The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory by Stacey Wakefield

Stacey Wakefield has crafted a novel of historical fiction, set in a Brooklyn Squat in the mid 1990’s. Our protagonist, Sid, is basically a 20-something rover hanging out with the punk-anarchist crowd, looking for a squat to live in. The problem is, the Manhattan squats are all full by this point, and since this is the era when the price of East Village real estate went up, there aren’t any more abandoned buildings to squat in. So she goes for the next available spot, in this case, Williamsburg.

If you expect a novel about booze, drugs, and partying, you won’t find it here. This novel is in the realm of Ash Thayer’s Kill City, and much of it is spent renovating, hauling debris, getting water, etc. Though most third-wave feminists probably won’t agree, this novel does more for women’s lib then a whole lot of activists. Think of it as a book about a woman doing everything on her own; no money from home, and no getting by on her looks. She’s not in the kind of life where looking pretty is an asset, and her part-time job doesn’t require a cute girl.

I consider this book a cross between Little House on the Prairie and Home Girl. As with the former, Sid is a homesteader, trying to make a home out on a frontier. As with Home Girl, Sid is a woman in a harsh part of town. But unlike Judith Maitloff’s book, Sid doesn’t have to contend with as much crime as she would in Hamilton Heights. For those of you that read Scenes From a Life, you’ll see that Williamsburg, an industrial area, had less crime because fewer people lived there. Soho was like that in its early days too. I guess it’s easier to live in an industrial area than a poor one.

Stacey Wakefield’s previous effort was Not For Rent, consisting of interviews with squatters in several cities, including London, England. Unfortunately, the days of the city squatters in New York are over. There are no more abandoned spaces, thanks to rising values. If you want to squat, you might as well try Philadelphia, Camden, and Detroit, all of which are full of abandoned blocks. But you’d have to contend with dangerous neighbors in those cities.

Antidote for a Stalker by Mike Proctor

Mike Proctor is a retired police detective who specialized in stalking and harassment cases. It was a difficult specialty for a long time, because as he stresses in the first chapter, the laws were very unclear. For all those of you who saw Cape Fear (the original and remake) you will know how a stalker can drive the victims crazy. Proctor doesn’t sensationalize anything, however. He gives lots of case studies and examples of how the stalker can be a stranger or someone close to the victim. But according to him, all stalkers obsess about their targets and they’re all capable of inflicting injury. Worse, the stalkers rarely know when to quit and they are almost impossible to scare off.

Proctor also discusses the type of victims that the stalkers target. If the stalker is an estranged husband, it’s a case of battered woman syndrome (like it was with OJ Simpson.) He’s not entirely sympathetic to all victims, as in the chapter on paparazzi, who use GPS to track their celebrity targets. “They are their own worst enemy,” he writes, since they use Twitter to tell everyone where they’ll be and when.

I’m surprised that Proctor had to self-publish this book through Createspace, because this is a great comprehensive study on stalking. He’s right in that the law is part of the problem when it comes to prosecution; the code is so unclear that the police aren’t sure what to do. Is the stalker just being funny? Are the obscene photos just a prank? Does a full year of annoying prank calls, each one a misdemeanor, amount to a felony? If the stalker places ads in your name listing your home for sale, your car for sale, or takes out a subscription to violent porno in your name, what crime does that constitute?

I applaud Detective Proctor for writing this book. In the end, the only way to keep yourself safe is to safeguard your privacy. Don’t put your address on your iPhone GPS, just use a nearby park to direct you home. Don’t put your personal schedule on your Facebook page, because that will
help your stalker follow you. If you’re a celebrity, safeguard your privacy (like Bob Dylan and Meg White), and don’t parade your kids in front of the media (at least not as much as Angelina Jolie does.)

This book may one day become a staple for detectives worldwide. I await Proctor’s next book, which I hope will focus more on social media bullying.

Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccine, and the Forgotten History

The world has always had a love-hate relationship with medicine. On one hand, some people will try any procedure to cure illnesses, but on the other, many are afraid of the doctors. I imagine that when Smallpox inoculation came about, a sizable number of men would’ve said “I’m not dumb enough to go looking to get Cowpox!” Physicians have always been respected in the USA, but the Tuskegee Experiment didn’t endear them to African Americans in the South. A recent book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks shows how the problem was even worse than it looked.

Humphries and Bystrianyk, a physician and a medical researcher, not only tell the story of the vaccine controversy, but also show that lack of ethics practiced by the doctors. Take the chapter on Smallpox vaccine; the doctors did all of their experiments on children, which today would be totally unacceptable. In some ways, the book makes vaccine look like a reckless-quack-cure-all to deal with the poor. In the chapter The Rebel Experiment, we see how the authorities in Leicester used hygiene as opposed to vaccine. The outbreaks of Smallpox were occurring in the slums, which were crowded, badly-ventilated and filthy. The best way to fight the disease was to move the infected to isolation wards, clean the apartments, and air them out.

The book continues to discuss the problems of “quick fixes” for health problems; DDT, questionable Polio treatments (and diagnosis), along with lack of proper diets. During the Polio epidemic, which often occurred in summer, DDT may have been responsible for damaging immune systems. There’s even a chapter on old remedies, many of which do in fact work. I remember how my grandfather used to make his kids (and grandkids) take cod liver oil every day in the 1950’s. It tasted horrible (even in pill form) but it worked. Cod liver oil contains essential vitamins, and is a known immune-booster.

I get the feeling, after reading this book, that Americans use medicine as a quick fix so they can avoid having to work at it. We give our kids vitamins to compensate because we can’t get them to eat greens. Then we give behaviorally-challenged kids Ritalin to keep them quiet, rather than use sports and outdoor recess. Just like in the 1800’s, when London’s authorities would rather use Cowpox-based vaccine rather than provide clean water, we tend to look for easy cures.

