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Unlike other magazines, Stay Free! is created for readers, not advertisers. That’s why we beg for
money. Subscriptions to Stay Free! are $10.95 for three issues (or $6.95 for digital issues) and include
invitations to Stay Free! events, internet-only updates, and the joy (not to mention the good karma)
that comes with supporting independent publishing. You can pay by credit card on our website,
www.stayfreemagazine.org. Or send a check to Stay Free! 390 Butler Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217. We
gladly accept (tax-deductible!) donations at this address as well.
buy stuff online at www.stayfreemagazine.org
Stay Free!—The REAL magazine

14 24
40
G E N E R A L I N T E R E S T B R O O K L Y N
12
Eyesore of the Month
When fake charitable clothing boxes invaded
Brooklyn, our intrepid reporter repurposed
them.
23
The Windsor Terrorist
A local teen is mistaken for one of al Qaeda’s.
24
COVER STORY
Interview with Jake Greene, a homeless man
who has been in Park Slope longer than you.
4
Introduction
14
The Trouble with Wal-Mart
Whatever you’ve heard about the retail giant,
it’s a lot worse than you think. Interview with
journalist Liza Featherstone.
32
Pricing the Priceless
How much would you pay for a case of chronic
bronchitis? What is a hunchback whale worth?
Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling discuss the
sordid world of cost-benefit analysis.
40
Volkswagen: The Vehicle for Comparison
Chris Boznos ponders the rapid spread of a
curious new measuring stick.
28
Eugene Mirman
The local comic talks about his native Russia,
temping, and surviving the comedy biz.
44
The Mouse That Whored
Chuck E. Cheese has hit Brooklyn, but is it the
borough’s newest fun spot or the latest scar of
gentrification?
46
It’s No Moon River
Stay Free! takes a canoe trip down the Gowanus.
culture and politics for brooklyn and beyond
48
Flavor Makers
A couple of former factory workers talk about
non-blueberry blueberries, the dangers of
peppermint oil, and why you really, really don’t
want to spill the diacetyl
54
Reel People
Chances are those old Laurel & Hardy prints
sitting in your basement aren’t nearly as valuable
as your mom’s home movies. The founders of
Home Movie Day talk about amateur films and
what they can teach us.
60
My New Favorite Thing
Music, books, and other items we fancy
65
Fake classifieds

Change is good
. . . or at least it better be, because I have
more than my share this issue (#23). Yes, this is the first Brooklyn issue, meaning two
things: the magazine now includes multiple references to the place where it is made,
and many people in that place will be picking up Stay Free! for the first time. Stay
Free! has long been sold in book and record stores across the U.S. and Canada, but
now it’s also available in local shops and cafés in what we’re calling South Central
(Brooklyn, that is): Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, and
Boerum Hill.
What does this mean for the magazine’s content? Stay Free! will continue to do the
same sort of cultural criticism we’ve always done. We still have the same enemies:
nefarious corporations, greedy politicians, hidden persuaders, and SUVs. But we’ll
also be covering the people and places that make our neighborhoods alive. I suspect
that we can do this without alienating our national subscribers, and—just to be
sure—I’ve added eight pages to the magazine for local stuff instead of cutting the
usual, more nationally minded fare.
Why go local? I’ve been wanting to do local coverage for years now, but publishing
a separate magazine about Brooklyn would never work. One zine is eccentric, two
is insane. I don’t have a trust fund, after all, and I need to pay rent. At the same
time, taking Stay Free! local makes economic sense. National distribution has been
giving me ulcers. I recently had to cut ties with our largest distributor, which has
yet to pay Stay Free! the $6,000 it owes. And, lately, selling advertising has been a
struggle as well. The independent record labels that have long been our mainstay
have suffered flagging sales. With local distribution, we can broaden our ad base with
neighborhood businesses—and, with luck, still maintain our national advertisers.
In many ways, this move toward the local is a return to our roots. I started publishing
Stay Free! as a free music zine in North Carolina 11 years ago. The only reason it
went national is because I moved to New York and still felt like a southerner—it
took me a while to find a new local community. Now I’ve been on the same odd little
street on the western border of Park Slope for more than eight years, and at some
point along the way this place became not just a neighborhood but my neighborhood.
I love it, and I love Brooklyn, and hopefully Brooklyn will feel the same about Stay
Free! (You better!)
Carrie McLaren
October 17, 2004

EDITOR & ART DIRECTOR
Carrie McLaren
VICE PRESIDENTS
Jason Torchinsky
Alexandra Ringe
Charles Star
COPY CHIEF
Emily Votruba
COPY EDITORS AND PROOFREADERS
Mike Janson
Eva Pendleton
Allison Miller
Kris Kohler
ASSOCIATE DESIGNER
Noah Scalin
ADVERTISING SALES
Kavita Kulkarni
TECH SUPPORT
Ivan Drucker
FRONT COVER
Photo of Jake Greene: Sabrina Hartel
Background and compositing: Carrie McLaren
AMERICAN GENTRIFIER COVER
Photo of Jeanne McCabe, Andrew Hearst and
(baby) Jack Jewell by Om Rupani
Hair and makeup by Emily Warren
CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE
Marisa Bardach , Chris Boznos, Matthew Daniels,
Jeff Faerber, Mikki Halpin, Tim Harrod, Francis Heaney,
Claire Houston, Steven Joerg, Emily Pugh, Bridget
Regan, Tamar Rothenberg, Jack Silbert
THANKS
Kevin Mullaney, Brooks & Patrick Jewell, Mark J. Fidel,
Peter Bergin, Serena Norr
Stay Free! is a nonprofit magazine covering American
culture, politics, and life in South Central Brooklyn.
Though we have a 10-plus year history, this is our first
Brooklyn issue. Back issues, postcards, and arcana can
be found at www.stayfreemagazine.org. Stay Free! will
hereafter be published twice a year, in November and
in May. We welcome outside contributors; just write a
letter pitching your idea and send pertinent samples of
your work. • Stay Free! is distributed in book and record
stores across the U.S. and Canada, as well as in eateries
and shops throughout Prospect Heights, Boerum Hill,
Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, and Park Slope, Brooklyn. If
you do not see Stay Free! at your local bookstore, please
inquire within. For a list of distributors, see our website.
Stay Free! 390 Butler Street, Third Floor, Brooklyn, NY
11217 • (718) 398-9324 • www.stayfreemagazine.org
STAY FREE! 6 ISSUE NO. 23

ON THE STREET
“ What do you think of when
you think of Park Slope? ”
STEVE DOLLAR
Babies and mommies and strollers and kids
out on the street screaming and blocking
my way. That’s what I think of.
EILEEN LADA
I grew up here. All the new and up-andcoming
things are nice, but to me they’re
a real inconvenience. This was a beautiful
neighborhood before; very family oriented.
I mean, it’s still nice—don’t get me wrong—
but you don’t see a lot of kids outside playing.
If they’re outside in the evening, the
poor kids are getting yelled at. It’s a lot different
than what it used to be.
NEAL WALKER
I think of money, culture, beautiful brownstones.
I see diversity, not just culturally but
genderwise. And to me, it’s like the greatest
village of Brooklyn.
ADAM
White people, except on 5th Avenue, where
there’s more nonwhite people. And rich
people and brownstones.
LOUIS MANCO
I’ve been here since 1951. This is a good
neighborhood; it’s changed a lot. No
more trouble, no more gangs. There used
to be the Garfield Boys, the Tigers—back
in the ’50s—but they all stopped. They
used to all hang around in the restaurant
up the block.
DOLORES ORTALANO
Park Slope is nice, but not compared to
Bensonhurst. Bay Ridge is nice, too. Bay
Ridge is like another village.
PEDRO CHACON
I just come here for work—I’ve been
working here for about four months.
What I’ve seen so far is . . . gays. Gay
neighborhood. Lesbians, gays. You know,
guys holding hands, girls holding hands,
stuff like that.
ARITA ALEXANDER
It’s culturally diverse. I think of interracial
couples and interracial children, feeling
free because they’re not the only one in
the neighborhood.
ANITA
It’s very family oriented. I think it’s pretty
diverse. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to own
a co-op or an apartment or a house here but
I really love living here. I love being near the
park and the shops and everything. Unfortunately,
we’re moving; it’s so unaffordable
and we’d like more space. We live in a small
apartment, and if it was just my husband
and I, it would be fine, but with the baby
we’re so crowded.
LEONARD BALDING
I heard there were seven elderly people
killed in traffic accidents on 7th Avenue.
If you’re an elderly person and you’re
going too slow, there’s a lot of cars that
honk their horn, tell you to get off the
road. They’re very discourteous. They
don’t come from Park Slope, they come
from somewhere else. They should have
stricter laws and say that it’s murder to
run over somebody using your vehicle.
Interviews and photos by Steven Joerg
STAY FREE! 7 ISSUE NO. 23

