Jefe's House

“Hi Gangters of Plein Sud Guess What!! We are not moving from this spot.”

I stumbled upon some real-life street theatre in Tribeca this summer and wrote about it for the New York Press.  It’s this week’s cover story, To Kebab and  Conquer, about a street fight between a scrappy halal cart vendor and a highbrow restaurateur.

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 Here’s the online version.  Enjoy.

New York Magazine weighs in.

How Serge Becker treats his neighbors and customers.

Gawker writer Brian Moylan trashes Vogue editor Anna Wintour for trying to run Serge Becker out of town on a rail and for saying of him, rightfully (and I speak from first-hand experience), “I know the kind of places he’s involved in and the kind of people that he brings.”  Like I said, she’s exactly right, and he’s been getting away with it and will continue to do so for years.  Follow the [bribe] money.  Becker has a long history of utter disregard and contempt for his neighbors and a pattern providing employment opportunities and hangouts for unrepentant drug addicts and hoodlums. His establishments are little more than glammed up crack houses.  Don’t take my word for it, do your own homework.  

I hate it when a jackass hipster posing as a journalist describes the residents of a neighborhood as “pesky” for not wanting their blocks turned into eternal street parties and crack dens for his over-privileged moron friends.    Damn you, pesky citizens, for not rolling over and playing dead so coke-addled, pretentious suburban kids can live out their NYC glam fantasies and turn your residential block into a shithole.  

Wintour’s dead right about Becker and the crowd he runs with — convicted drug dealers, thugs, crackheads, crooks  – and that’s just the front-of-house staff.  Becker hand picks scum like this to be the public face of La Esquina, then wonders why no one wants him in their neighborhood? Gee Serge, what gives?   Wintour and her Greenwich Village neighbors might be “tony” but that doesn’t mean everyone who wants Becker’s slime pits shut down is in her same income bracket, so stop making sweeping generalizations.  Maybe she just doesn’t want to see her neighbors beaten, dragged, manhandled and have lit cigarettes tossed in their faces. 

Where do you live, Moylan? Please tell us so we can come by and party Becker-style outside your place, ‘k? No complaints, now, junior, or we’ll brand you a NIMBY.

BP Buys Google and Yahoo Search Words to Keep People Away From Real News on Gulf Oil Spill Disaster
by Maryann Tobin, reposted from examiner.com

“In their most tenacious effort to control the ‘spin’ on the worst oil spill disaster in the history, BP has purchased top internet search engine words so they can re-direct people away from real news on the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

“BP spokesman Toby Odone confirmed to ABC News that the oil giant had in fact bought internet search terms. So now when someone searches the words ‘oil spill’,  on the internet, the top link will re-direct  them to BP’s official company website.”   CONT’D

[In fairness that examiner.com headline does seem a little alarmist to me.  It's indeed a lame and desperate move from BP but the BP link is clearly marked on Google as a Sponsored Link in a different colored field to offset it, the same as when I google "riding crop" or "cotton candy machine" and tons of sponsored links pop up before the real links.]

[Turns out the same thing happens on Yahoo, too.   The BP-sponsored links are clearly marked as Sponsored Results in a separate shaded area. In fact one of the main stories right now from the AP on Yahoo's front page is about how BP's been lying about the amount of oil leakage, so if BP's paying Yahoo to spin the news then it should demand a refund because Yahoo's not delivering the goods.  In fact, this whole Examiner piece turns out to be a silly load of crap, a non-story.  How embarrassing. I can't believe I took the bait. I guess examiner.com took a page from Fox News' playbook.

Sorry to have wasted your time, readers.]

Now that Hillary Clinton is beating the drums of war and calling on the entire world to rise to its “duty” to respond to North Korea’s supposed attack on a South Korean warship and the murder of 46 crew, a flood of frightening analogies and comparisons come to mind. The most obvious one is that this is strikingly similar to how US involvement in Vietnam began in 1964: with a US-faked attack by North Vietnam on the US warship Maddox, which by the rules of our SETO treaty gave Lyndon Johnson the legal greenlight to take military action in Southeast Asia.

Is South Korea’s Cheonan to USS Maddox as North Korea’s “torpedo sub” is to North Vietnam’s nonexistent Tonkin ghost ships of ’64? Let’s hope not.

The recent events surrounding North Korea also call to mind how Bill Clinton found a way to win the world’s approval to remove mega-mobster Milosevic from power by having NATO bomb Europe (and, by the way, use depleted uranium weapons in Kosovo even after he promised not to do so — way to “help” the Kosovo Albanians) by citing the Kosovo Liberation Army’s faked massacre of 45 Albanian civilians allegedly by Yugoslav police at Raqak, Kosovo in 1999. The American public swallowed it hook, line and sinker even though it was repeatedly discredited as a hoax.

