yippeeskippy.com

First it was suddenly a no-no to snap pictures of, or take home videos in the vicinity of, bridges and tunnels, government buildings and anyone working for the Port Authority, their vehicles and activities.

Now, we won’t be able to photograph, videotape or film anywhere in Manhattan without a permit, except in passing, “like ships in the night” as it were.

Read it and weep. Then get really pissed. Then GET BUSY:

“The Mayor’s Office of Theater, Film, and Broadcasting, which coordinates film and television production and issues permits around the five boroughs, is considering rules that could potentially severely restrict the ability of even amateur photographers and filmmakers to operate in New York City. The NY Times reports that the city’s tentative rules include requiring any group of two or more people who want to use a camera in a single public location for more than a half hour (including setup and breakdown time) to get a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance. The regulation would also apply to any group of five or more people who would be using a tripod for more than ten minutes, including setup and breakdown time.” -(Excerpted from the Gothamist)

To put a stop to this shameful attack on artists’ rights, YOU CAN:

Send an email to Julianne Cho: JCHO@FILM.NYC.GOV

Sign a petition at Picture New York: http://pictureny.org/petition/

*Learn More* at the New York Civil Liberties Union web site: http://www.nyclu.org/

*Learn More* at Picture New York (without Pictures of New York): http://pictureny.org/

(You can add their banner to your web site too!)

And check out this video by comedy group Olde English: Free NYC Rap

Thanks for doing the right thing!

I. Manhattan

“When are you going to put your wings on?” 5-year-old Theo asked. “Can I show you something? What kind of puppets did you bring?”

“Don’t bother the fairy, she has a lot to do and she’s already late,” his mother intervened in a strained voice.

I was pumping air into heart-shaped balloons, my squeaky elbow straining. Colorful rubber bubbles drifted across the floor between a facing pair of painted cardboard turrets. Theo liked castles, his mother had said. I had pictured twenty-five kindergardeners puffing back and forth across the room, wafting balloons through the arched openings in these towers, dirigibles propelled by breath alone. During the trial run, I could not throw, much less blow, a single balloon through the arches, not even from two feet away.

Always test out party activity ideas you find on the Internet.
BEFORE you sell the client on them.

After the frenetic twelve-hour puppet show, the Dad exulted, “you kept those kids mesmerized for over an hour!”

“The show was an hour long?” I remember babbling. I had slept less than that, the previous night.

(I keep telling myself, I am not 46, I’m 23 for the second time. The second time, it turns out, is much more exhausting.)

The Mom now referred to me as “our fairy”, and assured me that the entire disaster was in fact “an enormous success.”

Catatonia was setting in. The mother approached me several times and patted me on the shoulder, a gesture that seemed to say, “Paramedics are standing by.”

I swooned on the couch with a glass of champagne in one hand and a slice of pizza dribbling reddish grease on my gauzy flowered dress. Occasionally a child, apple-cheeked from the exertion of whacking another child with a balloon sword, came to sit shyly beside me, curious. What sort of grownup makes a living dressed like Tinkerbell? Will she take me to go pee-pee? Repair my balloon doggie?

Yes, she will. But can she remember where she parked the car?

GREENVISION
on B.C.A.T.
Brooklyn Community Access Television
Wednesdays at 2:30pm and 10:30pm
Channels 35 and 68
Video streaming at bcat.tv (ch. 2)
ph: 718-875-3134 Email: clawx@earthlink.net
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“The Environmental Impact Study (EIS)? It’s a joke!”–Bryan Thomas, Gravesend Marina
“Garbage is garbage…and everyone hates it.” –Steve Chung