STAY FREE! X ISSUE NO. 23

Letters to the Editor >
Igive this last issue of Stay Free! a
double thumbs down. Of course,
you got my respect for picking a
sufficiently bizarre issue (“eugenics and
dog breeding”). But your interview with
Daniel Kevles made eugenics look like a
thing of the past. Not so. And I’m not
just thinking about the usual suspects:
sex selection of embryos or GMOs on
the cornfield.
Do you know any young people with
Down syndrome? Nope? Guess why: prenatal
testing. A friend of mine was encouraged
to abort because the Down syndrome
test (post-fourth-month) came out
positive. When she refused, doctors told
her she should not expect society to foot
the health-care and special-education bill.
It turned out that the disability was very
slight—the appearance of an extra gene
says little about the level of disability.
In the issue, there was not a word
about the sterilization of Native Americans.
From 1970 to 1976, the Indian
Health Service coerced Native American
women into being sterilized, under the
guise of “pregnancy counseling.”
Looking through my stack of Stay
Free!’s, I think overall you spend too
much time talking to white men. It’s not
good for the head: makes one think white
man thoughts. I know from experience.
Yours most devotedly,
Zenta
Kyoto City, Japan
Istumbled across your magazine on
the internet. I’m glad, because I really
like the articles, and I thought
the Illegal Art Exhibit was great. Anyway,
I thought you might like this picture of
some ink of mine [below right]. I had it
before I came across your magazine (it’s
actually somewhat of a tribute to the
Clash’s song); I thought it was so cool
to see a whole magazine devoted to this
thought. Keep up the great work.
Gabriel Van Horn
New Brighton, PA
Regarding your article on subliminal
advertising: I heard Bryan
Wilson Key in 1974 at a conference
in Toronto just after the publication
of his controversial book Subliminal Seduction.
It seems there were few skeptics
in the audience. Why? Most of the
academics were eager to believe his thesis.
More interesting than that occasion was a
public forum held in Toronto a year later
involving Key and a bunch of guys from
ad agencies. Again the public sided with
Key. The crowd gasped as his slides revealed
the many hidden (Freudian) messages.
The ad people denounced it all as
sheer hokum and affirmed that, at least in
Canada, such things didn’t happen. One
of them said, “If we thought this really
worked, we would do it.”
I met a teacher who had studied under
Key at the University of Western Ontario.
Apparently, if you didn’t find the
subliminal messages in the ads that were
handed out, you failed the course!
Barry Duncan
Toronto
contributors
Chris Boznos lives a few miles from Harvard, Illinois, “Milk Capital of the World” and the home of the Milk Day
Queen, whom he hopes to marry someday. Francis Heaney is a puzzle writer, songwriter, and playwright. His humor
book, Holy Tango of Literature (Emmis), is due out this fall. Mikki Halpin is the author of It’s Your World—If You
Don’t Like It, Change It (Simon & Schuster Children’s). Tim Harrod has written for The Onion, The Late Show with David
Letterman, and Star Wars Insider. He is getting better at the ukulele. Sabrina Hartel is a New York–based documentary
and portrait photographer. Her work can be seen at www.SabrinaHartel.com. Mike Janson wants to know
what that girl on the back cover is doing with that guy. Steven Joerg spent much of the past year producing Shrimp
Boat’s Something Grand box set, which he considers to be one of the greatest collections of American music ever, and
therefore gently urges you to buy a copy at www.aumfidelity.com. Kris Kohler works for the political action committee
of a large construction union and moonlights as an aural landscape artist (“DJ”). Carrie McLaren publishes
Stay Free!, works as a freelance web and graphic designer (visit www.carriemclaren.com), and little else, it seems.
Emily Pugh is the drummer for sissy pop band the Mean Corner: www.thepirateship.org/themeancorner.htm. In her
spare time she is getting a Ph.D. in art history. Alexandra Ringe has had the good fortune to live in the Olga—second
only to the Mildred in Park Slope buildings with great names—since 1995. Tamar Rothenberg spends her days
interrogating teenagers at New Youth Connections magazine. Om Rupani is a photographer who splits his time
between searching for God and half-naked women. For half-naked women visit www.OmRupani.com. Jack Silbert
is a writer and magazine editor residing in Hoboken, NJ. Charles Star is a standup comic living in Prospect Heights.
He gets no press despite the Jews’ control of the media. Emily Votruba is the copy chief at Cargo magazine (Lucky
for men), an editor for the Rubber Band Society Gazette, and she still gets emails from Howard Dean.
STAY FREE! 9 ISSUE NO. 23

WORLD VIEW
Organizers of the 2004 Olympics have
warned spectators that they could be
barred for taking a surreptitious sip of
Pepsi or an illicit bite from a Burger King Whopper.
Strict regulations published by Athens 2004
dictated that spectators might be refused admission
to events if they were carrying food or
drinks made by companies that did not see fit to
sponsor the games. Staff were also on the lookout
for T-shirts, hats, and bags displaying the logos
of nonsponsors. Known as the “clean venue
policy,” the rules were drawn up by the Greeks
and the International Olympic Committee (IOC)
to shield sponsors from so-called “ambush marketing,”
an attempt to advertise items during
the games without paying sponsorship fees.
The restrictions, which drew criticism from
Amnesty International, were even harsher for
the thousands of stewards and volunteers working
at Athens 2004 who were supplied with uniforms
but no shoes. “We [had] to provide our
own shoes and we were told that we shouldn’t
wear trainers with a bright logo from a sports
brand which [was] not an official sponsor like
Adidas,” said one. It was not even possible to
buy a ticket to the Olympics using a credit card
other than Visa, which paid more than $30 million
for its exclusive rights. —Halifax Herald Limited,
8/8/04
* * *
Two people were killed and 14 others injured
in a stampede during the opening
of a new Ikea in Saudi Arabia. The popular
Swedish home furniture retailer had announced
the opening of two new stores in Riyadh and Jeddah,
advertising in the local press that customers
who arrived first would receive special vouchers.
“We were expecting 20,000 visitors during the
whole day, but this number arrived even before
opening,” an Ikea spokesperson in Jeddah said.
—AFP Worldwide, 9/22/04
From selected Amazon.com reviews of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR):
“The DSM . . . is complete fiction. Psychiatric “diseases”
are VOTED into existence by a panel of
about 1,000 members of the “Mental Health Industry,”
and when these “diseases” win the vote
and are included in the next edition of the DSM,
they become by that fact “real.” I would suggest
that any person who is about to have a diagnosis
rendered upon them through the use of DSM
IV and is concerned about their right to disagree
should contact attorney Skip Simpson of Dallas,
Texas.”
“The DSM-IV is a political document . . . Psychiatrists
create myriad phony illnesses to justify their constant
destruction of innocent people with heavy
drugs, electric shocks, insulin shocks, other shocks,
and destructive brain operations. The DSM-IV is
the vehicle for this criminal fraud.“
“Imagine for a moment that someone tattoos a
single word upon your forehead.”
“The DSM is to psychiatry what Malleus Maleficarum
was to the Inquisition. Historians will find it
an essential guide to the superstition and cruelty
of the period.“
“Hi, I’m Lynn. I was thinking of buying this book
DSM-IV-TR. For those of you who already have it,
is it just a reference book or are there any tests in
it that tell you what the diagnosis is? If not have
you seen anything like this anywhere? Feel free to
email me. Thank you, Lynn” —via David E. Brown,
Saturation.org
* * *
From Consumer Behaviour (Prentice Hall),
an online textbook by Schiffman, Bednall,
Cowley, O’Cass, Watson and Kanuk:
STAY FREE! 10 ISSUE NO. 23

