(Photo courtesy of Paul Krassner)
Paul Krassner sometimes gets touted as a forerunner to comics like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who blend fact and fiction into combustible political cocktails. But the Daily Show can seem lame and tame compared to The Realist, launched in 1958 when Krassner was a Mad magazine contributor living in the East Village.
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(Photo: Mary Reinholz)
Frank Zappa’s onetime mistress wants to release a new album, but first she’ll have to overcome a failed fundraiser and — worse still — a bureaucratic nightmare of the sort that Zappa surely would’ve lampooned.
Nigey Lennon was 12 when she first discovered Zappa’s Freak Out!. She was 15 when she sent him a demo of her own music and was surprised to receive an invitation to meet with him to discuss it at Bizarre Records. She was 17 when he hired her as a guitarist for his 1971 tour to promote his film, 201 Motels. Lennon was still a minor when Zappa — 30 and married at the time — seduced her in Berkeley, according to her book Being Frank: My Time With Frank Zappa.
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(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
A group of Bowery locals and activists are once again voicing concern about a homeless shelter that has long been linked to various crimes in the East Village.
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Lt. Patrick Ferguson (Photo: Mary Reinholz)
After a summer recess, the Ninth Precinct’s community council resumed its monthly meetings last night, drawing a large turnout of locals to the East Fifth Street station house. Deputy Inspector Peter J. Venice announced that crime in his precinct was down overall by 4 percent with declines in all categories except felony assault during the last 28 days. But residents still griped about everything from loud music at rooftop ragers to rats scurrying out of “filthy” apartment buildings.
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Norman Siegel and listeners. (Photo: Mary Reinholz)
Insisting he is not “anti-cop,” only “anti-bad cop,” civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel last night called for the creation of a New York State prosecutor to investigate police misconduct in the wake of the chokehold death of Eric Garner. At a community forum at St. John’s Lutheran Church in the West Village, he also recommended that training for cadets be extended from six months to a year.
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Margaret Chin and tenant leader Mary Keating (Photo: Mary Reinholz)
More than 120 tenants of Knickerbocker Village crammed into a fifth-floor room in lower Manhattan yesterday to protest a rent increase calculated at more than 13 percent over the next two years, contending that owners of the complex — and not they — should pay for a shortfall in their operating expenses.
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(Photo: Amy Lombard)
It was dark by the time members of the East Village walkabout group entered Tompkins Square Park, carrying plastic bags containing clean syringes, sterilized cookers and tourniquets, condoms, lubricants and dental dams.
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Sanders performs Fugs songs. (Photo: Gina Murrell/@GinaMurrell1)
Last night at Bowery Poetry Club, friends of counterculture icon Ed Sanders marked his 75th birthday by lauding him variously as a journalist, an investigative poet, a utopian anarchist, the co-founder of The Fugs and publisher of Fuck You: a Magazine of the Arts, and the intellectual who opened the Peace Eye Bookstore off of Tompkins Square Park in the 1960s.
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Casa Betsaida’s chapel. (Photo: Mary Reinholz)
The former convent on Hewes Street is a mystery house: there’s no sign outside announcing its name or mission. People walk in and out of the two-story building quietly, most of them black and Latino men largely unnoticed in this Satmar Hasidic part of South Williamsburg. One 34-year-old man, from Guatemala, paused to talk to this reporter and then was on his way, in a hurry to get a prescription filled.
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