This week, May 9, 2007, GREENVISION presents “BARGING IN-Part II, Bensonhurst fights back”, the ongoing story about DSNY (the garbage department) imposing a mega 4000 ton/day Marine Transfer Station (MTS) on Brooklyn and how the community of Bensonhurst came out strong to just say ‘fugetabowdit’!
The show opens with true Brooklynite, Bryan Thomas, giving an exclusive interview to Greenvision’s Rebecca Migdal on the “sorted” (to burn or not to burn) experience he’s had with the Dept. of Sanitation. He tells us that Gravesend Bay was dumped on for 30 years with toxic ash from an illegal incinerator, while DOS tugboat turbulence undermined his sea wall-along with his business. One of Terry Riley’s eerie sound pieces sets the tone, as I again slowly focus on a large white abandoned shed on the bay’s north shore with the letters NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION splayed out above its gaping door. As we showed last week, DOS has newly restyled itself with the deceptively cheery anagram “DSNY” (Disney) and is planning to build another three MTS’s along the City’s waterfront.
Five years ago the formative plan to build the “Southwest Brooklyn MTS” was generally applauded as a wise expedient-it would eliminate the OUTgoing private semi’s. But, the INcoming DOS trucks will keep rolling. Also, in this latest “solution” to the City’s garbage problem, Gravesend Bay will be dredged along Bryan’s sea wall to allow larger ocean going barges to dock. The smelly details of this plan for Bensonhurst residents have finally been ‘unearthed’–the dredging would stir up poisons, like PCB’s, lead, mercury, cadmium and the most toxic substance known-dioxin, which settled to the bottom as layers of relatively benign silt…benign, as long as it isn’t disturbed! The incinerator was finally forced to close in the nineties under intense community pressure (like the kind of pressure they’re getting now).

The old MTS site also came under fire in the 80’s after medical waste, originating from the poorly run facility, washed ashore from New Jersey to Maine-not to mention fouling Coney Island beach less than two miles away!

Still, Gravesend has its charms-walking at sunset through the sensual dunes in one of three nearby parks, chartering a fishing boat at Bryan’s marina or just fishin’ from the shore. Edible (though questionable) prizes of sea bass, albacore and yellow fin are still pulled from these waters. But the dredging would particularly threaten endangered species like the short nose sturgeon, that pass through on their way to their mating grounds in the Hudson.

The community is fighting back. At the April 16th “Environmental Justice Informational Meeting” at Shore Parkway Jewish Center, that Green Party activist Mitchel Cohen helped organize, I show Assistant Commissioner Harry Szarpanski trying to soft-pedal the station’s environmental impact. Local residents and organizations (like the Urban Divers) and some elected officials weren’t buying it. They learned that Cropsey Avenue, a major artery in Bensonhurst, is slated to become a choked-up route for ONE HUNDRED TRUCKS PER DAY!! At the meeting Bryan said, “My customers will complain, ‘why am I sitting here in the middle of all these garbage trucks for 45 minutes when I can just go somewhere else?” Indeed, but the problem is not simply an ‘inconvenience’ for Bryan’s customers. The fine diesel particles from the trucks choking Cropsey will end up in people’s lungs increasing the likelihood of asthma and other diseases!
Please, stay tuned to GREENVISION for updates on this breaking story and other exciting stories about ordinary people propelled into action to become…extraordinary.

Thanks for watching,
Rebecca Migdal, host
Carl Lawrence, producer

REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE. We can dramatically reduce solid waste voluntarily! Insist on tighter standards for domestic and commercial waste production. Compost at your community garden. Reward businesses that provide consumers with low-waste packaging options, and restaurants that use china and silverware instead of throwaway dishes and utensils. Regulate the disposal of construction rubbish. For more info on how to live lightly on the earth, go to: http://www.globalstewards.org/ecotips.htm

Article on the public information meeting in:
www.brooklynheightscourier.com

Garbage Shed- Up Close And Personal:
The Abandoned Marine Transfer Station at Gravesend Bay

GREENVISION
on B.C.A.T.
Brooklyn Community Access Television
Wednesdays at 2:30pm and 10:30pm
Channels 35 and 68
Video streaming at bcat.tv (ch. 2)
ph: 718-875-3134 Email: clawx@earthlink.net
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“Some people don’t want this kinda business here…I guess they don’t make enough money to pay enough taxes” -Greenpoint scrap yard worker
“The asthma rate is high”-Annette Lamato, Greenpoint environmental activist