“People who achieve goals often raise their aspiration
level and pursue new goals. People who
fail to achieve goals may select substitute goals
or become frustrated and adopt defense mechanisms.
Defense mechanisms affect consumption in
which of the following ways?
A. Aggressive consumers may boycott companies
or riot for better social conditions.
B. Consumers may rationalize that an unattainable
product or service is not really worth having.
C. Consumers may purchase goods and services
that people in similar situations use to overcome
similar frustrations.
D. A and B
E. All of the above
Answer: E
(Thanks to Barbara Kerr for the link:
http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/
schiffman_au/)
* * *
Women are substantially overrepresented
in advertisements for psychiatric
drugs and are usually shown as submissive,
sexy, or asleep, according to an analysis
that compared ads over a 20-year period in three
psychiatry journals. Although in 1981 there were
roughly equal numbers of men and women in psychiatric
ads, by 2001 the number of women had
soared to 80 percent in the Canadian Journal of
Psychiatry and 88 percent in the American Journal
of Psychiatry. That year, no men were shown in
ads for antidepressants in the American Journal of
Psychiatry. Overall, 88 percent of the drug ads depicted
white people. The analysis was published
in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.
“The effect of these advertisements on physician
perception, diagnosis, and prescribing is unknown
but may be substantial,” the researchers wrote.
(Washington Post, 7/6/04)
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A service of
STAY FREE! 11 ISSUE NO. 23

Eyesore of the Month > by Charles Star
When fake charitable
clothing boxes invaded
Brooklyn, our intrepid
correspondent decided
to repurpose them
Don’t throw it away.
Give it
to me
Perhaps you have seen one of the bright red
and white sidewalk-cloggers that have spread,
like a metastasized cancer, throughout Brooklyn
and other cities across the U.S.
Decorated with American flags, these
eight-foot-tall behemoths implore
us to deposit used clothes and
shoes for the good of the environment.
No one seems
to know where they came
from or why they appear
in public spaces. But most
If you want to give to SCHOOLS
and CHARITIES you are free
to do that. But if you want the
convenience of this handy box,
you’ll have to give it to me.
For more information, write
me_first_bklyn@hotmail.com or
call me at 718-810-2527.
CLOTHES AND SHOES
(XL/38 waist, size 11 ONLY)
If you are in a giving mood, please
give to me. I’ve recently lost
weight and my wardrobe needs
updating.
people assume them to be for
a charitable cause and would be
surprised to find that they are in fact
owned by a for-profit company, the Chicagobased
U’SAgain. The boxes made but a brief
appearance in Park Slope proper—someone
spray-painted EYESORE on a box on Seventh
Avenue, and it disappeared shortly thereafter—yet
they remain in Gowanus and Prospect
Heights.
This box is for used
but stylish clothes (XL;
waist 38) and shoes
(size 11). I can wash the
stuff myself, but please,
nothing skanky.
The clothing boxes got me thinking: if some
out-of-town company can clog our sidewalks
with its unsightly bunkers, what’s to prevent
me from doing the same? After all, I can always
use clothes. Lacking the resources to
weld my own box, I opted to repurpose the
ones belonging to U’SAgain. By simply pasting
new messages over the U’SAgain boxes
in Prospect Heights, I made them my own.
STAY FREE! 12 ISSUE NO. 23

STAY FREE! 13 ISSUE NO. 23

U
TH E TRO BLE
If there is one chain
that stands above all others in deserving
your wrath it is Wal-Mart. The most successful retailer in the world
is, not coincidentally, a pioneer of some of the
imaginable. I’m not just talking about reckless sprawl, Kathy Lee’s
shadiest business practices
sweatshop line, or the censorship of popular music, but about Wal-Mart’s uncanny knack for
uncovering some of the most innovative ways to screw people over, all the while maintaining
its wholesome, all-American image. For instance, the company locks late-shift employees in at
night, forbidding them to leave the store. Managers have required workers to clock out
yet stay on the job, in order to avoid paying them overtime. The company has hired
illegal immigrants and forced them to work seven-day weeks without breaks. It spies on
employees, fires anyone remotely suspected of union activity,
violates child-labor laws, and discriminates against female employees.
It is this last misdeed that Liza Featherstone focuses on in her new book,
Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart.
Featherstone, a New York–based journalist, chronicles the emergence of
Dukes v. Wal-Mart, a class-action suit by Wal-Mart’s women workers that is
currently winding its way through the courts. In telling the employees’ stories,
Featherstone discusses the broader societal impact of the retail
giant, and the terrifying prospect of its continued growth. Wal-Mart thrives in part by
offering poor and working-class people (its primary consumer base) the lowest prices
around. But this boon to consumers is also a disaster for workers and local community members.
That is, it hurts the very people it helps. Reading Featherstone’s book made me
realize that shopping at Wal-Mart is a little like smoking
crack: the low-prices undoubtedly fill a need (particularly for the poor) but
they only come back to bite you in the end.
STAY FREE! 14 ISSUE NO. 23

WI
T
H
WAL -MAR
T
STAY FREE!: In your book you discuss
patterns of sex discrimination in Wal-
Marts across the country. Women earn
less; they can’t get promoted; if they
complain, they’re punished; and so on.
The plaintiffs in the current class-action
suit have an airtight case. Did any of
these women seriously consider pursuing
private lawsuits? How did this end
up as a class action?
LIZA FEATHERSTONE: Some of the
women had filed claims with the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission,
but a lot of them wouldn’t have pursued
individual lawsuits, because most lawyers
will say, “you don’t want to do this.”
Small lawyers don’t have the resources
to take on a company of Wal-Mart’s
size. Some women have won lawsuits,
and evidence from those cases informs
this case, but women in general
haven’t had very
good luck in getting lawyers to pursue
Wal-Mart. So that’s a reason why class
action is a good strategy.
STAY FREE!: I was amazed that some of
these women—who had been through
hell with Wal-Mart and had incredibly
solid cases—would opt for a classaction
suit, because they’d get a lot more
money out of a private lawsuit. Also,
they wouldn’t have to worry about the
case dragging on for years.
FEATHERSTONE: Yes, actually, in their
cases, they have the resources to pursue
individual suits, but they really want to
change Wal-Mart. If they were to sue
as individuals, Wal-Mart would settle
and it would never have to make
any institutional
reforms. The only reason these women
are doing the class action—aside from
the strength in numbers—is because
they want to change the company.
STAY FREE!: But if a bunch of women
sued Wal-Mart individually, wouldn’t
Wal-Mart see that they’re losing money
and see that discrimination is ultimately
against their interest?
FEATHERSTONE: No, there would be so
few cases that it wouldn’t matter. A million
dollars every few years is nothing
to Wal-Mart.
STAY FREE!: How successful are classaction
suits in changing companies? If
the workers win, what then?
FEATHERSTONE: With a
class-action suit, you
can order a company
to pay back
wages to the
people it
Illustration by Jeff Faerber
STAY FREE! 15 ISSUE NO. 23

