Learning from Miami: NYC Activists Beware!

Local

If last month’s protest in Miami against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meeting is any indication, the strategy developing among law enforcement agencies regarding how to handle large protests is similar to a Powell Doctrine for domestic dissent: overwhelming force, preemptive arrests, and intense multi-agency reconnaissance.

Out of the Blue: My Experience in the NYPD

Express

Every morning I had to get up so early, just so I could get to the bus stop and then to the train station, in order to arrive at the Academy on time. Ultimately we will be assigned to Brooklyn for driving practice, a two-week assignment, and I will need a car rather desperately. Please God let there be someone who can hook a sista up with a ride; if not, please let me be able to find and afford a little piece of car.

Thomas Nozkowski with Chris Martin

Art

The Brooklyn Rail met with Thomas Nozkowski at his house in High Falls, New York on a clear November day. We sat in the dining room as the afternoon sunlight filtered through the trees outside and set warm gray shadows flickering on the window shades

David Levi Strauss with Joan Waltemath

Art

What I’ve always tried to do in relation to an artist’s work is to write something that can sit next to the work and not do violence to it, first of all, which is very difficult, and then to try to make something happen between them, between the visual work and the written, that is a third thing.

The Drum Is a Voice

Music

The music referred to as jazz (a term which arguably has its origins in the amalgamated African cultures of Georgia and South Carolina, a.k.a. Gullah) is not dead. It continues to live and grow, and thus cannot be dealt with as a fixed relic.

Editor's Letter: The Issue is Free Speech

Although a party convention, by definition, is a large political event, our city leaders have presented next summer’s Republican gathering in a different light. According to Jonathan Tisch of Loews Hotels, who also heads the city’s tourism agency, “The convention coming to New York is so important economically and emotionally that it’s necessary for all 8 million New Yorkers—no matter what their party stripes are—to support this event.”

The Sounds of Change: Tony Kushner’s New Musical

Theater

Nothing ever happen underground
in Louisiana
cause they ain’t no underground
in Louisiana
There is only
underwater.

Swallow Myself

Fiction

I’m doing it. Swallowing myself. I know the act is simple, I’ve been eating since before I was alive.