Invisible City: Photographs by Ken Schles

Originally published in 1988 by Twelvetrees Press, and now reissued by Steidl, these photographs capture the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the end of her life. When I say “end,” I mean that the buildings are vacant, the trees are bare ad stunted, the streets are empty, and the people look empty too. Schles captures them lying around in filthy apartments, hollow eyed, and depressed. One of them shows a woman on the toilet, crammed into a tiny bathroom, her dress hiked up to reveal her flabby legs. I remember the city in the Kotch-Dinkins-Giuliani days; most New Yorkers were averse to being photographed, and the subject here must’ve been pretty hopeless to let herself be compromised like this. Regardless, I was not turned on.

In another photo, the neighborhood comes out to celebrate the fireworks, everyone’s out dancing in the street. Other than that, there’s no sign of happiness in this book. Everyone’s just waiting for the place to die quickly so they can move on. Seen from a window on a hot summer day, weed-grown lots and empty tenements. I know it’s the summer because the tree have leaves and the sky is cloudless. But even the trees look sick. There are three cars on the street, their windows intact. Is it because nobody’s there to break them? Do the owners move the cars at night? One photo shows a bunch of tulips on a windowsill overlooking an alley. They say that when a tree des, a thousand flowers bloom.

Today, the Lower East Side has good things. Community gardens are well-maintained, streets are clean, kids can walk safely in the streets, and there are healthy things to do. Young people have moved in, and they proudly decorate their apartments. The neighborhood was once a dead tree, and it finally fell down. Flower bloomed in its wake.

The grainy pics capture every horrible sad detail of the old Lower East Side. Some might call it poor quality, but keep in mind that not all artists are well-financed with the best equipment. The photographer may have been too poor to afford a flashbulb, or maybe he bought some past-date film. I remember when I started taking pictured in that era; I used grainy 400dx black and white film. You couldn’t blow it up, but it was perfect for low light. Or a dark, unlit tenement.

New York's New Edge

My first encounter with Chelsea and the New York City Highline was back in 1996. The neighborhood was already one big gallery space, and the old factories and warehouses had all become artist studios. As for the Highline railway, it had not been used in nearly 20 years. Still, I was fascinated by this old relic of the past, an elevated railway that ran through buildings and stopped very abruptly in the middle of the street. Today it’s an expensive area, but what about the 80’s, when it wasn’t as desirable?

David Halle and Elisabeth Tiso collect the stories of people who lived there through the years. In the first chapter, Silas Seandel describes his move to Chelsea in 1978. He needed a concrete space, SoHo was already taken, so he found a spot west of 9^th. The area had lots of S&M bars (well-known from the movie Cruising with Al Pacino) and since nobody lived there, muggers didn’t bother with it. The city didn’t want to lose industry by allowing Chelsea to become residential, but they didn’t realize that industry in the city was practically dead. Kind of reminds me of an earlier book, In Love With Art (about Francois Mouly and Art Spiegelman) where the artists acquire a cheap printing machine, thanks to all the local print shops shutting down.

SoHo was residentially zoned b 1995 and had long-term leases, so all the galleries were priced out by the Giuliani era. The Dia Art Center, started by the DeMenil family, is portrayed by the author as being an anchor for the neighborhood. My problem with this book is that the Westbeth building is barely discussed. The apartments-located in the old Bell Telephone factory-were founded as residences for artists. Don’t the longtime residents of the Westbeth have stories to tell? They loved down on Bethune Street when it was barely safe to go at night. The authors also ignore the transportation issue, which would have been a major factor in the area. SoHo had connections to all subway lines on the east side, but Chelsea had only the west side lines, and 11^th avenue is almost half a mile from the nearest subway stop.

The great thing about this book is that it give an insight into the way the artists were the pioneers of the city in the earlier days. They lived and worked in an area that was not glamorous, not fun, not vibrant, and didn’t have all the great restaurants and fun bars. They had to be tough enough to handle seed streets, which were probably pitch black at night from unrepaired streetlights. My hat will always be of to these people for toughing it out.

Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth Century American Writers

I’m not a fan of Saul Bellow, but this book is probably the best study of the writer that I’ve read so far. In fact, Edward Mandelson’s portrait of him is greater than anything Bellow ever wrote himself. He portrays Bellow as maturing from a liberal parent to a seriously non-liberal old patriarch, browbeating his kids. Strange, how he went from practicing what he preached to being one of the mean old cranks he’d write about in his books.

Mandelson’s portrayal of Norman Mailer is not flattering, probably because there isn’t much about Mailer to flatter. Okay, Bellow was a bit of an Archie Bunker type in his later life, but Mailer just comes off as nasty. Never mind the incident where he attacked his wife; Mandelson portrays Mailer as being so overindulged by his mother that he grew to expect indulgence throughout his lie. If you expect the author of this book to trash Mailer over the issue of Jack Henry Abbott, you will find that he doesn’t. However, he doesn’t forgive either. Mandelson argues that mailer was conned; Abbott was ratting out the other prisoners, and it was the warden and US Attorney who pushed for the release in order to be rid of him. The “radical chic” element comes into play too, as Mailer was a hypocrite, easily conned by Abbott’s eloquent rhetoric.

I have to wonder if maybe Mandelson has picked a poor example. These writers are all from an earlier era, and there have been more great American writers making their debut in the decades since. What about Steven King, Amy Tan, and Toni Morrison? What about David Sedaris, Mary Karr, and Sandra Cisneros? The writers from the Baby Boom generation had their own unique contributions, and it doesn’t seem fair to leave them out.