Of course, neither Democrat Lyndon Johnson nor Democrat Bill Clinton have anything on Republican George W. Bush’s trickery to get us into Iraq, ostensibly to remove Saddam from power but at the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.

Have Hillary and Obama learned from these masters how best to position a US — I mean South Korean (right) — bombing run into North Korea to get rid of the latest Milosevic, Kim Jong Il? We’ll soon find out. I hope I’m wrong.

Sure KJI is evil and crazy, but let’s hope our aggressive rhetoric of late won’t result in hundreds of thousands of dead North Korean civilians we’re supposedly liberating from oppression, over a relative handful of dead South Korean soldiers.

Hillary’s lustily rattling her sabre, and South Korea’s president Lee Myung-bak is cocking his rifle, and our big trade partner Red China is pretending to be on the fence but leaning heavily toward siding with the US.   The North Korean leadership is just as full of hype as the rest of these players but they’re still calling this whole mess a “wild provocation.” Are they right? If they did torpedo the ship then why be bashful about it? Something’s not right here.

I had to look elsewhere to find out some apparently objective facts beyond all the hype and rhetoric coming from the the West and its flunkies via our mainstream media. The following is culled from South Korea-based pro-democracy news organization NKnet, the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights –

Despite North Korea’s rhetoric that “all communication links between North and South Korea are severed,” and “the North-South Economic Cooperation Council Office in the Kaesong Industrial Complex is being frozen and abolished, and all South Korean workers are to be immediately deported,” … the North Korean military authorities granted entrance to the Kaesong Complex for South Korean personnel this morning. Movement into and out of the Kaesong Complex is continuing normally, while fixed line telephones connecting the Kaesong Industrial Complex and parent corporations in South Korea are operating without any problems, too. This appears to display North Korea’s underlying desire to continue operating the Kaesong Industrial Complex.” 

These don’t seem like the actions of a small country eager to go to war against the US, Japan, China and South Korea.

It seems no one over in this hemisphere, in our government or in our media, is interested in reporting such hopeful signs that this will be resolved peacefully. Why is that the case?  It’s more fun, and more lucrative, to beat the drums of war.

Something’s up, y’all.

[photo via infowars.com]

That’s it. I am literally never going to listen to the radio, watch TV or read news stories on the Internet ever again. Literally. I am literally going to gouge out my eyeballs with a ballpoint pen.  Literally.

NBC Dateline segment Follow the Money, 5/2/10 (rerun, originally aired Nov. 2009):

SGT. JAMES PEREZ OF FAIRFIELD, CT:  She’s so close. She could almost see the money. She can smell it, she can taste it in her bank account.

CHRIS HANSEN: The scammers managed to get Shireen to be emotionally invested here.

SGT. PEREZ: Right. They’re literally pulling the puppet strings.

No, Sergeant, the Nigerian email scammers are figuratively pulling the puppet strings, that’s your point. They did not literally have strings tied around Shireen’s joints controlling her arm, leg and head movements.

Next up, NPR’s All Things Considered segment on the government’s Minerals Management Agency (5/11/10), which sells leases for oil and gas production. 

For the exploding Gulf rig the agency gave BP a Categorical Exclusion, “which means there is no public review, no scientific analysis, no discussion of alternatives…it’s literally a rubber stamp process,” said Bill Snapes, Chief Counsel for Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group.

No, Bill, it’s figuratively a rubber stamp process, that’s your point. I don’t think the MMA literally inked CATEGORICAL EXCLUSION – APPROVED onto a series of BP’s mimeographed  lease documents with a big rubber stamp.

And lastly, this AP story about “Crude” documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger being ordered to hand over footage regarding a long-running legal case against Chevron in Equador (5/7/10):

Chevron lawyer Randy Mastro…said it was not a case about the First Amendment. “It’s a case about a lawyer who decided he wanted to star in a movie,” he said. “It is literally candid camera.”

No, Randy, it’s figuratively Candid Camera, that’s your point.  Was the lawyer in the documentary shown shooting a TV show hosted by a Funt and featuring actors pulling good-natured practical jokes on unsuspecting dupes?  No, Randy, he wasn’t.

[pictures via amazon.com, sentinelprint.com and seattleweekly.com]

Originally posted 3/10/10 by jefevonstanley on MediaElites.com.

Rachel Corrie

Theatre changes nothing, but at least it changes that. The BBC reports that the Rachel Corrie murder trial is finally underway in Israel. Well, okay, it’s a civil suit but still. Never heard of her?