STAY FREE! 16 ISSUE NO. 23

wronged. You can order it to change
its promotion system, to provide better
incentives for promoting minorities,
to post its jobs, and you can have some
degree of enforcement. That’s the ideal
scenario. Those reforms are so much better
than nothing, but they’re ultimately
kind of limited because they don’t really
change the balance of power between
the worker and the employer very much.
What you can accomplish with a classaction
suit is nothing next to what you
can accomplish if the workers organize.
STAY FREE!: In the book, you also pointed
out that one of the key advantages of
class-action suits is media coverage.
FEATHERSTONE: That’s right. If you sue
Wal-Mart as an individual, the media
isn’t going to care very much. But if
you’re suing Wal-Mart on behalf of 1.6
million other women, as Betty Dukes is,
you get an enormous amount of attention,
and that embarrasses the company.
STAY FREE!: The woman in the Wal-Mart
commercials who talks about how great
Wal-Mart treats women looks like Betty
Dukes. Do you think that’s intentional?
FEATHERSTONE: Oh, absolutely. She’s
a black, middle-aged woman, just like
Betty Dukes. She’s a department manager,
which is the job Betty Dukes has
been seeking the entire time she’s been at
Wal-Mart. She is Betty Dukes in the ideal
Wal-Mart.
STAY FREE!: How effective do you think
the commercials are?
FEATHERSTONE: A lot of workers tell me
that their friends think Wal-Mart must
be a great place to work because they see
the commercials. And people have told
me they went to work at Wal-Mart in
part due to the commercials. The commercials
have always featured happy
employees.
STAY FREE!: All the commercials seem to
be the exact opposite of the reality. You
described one that talks about how great
the Wal-Mart health-care package is.
FEATHERSTONE: Yes, it shows a very
sweet, caring young father whose baby
had some horrible disease, and he says
that, thanks to Wal-Mart, the baby
People often buy the idea that low prices equals
a better standard of living. They tend to focus
on how they’re treated as
consumers rather
than how they’re treated as taxpayers or
workers or citizens.
was able to get coverage. In real life,
that baby would have indeed been covered
for some terrible disease, but the
sneaky thing is that Wal-Mart’s healthcare
plan is weighted toward exactly
that kind of catastrophic illness. That’s
not what most babies need. Most babies
need preventive care, which Wal-Mart’s
plan doesn’t provide. Babies need a lot
of checkups. Wal-Mart doesn’t cover all
kinds of vaccinations. If the father had
been a new employee, it would have
taken him about six months to get coverage
for his family.
STAY FREE!: Aren’t many employees gone
by that time?
FEATHERSTONE: Yes, and he would have
had to pay a third of the cost of the
health insurance from his salary. If that
same father were to work for another
large company, that baby would have a
better shot at getting the preventive care
he needs in case he recovers from the terrible
illness and needs stuff that regular
babies need.
STAY FREE!: Wal-Mart used to run a
“Buy America” campaign. What happened
to that?
Jeff Faerber
FEATHERSTONE: Sam Walton started
the “Buy America” campaign in the late
1980s in response to criticism that Wal-
Mart was selling more foreign goods than
STAY FREE! 17 ISSUE NO. 23

American goods. Again, like the health
ads, the spots were impressively nonspecific.
They never said that everything at
Wal-Mart was made in America; they
never even said a majority of the items
were made in America—and even at that
point I’m pretty sure that the majority of
items in the store were made overseas.
It was merely intended to highlight that
some of their goods were made domestically.
Since then, they have dropped
the campaign because it has become so
implausible. If Wal-Mart were a country,
it would be China’s largest export market.
Very few items sold in the store are
made in the U.S.
STAY FREE!: Do they still run the “Buy
Canadian” and the “Buy Mexican” campaigns
in those countries?
FEATHERSTONE: I don’t know about
those, but they do have a nativist campaign
in China. I’m sure it’s convincing
there because the stuff really is made in
China! [laughs]
STAY FREE!: When Wal-Mart decides to
open a store in a town, is it protested
more than other big-box stores?
FEATHERSTONE: Yes. It’s easier to get a
campaign against Wal-Mart. I think the
general public is becoming more familiar
with their practices.
STAY FREE!: The arguments Wal-Mart
makes for bringing the store to a town
are that it offers low prices, new jobs,
and more tax revenue. Clearly, Wal-
Mart has low prices, but what evidence
is there to support or discredit the other
two claims?
FEATHERSTONE: The increase in jobs
claim isn’t always true because Wal-Mart
puts other stores out of business.
STAY FREE!: Have there been any empirical
studies along these lines?
FEATHERSTONE: Yes, but I don’t know
much about them. The research on
this is very ambiguous because a lot of
small businesses don’t have great pay
or benefits, either. Plus, a lot of them
don’t employ very many people—they’re
small. So I wouldn’t say it’s a myth that
Wal-Mart brings jobs. There are large
areas of this country where there is no
meaningful economic development at
all, and Wal-Mart tends to target those
areas because they contain a supply of
poor customers and workers—people
who will accept the jobs and be eager for
the low prices.
Now, the question about tax revenue:
Wal-Mart is a serious drain on communities
because it aggressively seeks out
huge tax breaks. They often come into
small towns and get several million dollars
in corporate tax breaks and subsidies
for buildings. And on top of that,
they drain the communities by creating a
Wal-Mart ends up driving down
wages in industries they are not
directly involved in.
low-wage workforce that requires public
subsidy. People who aren’t making a living
wage need housing, they need health
care, and they even need food stamps.
In many places, Wal-Mart is the leading
company in the number of dependents
on welfare. That’s well-documented.
These are people who are working—they
shouldn’t need welfare! The benefits that
Wal-Mart may appear to bring to a community
are a double-edged sword. People
tend to buy the idea that low prices equal
a better standard of living. They tend to
focus on how they’re treated as consumers
rather than how they’re treated as
taxpayers or workers or citizens.
STAY FREE!: Have any towns or other
municipalities passed laws against Wal-
Mart in particular?
FEATHERSTONE: I don’t think you can
pass a law against a particular company,
but some places have passed laws banning
retailers of a certain size, which can
rule out Wal-Mart Supercenters. Many
places have tried to pass such a law and
have been defeated by Wal-Mart front
groups with names like Citizens for Fair
Commerce.
STAY FREE!: Where’s the nearest Wal-
Mart here in New York?
FEATHERSTONE: There’s one in Union,
New Jersey. And there’s one in Valley
Stream, Long Island. I periodically check
on the website to find the closest, and
there’s always a new one.
STAY FREE!: Do you think they’ll try to
open a store in New York City?
FEATHERSTONE: I do. They have been
talking to real estate people; they’ve made
public statements saying it’s a market
they’d like to get into. They don’t know
how to approach it, because it would be
a huge political battle. Actually, somebody
last night asked me if Wal-Mart’s
expansion into urban areas would possibly
have a good effect because, as Wal-
Mart goes into places where organized
labor is stronger, it might be forced to
change its bad practices. But I don’t
think that we in New York should risk
having Wal-Mart come in, lower wages,
and be a blight on the landscape. Here,
it’s also a cultural issue. On one level,
that’s a little bit elitist. On the other
hand, I don’t think people come to New
York to see chain stores. As more of the
country becomes overtaken by this stuff,
it’s important to have places that are not,
to show that it can work.
STAY FREE!: Yeah, we’re now seeing cities
imitating Times Square by putting up
these large moving billboards in their
business districts.
Does Wal-Mart engage in predatory
pricing? Do they use price to intentionally
put other retailers out of business?
FEATHERSTONE: Yes, and it’s so central to
the way they do business that I can’t even
think of an example. Wal-Mart has gone
to some places, put all the stores out of
business, found that their store still isn’t
STAY FREE! 18 ISSUE NO. 23