This week, April 25, 2007, GREENVISION presents “BARGING IN-Garbage Port Imposed on Gravesend”, about two Brooklyn neighborhoods who have fought being poisoned and dumped on for years.
The show opens on a seemingly pastoral setting-my camera pans over Bensonhurst’s lovely Gravesend Bay, with its sensual south shore dunes in the foreground. But then I zoom in slowly to reveal the lettering on a large abandoned nondescript shed on the north shore-NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION.
Zoom back eight years ago…I got an urgent call from the intrepid Greenpoint activist Annette Lamato. Hundreds of garbage trucks were suddenly rumbling past her house daily (due to the closing of barge fed Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island) spewing toxic diesel fumes, cracking the walls of her family’s 100 year old home and wracking her family’s nerves! “Would it be possible for someone from the Green Party to film the scene to support an ongoing lawsuit?” The next two days were a blur of activity-we bought a video camera and headed for Greenpoint for Annette’s ‘grand tour’. It was my first Greenvision episode.
The Lamatos were incensed about the City’s Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP) which shifted the city’s garbage burden from S.I. to their neighborhood. Private trucking companies (mainly Waste Management) would now coordinate with the Department of Sanitation (DOS) and haul all the nasty stuff away to parts unknown. The trucks often idled for hours, grimly waiting their turn to inch forward and fill their tired buckets with Sanitation Department refuse.
Zoning laws were enacted in the Sixties to permit, among other things, the creation of 23 waste transfer stations along New Town Creek alone that processed garbage from three boroughs. Since then, their neighborhood, once a farming community, had become a wasteland of brownfields, truck washes, scrap yards and other undifferentiated dumps.
Zoom forward to 2007- Bensonhurst again faces another DOS onslaught. Yes DOS, newly remonikered with the deceptively cheery anagram “DSNY” (Disney), is planning to build a 4000 ton capacity marine transfer station (one of the four MTS’s planned for NYC) on the site of that white shed in the opening scene.
Five years ago the formative plan to build the “Southwest Brooklyn MTS” was generally applauded as a wise expedient-it would eliminate the outgoing trucks. But as the City’s wheels turned, yet another ill conceived solution to its garbage problem (this time involving dredging the bay to allow larger barges to dock) hit home to the affected communities. The dredging would stir up poisons, like PCB’s, lead, mercury, cadmium and the most toxic substance known-dioxin-that had spewed forth for decades from an incinerator on the site. The incinerator was finally forced to close in the nineties under intense community pressure.
The old MTS site had also come under fire in the 80’s after medical waste, originating from the poorly run facility, had washed ashore from New Jersey to Maine-not to mention Coney Island beach less than two miles away!
Like old Greenpoint, whose name suggests the lushness that predated the brownfields and toxic sludge, this section of coastline is still blessed with natural beauty. With its three public parks and a charming array of beachfront homes (where we sometimes live) Gravesend Bay is not graves-END-yet. Locals can charter a fishing boat or, as I show, do a fishing “dance” from the shore. Edible (though questionable) prizes of sea bass, albacore and yellow fin are still pulled from these waters. The dredging would particularly threaten endangered species like the short nose sturgeon, that pass through on their way to their mating grounds in the Hudson.

The community is fighting back. At an April 16th “Environmental Justice Informational Meeting” at Shore Parkway Jewish Center, that Green Party activist Mitchel Cohen helped organize, Assistant Commissioner Harry Szarpanski tried to soft-pedal the station’s environmental impact. Local residents, who had already been lied to and poisoned for thirty years by the DOS, weren’t buying it. They learned that Cropsey Avenue, a major artery in Bensonhurst, is slated to become a choked-up route for ONE HUNDRED TRUCKS PER DAY! Fine diesel particles go deep into the lungs and stay there!! Did someone say asthma epidemic?
Stay tuned to GREENVISION for Part II of “Barging In” as we focus on this very heated meeting. DSNY may be bent on stirring up the toxic soup in Gravesend Bay, but so far, all it has managed to stir…is rage!

Thanks for watching,
Rebecca Migdal, host
Carl Lawrence, producer

REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE. We can dramatically reduce solid waste voluntarily! Insist on tighter standards for domestic and commercial waste production. Compost at your community garden. Reward businesses that provide consumers with low-waste packaging options, and restaurants that use china and silverware instead of throwaway dishes and utensils. Regulate the disposal of construction rubbish. For more info on how to live lightly on the earth, go to globalstewards.org

Read an article on the public information meeting at
brooklynheightscourier.com

The Hungry March Band gave a fanfare for the season’s kickoff of landmark amusments like the Wonder Wheel, that still struggle on at the Coney Island, despite developers moving in to destroy this classic resort.

