We have reached the end of "Staten Island's Hidden Treasures Week" on NY1, an admirable attempt to promote little-known aspects of the borough.
Unfortunately, their attempt to battle anti-Statenism was overshadowed by the Island's more recent turmoil. When NY1 ran a promo, "Learn about Staten Island's best-kept secrets!" people in the newsroom joked, "You mean Vito Fossella's love child?"
Oh well. Let's take a quick look at the stories of "Staten Island's Hidden Treasures Week."
On Monday, they profiled the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, a premier Orientalist art collection and an incongruous taste of a Lhasa Buddhist temple in the middle of a Staten Island neighborhood. Can't wait to visit this one.
On Tuesday, they profiled an interesting neighborhood shrine, the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank. In 100 years, generations of Italian-Americans have contributed to the site.
On Wednesday, they profiled a big glacial rock - old river sediment in Dongan Hills from millions of years ago. This probably would have made a better print story than TV segment (there's only so many seconds you can look at a gray rocky loaf on the TV screen), but I admire the series for not just profiling consumable traits of the borough.
Thursday's story, arguably the most interesting, profiled View Recording Studios in my neighborhood, St. George, which started out as the office of Remedy of Wu-Tang Clan fame, and now offers cheap recording space for budding hip-hop artists. No doubt about it - ARTISTS NEED LOW RENTS FOR THEIR CREATIVE SPACES!
Friday's story was not as dynamic, although the subject matter is arguably the most dynamic - human migration! which is studied at the St. Charles Mission Center in Dongan Hills.
More dire stories grabbed people's attention in this bloodstained week of city neighborhood shootings and a crane collapse. A shooting in Tompkinsville (2 miles from my house!) injured two teens, and the party endorsements of professional rich guy and Republican Frank Powers and Democratic City Councilman Michael McMahon as candidates for congressman, and the fact that not everyone's happy with those decisions.
Lastly, I stayed up way too late last night watching "Häxan" (1922), an extremely bizarre Scandinavian documentary on medieval and Renaissance witchcraft trials. It combines the grimy lyricism of "The Passion of St. Joan of Arc" with the delirious theatricality of Georges Melies's cardboard circus films. An old woman births carnivalesque chimera of felt and feathers! Old crones kiss a papier-mache demon's rump! Satan bleeds and cooks a jiggling rubber unchristened baby! (Startling images, like the Russian baby "burned" alive by medieval German Catholics in Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky.") The director used an eldery mental patient to play the part of an accused goodwife, to knock us over the head with the fact that mental institutions = the Inquisition's torture rooms!
Watch the film on YouTube - it's divided into 11 parts, and the first part is here. It gets weirder as you go on.
Witchcraft trials have very little to do with Staten Island (the Dutch weren't witch-crazy like the English and their Puritans), but P. T. Barnum exhibited a tableau of the "Witch of Staten Island," and earlier this year, some Staten Islanders showed a severe fear of Wiccans.
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2 comments:
Hey primo..! This is a very cool blog, I think I'll keep reading it..! I am right now moving to a new city that suffers from the same problem as Staten Island: Bonn? What is Bonn? :)
Anyway, say hi to Eduardo the First and lets keep in contact..!
While I can understand your frustration that Vito Fossella's coverage is taking over or tainting the whole island, but let's be honest, it happens all too often. Obama cinches critical nomination and is the first African-American man to do so, and today every station is focused on Hillary Clinton. The media kinda stinks at paying attention to what it's supposed to. But good thing that you're able to do that via this blog. Well done.
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