THE REPUBLIC OF WAL-MART
Annual Wal-Mart sales are higher than the GDPs of several industrialized nations
Noah Scalin
profitable enough and closed it down,
leaving those places with no stores at all.
STAY FREE!: I know Wal-Mart has hurt
the music industry. They use CDs as
loss-leaders, selling below cost. Tower
Records, for example, has filed for Chapter
11 bankruptcy protection. Wal-Mart
has also priced out toy retailers.
FEATHERSTONE: Yes, FAO Schwarz has
filed for bankruptcy, and Toys ’R’ Us is
having serious problems, and a lot of that
is due to Wal-Mart. I think they do that
in almost every area. They’re also very
aggressive in selling books, which is one
of the reasons independent bookstores
hate them so much. Hopefully, they’ll
therefore aggressively promote my book!
[laughs]
STAY FREE!: Can you talk a little bit about
Wal-Mart’s effects on other businesses?
I’ve read that it really puts the squeeze on
suppliers and other companies it works
with. Wal-Mart continually strives to
lower its prices from the previous year,
which strikes me as incredible.
FEATHERSTONE: Wal-Mart suppliers are
in a bind because they can’t not do business
with Wal-Mart, but that forces them
to lower their prices, which can affect
wages everywhere. So Wal-Mart ends up
driving down wages in industries they
are not directly involved in. They affect
wages in trucking and manufacturing,
even in other countries, by putting pressure
on suppliers to get them things faster
and cheaper. They’re creating even more
dire sweatshop situations in China.
STAY FREE!: Back to predatory pricing, I
guess what they’ve done to grocery stores
would be an example.
FEATHERSTONE: Yes. Many grocery stores
are unionized and offer good benefits,
but that’s a real disadvantage when
you’re competing with Wal-Mart. Some
grocers have been put out of business. In
California, the grocery strike that went
on so long last year was one of the few
instances where there was a huge labor
dispute because of competition from a
company that hadn’t even entered the
market yet. Wal-Mart was about to start
opening Supercenters, which sell groceries,
and that put the workers at a major
disadvantage, so they ended up getting a
lower wage than they would have gotten
if Wal-Mart wasn’t around. Labor
leaders all over the country now say that
anytime you’re having a negotiation in
the private sector, there’s always an 800-
pound elephant in the room, and that is
Wal-Mart.
STAY FREE!: Wal-Mart has repeatedly
been fined for falsifying or destroying
evidence in court cases involving shoppers
who were injured or robbed at one
of its stores. Do you know if Wal-Mart
is worse than other stores on these kinds
of cases?
FEATHERSTONE: I looked into slip-andfall
cases once, but no one seemed to
have a good answer for how Wal-Mart
compared with other companies. Maybe
there are a lot of slip-and-fall cases
because there are a lot of Wal-Marts. I’ve
talked to some of those people, though.
One woman started a website called
WalMartSurvivor.com. [laughs]
STAY FREE!: Do you keep track of other
lawsuits? Other class-action suits?
FEATHERSTONE: Yes, there are many
other class-action suits, at least 39 on the
overtime issue alone, in different states.
There’s also a class-action suit on behalf
of immigrant janitors, who were forced
to work for seven days without a break.
STAY FREE! 19 ISSUE NO. 23

The United Food and Commercial Workers’ Vice President for Strategic Programs, Al Zack, observes that
appealing to the poor was “Sam Walton’s real genius. He figured out how
to make money off poverty. He located his first stores in poor rural
areas and discovered a real market. The
only problem with this business model is, it needs more poverty to
grow.” That problem is cleverly solved by creating more bad
jobs worldwide. In a chilling but perhaps equally clever reversal of
Henry Ford’s strategy, which was to pay his workers amply so
they could buy Ford cars, Wal-Mart’s stinginess contributes to an economy in
which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart.
—Featherstone in Selling Women Short
STAY FREE!: I read about one lawsuit
involving a woman whose husband died
of a heart attack. Afterwards, she discovered
that Wal-Mart had taken out an
insurance policy on his life!
FEATHERSTONE: Yes. Vicky Rice. Her
husband was incredibly overworked, as
many Wal-Mart managers are. I believe
he was an assistant manager, and assistant
mangers are forced to work 70–80
hours a week. In some sense, they are
more exploited than hourly workers,
because they are salaried, so they don’t
get overtime.
STAY FREE!: You mean that even the law
says they don’t get overtime.
FEATHERSTONE: Right [laughs], because
Wal-Mart workers don’t get overtime
anyway! Actually, that’s another classaction
suit: Wal-Mart makes assistant
managers perform the duties of hourly
workers in order to avoid paying overtime,
so assistant managers have sued.
Anyway, this woman’s husband was
working 80 hours a week. I think he had
a weak heart. One day, he was exhausted
from working because he was understaffed,
but he had to help a customer
carry a TV to her car, and when he did, he
had a heart attack and dropped dead. So,
this is already a really sad story, but then
his wife found out that Wal-Mart had an
insurance claim on him. They were actually
collecting money from his death!
STAY FREE!: And they do this to lots of
employees, right?
FEATHERSTONE: Yes. In fact, there are
several class-action suits by people who
were appalled to discover that Wal-
Mart had been profiting from employee
deaths.
STAY FREE!: They do it because it’s a
tax loophole. They store money in these
insurance policies so they don’t have to
pay taxes. How do you feel about bigbox
stores in general? Are they necessarily
bad?
FEATHERSTONE: Other companies have
very similar practices. Aesthetically, we
all like Target better, but their wages are
in many places low or just as low, and
they all represent the Wal-Martization
of our economy, which is the exchange
of low prices for poor work conditions.
But I don’t necessarily think that largeness
is really the problem. Large stores
don’t have to be worse than small stores.
In fact, many studies have shown that
large companies on average offer better
wages and health benefits and are more
easily well-unionized. There are a lot of
things you could potentially do better on
a big scale.
STAY FREE!: Because you have the advantage
of buying in bulk.
FEATHERSTONE: Plus the convenience.
No one wants to spend their entire Saturday
running errands to different stores.
Why not have a place that everyone in the
community visits? A lot of people love
going to Wal-Mart to run into friends.
You could still have fairly cheap prices.
Costco pays workers better, and they are
quite cheap.
STAY FREE!: You mention in the book
that Wal-Mart is expected to run afoul
of antitrust laws in 2009.
FEATHERSTONE: I’m eager for that. If
you control too great a share of the market,
you are in danger of operating as a
monopoly. But I certainly hope there will
be more of a public outcry before 2009.
STAY FREE!: What do you think is the
greatest hope for checking Wal-Mart’s
power? You’ve mentioned labor unions.
FEATHERSTONE: I think that the biggest
hope lies in labor and communities coming
together, but they really need a lot
of help. g
Got story ideas?
Know interesting local folks we
should interview?
cm@stayfreemagazine.org
STAY FREE! 20 ISSUE NO. 23