Seven years ago, idealistic human rights activist Rachel Corrie, a Seattle native, was killed by an Israeli bulldozer on the Gaza Strip. Four years ago this month, the US premiere of the play based on Corrie’s poignant if naive political and philosophical ruminations, My Name is Rachel Corrie, was canceled by New York Theatre Workshop. The play, pieced together by actor Alan “Severus Snape” Rickman and Guardian editor Katharine Viner, had had a successful run in London in 2005.

NYTW’s PR nightmare began when conflicting reasons were given for the cancellation. Had they merely postponed it due to scheduling difficulties, or was it canceled because they’d consulted with New York City religious leaders who’d insisted the play was anti-Semitic and incendiary so they chickened out of premiering it? Hard to believe; after all, this was the organization that brought us Shopping and Fucking. Then again that play featured Philip Seymour Hoffman, so if he was bugged by the cancellation (see below) then maybe something was up after all. 

Continued here – http://mediaelites.com/2010/03/10/rachel-corries-ghost-gets-her-day-in-court.

Photo by Jefe Von Stanley.

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
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Apple Announces Tablet Device Called iPad
Steven P. Jobs says the product, which looks like a big iPhone, will fill a gap between laptops and smartphones.

obsian diabolism is abroad in the land once more.  Don’t you see?  The iPhone was  launched to fill an imaginary gap between PDAs and cellphones, and now the iPad will fill the imaginary gap between iPhones and laptops.  This is the devilish paradox of infinite points on a finite number line made concrete, and apparently a brilliant advertising model.

I prophesy that next will come the iPanic to fill the imaginary gap between iPads and laptops, the iPrep to fill the imaginary gap between laptops and cutting boards, then the iCouldntcareless to fill the imaginary gap between iPhones andiPads. Then we’ll need an iDunno to fill the imaginary gap between iPhones and iCouldntcarelesses, and the iBuprofen to fill the imaginary gap between iCouldntcarelesses and iPads and to stop your eyestrain headaches.  It can now literally go on forever.

Damn you, Euclid of Alexandria.  See where pre-Christian thought gets us?

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Dispatches
Notes From All Over
Monte Carlo

(Originally published in Hemispheres, United Airlines’ in-flight magazine, August, 2009.)

“I’m still learning, still messing up,” admits the rap star Nelly, ordering lunch from the snack bar at the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo moments after being bumped from the 2009 European Poker Tour’s grand finale tournament. Europe’s answer to the U.S.’s World Series of Poker, the EPT is an array of tournaments culminating in a championship, which this year brought 935 players to Monaco, on the Côte d’Azur.

Rather than seeming chastened after his losses, the multiplatinum artist wants more. “I’ll stick around for some other games,” he says. “It’s not like other kinds of gambling where you’re just playing against the house. It’s personal.”

Besides, you have to start somewhere. Isabelle “No Mercy” Mercier had a respectable job as a corporate lawyer in Montreal, but she quit to become a dealer and is now one of the top players in the world, complete with her own clothing line and a memoir currently being adapted by a pair of screenwriters. “I will never go back to law, ever, ever,” she says, relaxing on a plush red sofa in the players lounge. “My message is, if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do you’re going to be miserable.”

Chicago native Gavin Griffin, a top U.S. pro, was a speech pathology major in Texas when he started playing kitchen table poker with friends. He drove to Vegas for the 2004 World Series of Poker, won a tournament in an upset and quit school to go pro. “My parents weren’t real happy about it,” he recalls with a boyish smirk. Now 27, Griffin has earned $4.5 million.

Nelly, despite receiving just so-so reviews for his last album, 2008’s Brass Knuckles, insists poker will remain strictly a hobby. “After this,” he says, “I got to get back to work.”

http://www.brain-on-fire.com/hemispheres.htm

Poker legend Dan Negreanu trains the USA's media elite. Photo by Jefe Von Stanley.

A favorite repost of mine from ASSME, now MediaElites.com.

The European Poker Tour tournament held in breathtaking, transgender prostitute-saturated Monte Carlo concluded for most of the press corps with a “media tournament” in which we were each provided with $1500 in chips and got to sample high stakes poker. Earlier in the day a few colleagues and I took a Texas Hold ‘Em tutorial with Canadian poker legend and pokerstars.net spokesperson Daniel Nagreanu, a terrific and personable teacher who showed great patience.

Unfortunately most of us poker-challenged press dorks thought this “tournament” was one in which we’d play each other kindergarten-style in good, clean fun for a few rounds so during dinner beforehand at the delightful Il Terrazzino we stuffed and drank ourselves silly on wine and limoncello… They didn’t tell us until we’d arrived back at The Sporting that we’d be sitting separately at tables with seasoned cutthroat (and stone cold sober) players in a real tournament without quotation marks… continued here, http://mediaelites.com/2009/04/30/eat-the-press/