gov. Palin’s promises are not realistic for many reasons.

“There’s never enough funding … but worse, the whole system is so poorly managed you practically need a Ph.D. in public policy (or another parent who’s already been though this, or a lawyer, or all three) to help you get services,” Mrs. Silverman wrote.

“All you need to do is drive to the center of any large city in America and watch homeless schizophrenics push shopping carts to see the effects another social conservative — Ronald Reagan — had on another disenfranchised group, the country’s mentally ill.”

Neither presidential candidate stood out for Danny Dory although he did vote, exercising a right that the National Disability Rights Network has been actively promoting “I don’t like what I’m seeing on TV,” Danny said. “It is going to be a battle between them, but I don’t care who wins or who is president.  I just want a president.”

If you’re tired of the bar scene, Make Fun might be the place for you. Last Tuesday I checked out this do-it-yourself, sewing hangout in Bushwick and found out that sewing is cool!!!!

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Tuesday night at Make Fun in Bushwick

By Maya Pope-Chappell

Photo by Maya Pope-Chappell

Crisp snare drums bring the rain and the bass drums-they bring the thunder.  The nervous silence that once whisked through the air is interrupted by the clash, thump and pound of the Approaching Storm marching band.

Created as an alternative to street gangs, drugs and violence, Approaching Storm showcases the talent of youth from East New York and Brownsville.  Ranked one of the leading bands in New York City, the southern-style band has won 22 straight competitions.

“In the beginning, it was hard to compete in New York because our different style, our format and of course the people that could not accept what we were doing to their bands,” said a boastful Sergio Carter, director of the Approaching Storm marching band.

Carter birthed the band three years ago with no funding.

“We had no drums, no nothing,” Carter said.  “We was beating on encyclopedias, practicing out in the rain, we really didn’t have no housing.  And they expected these kids to quit.”

Slowly, the band raised funds for drums and uniforms by performing on streets like Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and asking for donations.

“We hustle for an hour and a half and we play for an hour and a half,” said 16-year-old tenor drum player Luis Figueroa of the routine.

Now 40 members strong, the band has weathered the storm, performing across New York, Virginia, and the Carolina’s.

The community-based band made up of boys and girls age 10 to 19 is full of personality and character.

“Nobody’s really the same,” Carter said.  They all come from East New York or Brownsville, so when it was time for me to teach, I had a rough group of kids.  And that’s what it comes out to be.  Hard work.  Tough kids.  Tough attitudes.  Tough playing then tough winning.”

Carter’s guidance and influence on band members have had a lasting effect.  As a result, Carter’s tough love often blurs the lines between director, mentor, and father.

Five former members of Approaching Storm have moved on, each obtaining a band scholarship for universities across the country including Clark Atlanta, Virginia State, and Morgan State.

“I eventually hope that me being a dancer in the Approaching Storm marching band will lead me to being a dancer in a HBCU [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] college band,” said Tuesday Hawkins, 18, who will graduate next year.

This January, the band hopes to be performing before thousands in the 56th Inaugural Parade in Washington D.C. for President-elect Barack Obama.

“If they do not get chosen, I would take them for the experience,” Carter said.  “Then at least they have a chance to be a part of the process.  To see the visual of it.  The aura.  For these kids, just seeing the magnitude of people will incite excitement in the child.”

In February, the band will host their second annual competition, “Battle of the Elements,” at the Brownsville Recreation Center.

This article from the Times last week, about European immigrants in Williamsburg reminded me of when I lived there last summer. I had just moved from California and was fascinated by the changing demographics, especially what appeared to be a hipster tidal wave. One personal experience helped me understand things.

As I jumped into a cab, a neighbor yelled, “Why are you so WHITE?”  While he was probably referring to my bright white Nike shirt—I had just come back from a run—he was also dropping an overt hint about the new Williamsburg immigrants—the youth, the white, the Hipsters.  Surely I didn’t fit the hillbilly hip dress (I had my iPod strapped to the bicep and was rocking New Balances) but I did share a skin pigment and a sub-30 age with many of the other new residents.  An old-timer, a vestige of Italian Williamsburg, this guy managed to say with a smile what I have felt since I had moved to this part of the City–The young and hip don’t always blend well with existing residents.