For more info on how to help, go to the Coney Island USA web site.

Click to see larger photo.

Check out the political illustrations of Jamie Fogle at www.radicaltradition.org

GREENVISION
on B.C.A.T.
Brooklyn Community Access Television
Wednesdays at 2:30pm and 10:30pm
Channels 35 and 68
Video streaming at www.bcat.tv (ch. 2)
Producer: Carl Lawrence
ph: 718-875-3134 Email: clawx@earthlink.net

“You will never succeed in joining their club (the rich).”
-Seth Tobocman, World War 3 Illustrated

GREEENVISION presents this week, April 4, 2007, “Songs Not Bombs–World War 3 and UFPJ Take On Bush”.
Two things the military and ANTI-military organizations have in common are parades and drums. One is to impose regimentation and the other is to oppose loudly legitimization (of war) through music…a celebration of resistance or a passing on of souls.
The weekend of March 17-18 brought together thousands across the country, especially here in New York (at the UN) and in DC, to protest via art, dance, poetry, and massive marches, the beginning of the 5th year of the Iraq war!! Greenvision was on the street at the UN and ‘in the house’ at that mainstay of social ferment-Judson Church.
The Judson event was a stirring eclectic day of performances and audio-visual presentations: notably the never-say-die Living Theater’s satire of military discipline (brainwashing) ‘marshaled’ by Judith Malina–still going strong after 40 years as director.
Seth Tobocman of the venerable anti-war comic, WORLD WAR 3 ILLUSTRATED, MC’d the event in his usual offbeat, turgid style. The tragedy and injustice of New Orleans was a theme running through both the street marches (with upbeat jazz funeral bands) and at Judson, where Seth’s graphic allegorical slide show was punctuated by his band, playing a kind of crashing, angry, funeral dirge.
The next day we hit the streets. One of the protest organizers, Leslie Cagan (who has lead United for Peace and Justice in countless demonstrations against ‘The War’ and occupations) laid out this argument: grassroots activists are acting as cover for the Democrats. The Dems are rolling over to the war machine, content to leave it to cash-starved peace groups to tell it like it is–Stop Funding the War for the sake of Big Oil, Bechtel and Halliburton, and Bring the Troops Home Now!
I include a recent performance at the Big Apple Convention of “Agent Alpha, the Pentagon’s Tiniest Covert Operative”, an anti-nuclear puppet show created by Rebecca Migdal. Looking like a moldy green Mr. Burns, but sounding like Edith Bunker, the sinister Pentagon-boosting little Alpha is the personification of a single particle of depleted uranium. That’s the radioactive coating, essentially nuclear waste, that the military has been slathering artillery rounds with for 17 years. It “cuts through tank armor like butter”, says Alpha. It also causes birth defects, cancer and radiation sickness, and has contaminated most of the Middle East and the Balkans! With over 3000 tons of U-238 particles forever drifting with the sand in Iraq alone, some analysts have suggested the country should be declared uninhabitable! As the puppet play points out, only through urgent public outcry, led by scientists of integrity like Helen Caldicott and physicist Mishio Kaku, does Agent Alpha finally get the boot. Ditto our elected officials if they continue to ignore their own constituents.

Please tune in to Greenvision today and every Wednesday, for state-of-the-art political activism- coming to a TV or computer near you.
Special thanks to Rebecca Migdal for her invaluable advice and assistance.

Carl Lawrence,
producer

The Veteran’s Memorial Park lawn, fenced off last Summer

Date: Febuary 28, 2007
GREENVISION
on B.C.A.T.
Brooklyn Community Access Television,Wednesdays at 2:30pm and 10:30pm, Channels 35 and 68,
video streaming live at www.bcat.tv (ch. 2).
Producer, Carl Lawrence-ph: 718-875-3134 E: clawx@earthlink.net

“His office (NYC Parks Commissioner, Adrian Benepe) is really a shrine to fake grass”-Bill Crane, Sierra Club and Citizens for a Green Riverside Park.