WAL-MART PRANKED!
I FIRST HEARD about the Wal-Mart position from a friend of
mine who was working the early-morning shift. He explained
that the electronics department needed an employee on the
overnight shift because the last person who worked there was
caught masturbating to a Cindy Crawford workout tape.
Sadly, I’m not kidding.
I was in college and needed the money, so I showed up
one Wednesday for an interview. Believe it or not, the interview
process was pretty thorough, especially considering that the job
paid $6 an hour and entailed wearing a blue smock, cleaning up
after dullards, and answering the same questions hundreds of
times per hour. After a grueling two-hour interview, a drug test,
and multiple calls to my references, I was finally accepted into
the ranks of the Sam Walton elite: I became Joe “The Overnight
Electronics Department Employee” Peacock.
The job was a complete nightmare.
The first few weeks were extremely frustrating. Because I
was the new kid, I ended up as the victim of several “funny”
pranks. For instance, I was told that the electronics person had
to cover for the pet department, which was on the opposite end
of the store. I was also informed that whenever possible, I should
pitch in and help other departments stock their wares. It was
common to find me putting away stock in other departments,
while being paged back to my department every 10 minutes.
Things went downhill from there. It started with my
manager noticing discrepancies on my inventory reports. Each
night, I found a note reminding me to check the battery count,
or verify the film count, because the rack was off by one. I
would count and count again, and the counts would match the
inventory printout. It baffled me, but I didn’t spend too many
cycles worrying about it. Yet more and more inventory began
disappearing: video games, printer cartridges, and eventually
a television. The notes from my manager became increasingly
terse. I watched the department like a hawk, but saw nothing
remotely suspicious.
One morning, I was confronted by the overnight manager.
I walked over to the offending aisle of printer cartridges, and
demonstrated for him that the count matched exactly with
what was on his new morning printout . . . hmm. That’s odd.
It actually was off by one. No one had even come into my
department that evening. Something stank.
After a few days of investigation, the morning manager, not
surprisingly, received horrible reviews of my performance from
the other employees. The part that really fried my turkey was
that the overnight manager, Darius, supported the claims of the
overnight staff that I was not only lazy but was also pilfering
STAY FREE! 21 ISSUE NO. 23

the stock for personal gain. I was furious. I explained—nay,
pleaded—my case to the morning manger, to no avail.
Which leads to a deeper, darker secret than working at
Wal-Mart: I was actually fired from Wal-Mart. I would say that
only a retard could get fired from Wal-Mart, but even the door
greeter with Down Syndrome who once bit a female customer’s
inner thigh was still employed. Truly it was one of the low
points of my life.
The following week, I visited the store to pick up my final
paycheck, and I met up with the friend who initially referred
me to the job. Fortunately, he was pretty tight with a few of
the overnight employees, and he told me what had happened.
In an attempt to frame me for theft, some of those magnificent
meatheads had been using the inventory gun to scan items,
increasing the inventory by one unit every morning, so that it
looked like we had constant shrinkage.
I asked my friend what I had done to piss them off so
badly. He replied: “Dude, you didn’t do anything. These are
simple people who are not worthy of your hatred.”
Still, hearing about the conspiracy made me angry. And
when anger is involved, revenge is not very far behind.
The day after Thanksgiving is notorious for being the
busiest shopping day of the entire year, and I determined that
my vengeance should take place on that day.
Since I was the guy who set up everything in the electronics
department for almost seven months, a few small advantages
were mine alone. For instance, I was the only one who knew
the lockout codes for the DirecTV and the demo DVD player.
These components sat inside the cabinet of an entertainment
center, and I still had the keys. I was also the only one who knew
the CMOS and screensaver passwords to all the demo PCs in
the department. But my real advantage was the knowledge that
there was an extra working phone line underneath the main
CD rack in the center of the department.
Thanksgiving night, I entered the store at midnight and set
to work. The morning manager never got around to filling my
position, and 80 percent of the workforce had the night off, so
the store was my playground.
First, I went to work on the DirecTV system, locking out
every channel except for The Hot Network, a hard-core porn
channel. While in the cabinet, I inserted a special DVD-R I had
made into the demo DVD unit, then I put a special VHS tape
into the VCR. I turned off all the units, then locked up the
demo cabinet and grabbed the remote controls. After that, I
turned up the volume on every TV as high as it would go.
Still not satisfied, I moved over to the PCs and changed
a few settings, then rebooted them to lock in the passwords.
Finally, I took a cordless telephone and plugged it into the
aforementioned vacant phone jack. Everything in place, I left
the store with a gigantic smile on my face.
Naturally, the store was flooded at 6 a.m, when special
sales began. There were lines to wait for a place in another
line. I showed up around 11 a.m. and easily breezed through
the store; not one of my former coworkers spotted me. I
went over to my rigged electronics department to do a final
survey of the area. All the televisions were on, screens black,
with a small message at the bottom of each screen that read
“signal unavailable.” All the demo PCs had rolled over to their
screensavers, which scrolled in blue text on a red background
“I AM A LUCKY COMPUTER! TAKE ME HOME!” Moving
the mouse or using the keyboard would not disable the
screensaver, since they were password-protected. Everything
looked ready.
I ran over to my secret hiding area in the pharmacy and
took out the cordless phone. It was time for the festivities
to begin. Using the paging system I had just hijacked, I
announced: “Greetings, Wal-Mart holiday shoppers! One of
our unadvertised specials is taking place RIGHT NOW! For
the next 30 minutes in the electronics department, if you see
a computer that reads “I AM A LUCKY COMPUTER!” that
computer model is 70 percent off the already low sale price!
These computers are first come, first served, so hurry to the
electronics department! And as always, thank you for shopping
Wal-Mart!”
The floodgates opened. Following the hordes of bargain
hunters, I rushed over to the electronics department to look
for the computer models that were “on sale.” Astounding!
Every single machine had a demo model that scrolled the magic
phrase! But my actual intention was not to screw Wal-Mart on
the price of their computers; it was to build an audience.
As the department reached critical capacity, I pulled out
my stolen remotes for the demo units and turned on all three.
Immediately, the top row of televisions, at full volume, flipped
to images from the DirecTV system that was locked on hardcore
pornography; the middle tier of televisions began showing
images from Where the Boys Aren’t, Vol. 12—Sorority
Sleepover, and the bottom row of televisions was playing
German scheiße films.
There is no way I can describe the resulting chaos, so I will
leave it alone, mentioning only that I barely managed to crawl
out of the store because I was doubled over with laughter.
What a happy holiday season I had that year. I heard later
from my friend that the store had to honor the “advertised” sale
on the computers, and that the “wall o’ filth” actually played
at full volume for the better part of an hour, as the department
was so packed with spectators that employees could barely
move through to the demo cabinet, which they obsessed over
unlocking instead of simply turning off the televisions. Overall,
the panic and unrest went on for longer than six hours.
The best part was that Wal-Mart accidentally paid me for
another two weeks after I had been fired. Some time later, they
sent a letter explaining that this was due to an error in the
payroll system and requested that I return the money. I wrote
the word scheiße with a chocolate bar on the letter, and mailed
it back, wondering if they would get the joke. I then put the
money into a tech-heavy stock portfolio that about a year ago
lost every cent.
Oh well. Easy come, easy go. —Joe Peacock
A longer version of this story appears on Peacock’s website,
mentallyincontinent.com, and will be Chapter One of the
forthcoming book of the same name.
STAY FREE! 22 ISSUE NO. 23

