Diff'rent strokes ...
Thursday, November 30, 2006
New Yorkers are sometimes bemused to find violent events in their neighborhood streets showing up as major national media stories, in the way the killing of 23-year old African-American bridegroom-to-be Sean Bell so powerfully did.
Even though in actuality New York is much more peaceable than a decade ago, the iconic position this city occupies in our media consciousness as a crime center (reinforced by a ceaseless round of shows in the Law and Order franchise) helped ensure national prominence for this local horror -- an NYPD team loosing off a hail of 50 bullets outside a Queens nightclub, 18 of them hitting Bell and his two surviving but badly injured friends.
Such horrors take place in every big city all too frequently, but I doubt if this particular encounter would have zoomed so high on the national news agenda if it took place in Detroit’s 8 Mile Road or Los Angeles’ South Central districts.
There’s a particular political/racial context, of course. It’s just seven years since Amadou Diallo, the West African immigrant to the South Bronx who died in a hail of police bullets, in his case numbering 41. And the differences in public handling of the two cases are extremely telling.
Today’s city mayor Michael Bloomberg has made a point with the media to look and sound nothing like his predecessor Rudy Giuliani, who as a former prosecutor successfully cultivated a hard-cop image, much to the distaste of many in the city’s minorities – and distinguished himself with special insensitivity after the outrageous, groundless Diallo killing.
Bloomberg quickly took care to be photographed (above left) among black community and religious leaders, and speaking “as a civilian” he called the Queens shootings “unacceptable” and said “it seems to me excessive force was used”. An official inquiry should, it’s to be hoped, establish the truth about the night in question, and about NYPD policy and practice overall.
National attention for the case may have a further dimension. Republican media handlers, after the mid-terms’ trouncing, are reviving that old “kinder, gentler” routine they often try when in trouble. Rudy Giuliani is much anticipated as a runner for the GOP presidential nomination, trading on his image as “America’s Mayor” after the Twin Towers attack.
The national audience may not remember, but New Yorkers certainly do, that Giuliani was so buoyed by his tough-guy role after 9/11 that he tried to buck the term-limits rules, and get himself re-installed as mayor instead of his lawful successor Bloomberg. And other presidential contenders may include that same Bloomberg, if his promoters among the local media are to be believed.
Bloomberg has his own multimillions to use if he campaigns; Giuliani has the financial support of others who have a bruising style to match his own. They include, as of this week, Richard Collins – a wealthy Texan who owns the Today Newspapers group, and who helped one of the GOP’s alleged super-strategists, Arthur Finkelstein, start a delicately-named campaign against Hillary Clinton.
It's called StopHerNow.com
EXCESSIVE POLICE FORCE is, as I say, frequent elsewhere - and my recent trip to Los Angeles emphasized for me how strong a role “citizen coverage” can play in exposing such abuses.
Two cases of apparent LAPD brutality surfaced through cell-phone videos taken by members of the public. Again there’s a local context – the infamous camcorder recording of Rodney King’s police beating back in 1991.
The current videos suggest little has changed. One shows William Cardenas being held down on the ground by one officer and repeatedly punched in the face by a second (picture above center). The other video shows Benjamin Barker being handcuffed and thrown in the back of a patrol car (reasonable enough arrest procedure, perhaps) but then being doused in pepper-spray -- his continuing threat came from the fact, police claimed, that despite his restraints he could still spit in the car.
A nowadays-predictable circulation of the videos (to more than 700,000 viewers) on YouTube.com (to view click here) led to broadcast of the incidents on TV and forced action by police chief William Bratton.
A more organized instance of video-recording has highlighted another distressing LA practice. The city of LA has this month opened proceedings against the Kaiser Permanente healthcare conglomerate for so-called “patient-dumping”. This occurs when a hospital sends out a homeless patient by pre-paid taxi to the city’s Skid Row district, with instructions for the tax-driver simply to leave the passenger there.
Such heartless barbarity prompted the district’s Union Rescue Mission to fix a web-camera to its outer wall, and earlier this year it recorded the dazed arrival by taxi of 63-year-old Carol Ann Reyes, who then wandered aimlessly around in a state of dementia, wearing her hospital gown and slippers (picture above right) until mission staff took her in. She had been discharged, if that’s the right word, by the Bellflower Medical Center, which Kaiser Permanente owns.
Cameras everywhere, it has been said, can be institutionally intrusive – but they can also function as a community’s conscience.
"COMPANY" – THE SOMEWHAT UNNERVING, BITTER-SWEET musical from Stephen Sondheim and George Furth – opened in a new revival at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre last night. And I wish the venture well.
Played in a black set that evidently wants to suggest a Soho or Chelsea loft, but at time glows with an eerie phosphorescence that made me think of a radio-active seawall, the piece also displays some of the least appealing costumes I’ve ever seen in a musical (- black again, though ugly, not chic).
But the songs of course are as wonderful as ever, and - at least in the early preview I saw - the hilarious (and pfetching) Jane Pfitsch brought the house down with the rapid-fire “Getting Married Today”. On the other hand, “The Ladies Who Lunch”, delivered here grindingly by Barbara Walsh, simply cannot hold a scented bougie to the originator Elaine Stritch’s subtle rendering, available to be enjoyed again only last month, during Stritch’s Café Carlyle cabaret engagement.
Like the director John Doyle’s previous, Tony-winning, transformation of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, the most striking element in this Company is the requirement laid upon all the players to do some astonishing multi-tasking. The male lead, Raul Esparza may simply have to tinkle the ivories a bit while singing, but Pfitsch for instance - as well as doing fast Lucille Ball-style comic switches while singing - had also to play the French Horn, and Leenya Rideout plucked the double-bass besides giving plaintive voice in the ambivalent ode "Poor Baby".
The effect is almost as striking as Patti Lupone strutting with the tuba in Sweeney Todd.