“Hey Mr. Yassky, no fake grassky!”-the crowd.

GREENVISION presents today, 2/28/07,”Leaves of Crass”, a show about the outrage from veterans, The Sierra Club, Greens and others last Summer, to the destruction of the memorial lawn of Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza Park-replaced with FAKE GRASS.
Astroturf EMITS heat in summer, whereas natural turf ABSORBS heat, thus cooling the air. This plastic and rubber carpet (now installed) also causes more injuries than real grass and the rubber crumbs eroding from it can be inhaled!! If it catches fire, toxic fumes are produced! How about habitat for birds, butterflies and yes, worms? Gone….

See the entire original press release here.

(Click here to see shirts, mugs, caps and more with our exclusive designs.)

“You’re talking about nerve gas?”
- “Fin” (actor, Ice T)

GREENVISION
on B.C.A.T.
Brooklyn Community Access Television
Wednesdays at 2:30pm and 10:30pm
Channels 35 and 68
Video streaming at www.bcat.tv (ch. 2)
Producer: Carl Lawrence
ph: 718-875-3134
Email: clawx@earthlink.net

Hats off to NBC’s “Law and Order, SVU” for finally dramatizing the deadly practices of the pesticide industry, a subject which Greenvision has covered for years. This week, 2-14-07, Greenvision presents “Poison Profits: Children as Human Guinea Pigs for Pesticides”, a show which uses extended scenes from the Law and Order episode “Loophole”, woven together with clips from the Greenvision archives–for instance, Roy Doremus’ tailing of a Clark pesticide truck through the streets of Harlem in the summer of 2000.

At first “Loophole” sensationalizes the plight of young Diego, a poor child living in a NYC tenement, by making him out to be the victim of child pornography–photographs are found which show the child standing in his underwear, but upon further investigation it’s discovered that his home was deliberately contaminated with an experimental pesticide, and the photographs and video were taken by the evil Super to document the pesticides’ long term effects, as per instructions by the pesticide manufacturer. It turns out that Diego has leukemia! and has lost most of his short term memory-he struggles to repeat the three word sequence, “ball, clock, elephant”, but manages only “hippo, pen, light.”

The term “loophole” refers to a law which bans the clinical testing of children with organophosphate pesticides (essentially a nerve gas) but allows “observational testing” when the stuff is applied in the field-sort of like the loophole whereby DDT, which is banned for use in the United States, is allowed to be manufactured here then sold abroad!

The writer of “Loophole” may have seen the documentary “Toxic Legacies”, about the legitimate pesticide study done by Elizabeth Guilette in Mexico’s Yaqui Valley a few years ago. I include clips of that film to draw parallels with the scenario depicted in “Loophole”. Organo-phosphates are demonstrated in both studies to “dumb down” children by attacking their nervous systems. Giulette found the exposed children in the pesticide-doused valley incapable of catching a ball or being able to remember that they had just been given a balloon–never mind remembering the balloon’s color. Similarly, Diego could not even remember that it was the super, Seth Millstead, who had taken the pictures.

Roy Doremus’ dogged video documentation of a Clark pesticide truck cruising the streets of Harlem and Staten Island, spraying domino players, kids, deli owners (and produce), people cooling off on their stoops, and most alarmingly, pregnant women, is the poignant centrifuge to this story. The Government is still allowing (and orchestrating) the indiscriminate exposure of the public to pesticides and other toxins. Needless to say, the chemical industry exhibits enormous muscle in DC through slick lobbyists and the legal bribery system called campaign “contributions”. Interestingly, a police chemical investigator in “Loophole” mentions in passing “Tuskegee” as an antecedent to the twisted study the super was doing. In Tuskegee, Alabama the government conducted, via the misnamed “Public Health Service”, a study to determine how Syphilis acted. It allowed 400 black sharecroppers, who were used as subject guinea pigs from 1932-1972, to die needlessly!!! They were lied to, and denied the standard treatment for Syphilis, penicillin, which was discovered in 1947.

Tune in to Greenvision tonight and/or next week to see who “Fin” grabs by the collar, for allowing Diego to be used and abused-you might be surprised. Did someone say “vindication”?

Thanks for watching,
Carl Lawrence
producer