Police Report > by Tamar Rothenberg
I WAS A HIGH SCHOOL TERRORIST
A Windsor Terrace teenager is mistaken for one of al Qaeda’s
ADAM WACHOLDER IS a genial 17-year-old with long, dark
hair and a penchant for tie-dyed shirts. He is not a terrorist. He
just looks like one—a terrorist named Adam.
Adam Yahiye Gadahn is wanted by the FBI as an al Qaeda
operative who has allegedly trained at al Qaeda camps
and served as an al Qaeda translator. His mug shot, plastered
all over newspapers, TV news, and web sites beginning May
27, 2004, shows a pale moon face with a baby scruff Lincoln
beard, framed by long, wavy hair parted in the middle. Just like
Adam Wacholder.
Adam Wacholder’s
father, a wholesale food
distributor who lives in
Windsor Terrace, alerted
him to this fact around 8
a.m. that morning. “He
told me to watch out,”
said Adam. “I thought he
was joking, but he sounded
pretty serious.”
At City-As-School,
an alternative public
school in SoHo, Adam
confronted classmates
armed with copies of the
Daily News, which students
there get free. “For
how many potheads there
Adam Yahiye Gadahn,
suspected al Qaeda operative
are at my school, they’re pretty educated, smart people,” said
Adam. They read the newspaper—and look at the pictures.
“One kid yelled at me, ‘Terrorist!’”
His classmates gathered around him, holding up the paper
and marveling at the likeness. “It was my 15 minutes of fame,”
said Adam. “At least I didn’t have to make any speeches.”
The commotion was a worthy excuse for Adam’s tardiness
at his internship at New Youth Connections, a magazine
written by and for teens in New York City. After alerting his
editors and his fellow writers to his dangerous double, Adam
turned his attention to the story he’d been writing all semester
about his love of rock music. (That’s a major difference
between the long-haired Adams: the suspected terrorist had
been into death metal, not the Beatles, Neil Young, Brian Eno,
Queen and XTC.)
Adam’s evil clone continued to hover, while the Daily
News kept the excitement going at school. Despite the publicity,
the California resident remained at large, along with the
six other alleged al Qaeda operatives, who were all foreign
nationals.
A few weeks later, Tom Brown, who handles subscriptions
at New Youth Connections, got a visit from two NYPD detectives.
Someone had spotted Adam’s picture in the magazine,
alongside a story he wrote, and alerted the authorities.
The NYPD officers requested information on the whereabouts
of Adam Wacholder, but they didn’t have a warrant, so
Tom declined to hand over the young writer’s home address or
phone number. When they left, Tom called Adam to warn him
that the cops were on his tail.
“My heart jumped half a jump,” said Adam. Even though
he knew he wasn’t the
Adam they were looking
for, “When the cops come
looking for you, there’s always
something to be concerned
about.” The next
day, “they just showed
up” at the King’s Highway
apartment where Adam
lives with his mother, a
teacher. Adam was in the
shower when his mother
came into the bathroom,
“very uptight.”
Adam emerged from
the bathroom ten minutes
Adam Wacholder, genial local
boy, hippie
later to find his neighbor
Vinny standing in the
doorway, talking to a guy
wearing a “ghetto outfit” of a matching track suit. He was
telling Vinny about the undercover work he’d been doing
around Arab bodegas suspected of sending money to terrorist
training camps.
He and the other detective, who was undercover in a pastel
blue polo shirt, assured Adam that their visit was just routine.
“They have to make sure I’m not the guy.” So Adam showed
them his true self, joking with them about his stash. “I’m pretty
sure they could tell I was joking,” he said.
Still, Adam’s mother had to show them all the paperwork
and ID cards she could find: driver’s license, birth certificate,
passport, prior passport, Social Security card.
Convinced that the teenage Brooklynite, grandson of orthodox
Jews, was not the married twentysomething Muslim
convert from California, the detectives shook his hand and one
of them gave Adam his card. “If I run into trouble, if I get
picked up by the FBI, I can call him,” said Adam.
Adam now carries the card with him at all times. So far,
he hasn’t been confronted by anyone who might think he’s the
lookalike terrorist. “After a few weeks,” Adam figures, “people
forget what they look like.” g
STAY FREE! 23 ISSUE NO. 23

Jake Greene, who’s homeless, has been standing in the
same spot in front of Ace Supermarket on 7th Avenue for
about a decade. With his winning smile and eternally sunny
attitude, Greene gives North Slopers the impression that
he actually likes asking for money.
Greene affectionately refers to the people who regularly
give him money as his “customers.” There is, for example,
the young Hasidic man who usually gives a nickel—unless
he doesn’t have a nickel, in which case he asks
Greene for change for a quarter. There’s also the retired
high school teacher who lives up the block, several women
who bring produce, and a guy who simply hands Greene
a vitamin (which Greene politely accepts, then discards).
Between these donations, meals at the CHIPS soup kitchen,
and occasional gifts of clothing, Greene has more than
enough to feed and clothe himself. The bulk of his day,
however, is geared toward making “the quota”—Greene
needs to have $20 by the time Ace closes (10:30 p.m.) in order
to get a hotel room. In fact, when I first tried to arrange
an interview, he continually postponed so he could make
his numbers. After three or four cancellations, I figured out
that if I just hung around and chatted, he was more than
amenable. It was then that Greene told me about serving
jail time.
In 1996, Greene was falsely accused of raping a young
Park Slope woman and was jailed for five months before
justice officials figured out they had the wrong guy. Upon
release, Greene returned to his spot in front of Ace and,
for years, mentioned his story to people who stopped by
to chat. Eventually, in 1999, he met a private investigator
who put him in touch with Carmen Giordano, a Manhattan
lawyer. According to a New York Post story about Greene’s
case, Giordano “discovered that Greene hadn’t been put
in a police lineup, even though there were two witnesses,
and that he didn’t even resemble the composite sketch of
the attacker.” Giordano told the Post, “I really think he was
arrested because he was a familiar face in Park Slope.”
Giordano filed a lawsuit against the city, the city settled,
and Greene wound up with a check for $113,000. He
then did something that few of his friends anticipated: he
went right back to his spot in front of Ace. According to a
longtime friend, Robert Dumas, Greene continued to ask
people for change, while at the same time telling everyone
within earshot about his windfall. Eventually, he took
his money, got on a bus, and visited family members in
Baltimore and South Carolina. He gave a good chunk of
the money to friends and family, lost a large sum on a bad
investment, and returned to his neighborhood, where he’s
been ever since.
While locals have come to rely on seeing Greene in
his usual spot, he’s had to experiment with other locations
lately. At the end of August, a fire broke out at the Olive
Vine restaurant and burned down the bodega next door.
The decline in foot traffic was immediate and, for Greene,
brutal. The store was the anchor on the block, and it helped
open the wallets of passersby. Still, I get the feeling that
Greene will do okay. Or maybe that’s just his optimism rubbing
off on me. —Carrie McLaren
JAKE GREENE: THE
STAY FREE!: Where are you from?
GREENE: South Carolina. That’s cottonpickin’
land. That’s what I used to do.
It was very hard work. I came up here
’round ’58 or ’59. I was about 16.
STAY FREE!: What brought you here?
GREENE: I moved up to be with my sister.
There were 12 of us in all and some of
my brothers and sisters were up here.
STAY FREE!: Were they living in this
neighborhood?
GREENE: No, my sister was on Dean
and Saratoga. In the 1960s, I lived in
Bushwick, East New York, some other
places. I didn’t come to this area till ’91
or so.
STAY FREE!: Was that when you first became
homeless?
GREENE: Yeah. I had been working for
the Transit Authority, cleaning floors.
I was in a bad marriage and because
of my wife they were garnisheeing my
wages. I wasn’t getting any money, I
couldn’t take it anymore. My head was
all messed up. I just left. I still want
to get my retirement benefits, but they
won’t give them to me.
STAY FREE!: How long were you at the
Transit Authority?
GREENE: Nineteen and a half years. You
have to be there twenty.
STAY FREE!: Have you noticed the neighborhood
changing over time?
GREENE: Yeah, the black people moved
away. Other people came here. It’s
STAY FREE! 24 ISSUE NO. 23

Sabrina Hartel
MAN ON THE STREET
very different. Some stores have closed
down, others have opened up. I miss the
Hebrew National—that was right where
that toy store is [across from Ace].
STAY FREE!: I’ve noticed you don’t have
a cup for your change.
GREENE: Yeah, I don’t like that. Some
people hold a cup and jangle the change
around, not me. I used to, but not anymore.
I’d rather talk to people [pauses].
I try to go to the bank on weekends,
when it’s not open. I like to hold the
door open for people, to offer a service
instead of just standing. Before I was
locked up, I used to bring my radio and
play jazz for people. They loved that.
STAY FREE!: What kind of stuff would
you play?
GREENE: Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins,
Thelonius Monk, Lester Young, but
I lost all of my music when I went to
jail. I lost my only picture of my grandmother
too. I lost everything.
STAY FREE!: You still have brothers and
sisters in the area. Did they help you?
GREENE: I haven’t seen any of my brothers
and sisters in years. My brother got
married last Saturday but I didn’t go.
STAY FREE!: Are you arguing?
GREENE: No, it’s all because of me. I
don’t call. I can’t talk to them. My favorite
sister died a few years ago. In 1997. I
didn’t go to the funeral. I didn’t want to
see her. I wanted to remember her by the
picture I have in my mind of her dancing.
She and I were the best dancers. We
would go to the local clubs. There was
Gayheart on Eastern Parkway, Presi-
STAY FREE! 25 ISSUE NO. 23

dent Château on President, Fulton Terrace.
This was in the 1960s. Places like
that aren’t around anymore.
[I leave for the night and return the following
week. Jake is standing in front of
Ace, but there is very little street traffic.]
STAY FREE!: Hey, I expected you to be at
the bank on the weekend!
GREENE: I almost got arrested. They don’t
like me standing in the bank.
STAY FREE!: What happens when you’re
arrested?
GREENE: They take you downtown and
you sit in jail for a day. When they release
me I come right back here. [Jake tells me
about the fire at Olive Vine and how it’s
hurting his business.]
STAY FREE!: So what happens when you
don’t get enough money?
GREENE: I go to the park on 3rd Avenue. I
don’t go there by myself, though, no way!
If I see a few people in the park, I’ll stay.
If not, I’ll go ride in the subway. I’ll ride
to the end of the line and then change
trains and go the other way. I can usually
get an hour or two of sleep at a time
that way.
STAY FREE!: You can nap a little during
the day too, though, right? I’ve seen you
sleep on that stoop over there.
GREENE: Yes, but sometimes people wake
me [to give money]—I hate that.
STAY FREE!: Have you ever gotten hurt?
GREENE: Yes. In the shelter on Atlantic
and Bedford about four or five months
ago. I got robbed a couple of times. How
much can you stay awake to keep watch?
You’ve gotta go to sleep eventually. They
might have cleaned it up now. I don’t
know. I haven’t been back.
STAY FREE!: Do you have a place where
you can keep your stuff?
GREENE: I have two places. One is in
the hotel on Classon and Lefferts. I can
lock my door and be by myself. [Silence.]
Man, you don’t see the people no more.
Where are my customers?
STAY FREE!: Would it be possible for you
to go to another vegetable stand? Another
deli?
GREENE: No, somebody might be there.
STAY FREE!: You mean other people asking
for change? What would happen
if you did go to someone else’s place?
Would they get mad?
GREENE: I wouldn’t wait for that, I’d just
leave.
STAY FREE!: So you don’t try out different
spots?
WANTED
ADVERTISING PERSON: Stay Free! seeks a smart, motivated
human to help sell ads in March 2005 (hours are
flexible). We’re looking for a reliable go-getter who enjoys
talking to strangers and is familiar with Prospect Heights,
Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Park Slope, and Boerum
Hill. $12/hour for about 40 hours. An exceptional student
could do most of the job over spring break. Send résumés
and a cover letter by January 20, 2005.
INTERN: Looking for a smart, motivated person to help
with various duties. Research and computer skills, activism
experience, writing ability, and a sense of humor will get
you far. Must thrive in unstructured environments. No
money. (Sorry!) Send résumé and cover letter.
Stay Free! 390 Butler Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217
cm@stayfreemagazine.org
STAY FREE! 26 ISSUE NO. 23

GREENE: No, I went down by Key
Food, down by Garfield, but I didn’t
have much luck. There, I’m new in the
area. I’ve been here for so long, it’s just
not the same.
STAY FREE!: Do the restaurants around
here help you out?
GREENE: The ice cream place is good,
Tasty D-Lite. Ozzie’s sometimes gives
me sandwiches at night. [A woman
comes by, hands Jake change, and apologizes,
“I’m sorry for neglecting you
earlier!” She smiles and is on her way.]
STAY FREE!: Most of the people I’ve seen
here are very sweet. Do people ever say
rude things to you?
GREENE: Yeah, they curse at me, but I
don’t care. I don’t curse back. I don’t
want to be negative. I try to have a good
sense of humor, even if I get a negative
response. g
back issues
#16. Jhally v. Twitchell on advertising. Pharmaceutical marketing, patent medicines, placebo
effects. Mindlessness. #17. Outdoor ad creep. Manhattan ad map. Media literacy. Attention
deficits. Dead famous people in ads. Commercial speech. #18. American history issue. Interviews:
Jane Healy, Richard Sherwin, Inger Stole, James Loewen. #19. (digital only) Conspiracy
issue. Interview with Mark Crispin Miller, FBI-created artwork, corporate urban legends, fastfood
horror stories, real conspiracies in history. #20. (digital only) Copyright issue. Interviews
with Siva Vaidhyanathan, and with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy; Illegal Art
Exhibit, people imitating the media. #21. Psychology Issue. History of the lobotomy, employee
personality tests, cross-cultural mental illness, psychosomatic illness, werewolves. #22. Eugenics
and attempts to breed a “better,” whiter race. The dark side of dog breeding. Robot marketing.
How trial consultants rig juries. Napster in the 1930s. Subliminal advertising. Back issues
are $4 each. Also available: anti-SUV postcards, Illegal Art Exhibit DVD and CD, and more.
STAY FREE!
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WWW.STAYFREEMAGAZINE.ORG
STAY FREE! 27 ISSUE NO. 23

Interview > by Francis Heaney
EUGENE MIRMAN
The Park Slope comic talks about temping, his native Russia,
and surviving the comedy biz.
The first time I saw Eugene Mirman, he was pretending to have sex with himself. Okay, he was actually only
pretending to have sex with a video of himself. And yet: disturbing. Odd. • The Mirman family immigrated to the
United States from Russia when Eugene was 4. (A photo of the young Eugene Mirman can be seen at his website,
eugenemirman.com, along with his videos, songs, and other work.) At some point after his arrival in America,
he became a comedian. He now cohosts a weekly comedy night at Rififi in New York’s East Village, a show that
features up-and-coming comics trying out new material, with none of the traditional comedy club’s overpriced
two-drink minimums. That is the only thing he does. • I’m sorry, that’s false. Actually, he sometimes opens for
rock bands (the Shins, Modest Mouse), performs on TV shows that are not hostile to the delicate art of standup
comedy (Late Night With Conan O’Brien, Comedy Central’s Premium Blend), acts, and releases CDs. Well, one CD,
anyway: The Absurd Nightclub Comedy of Eugene Mirman (with accompanying DVD). I used my powerful media
connections (I know the editor of Stay Free!) to acquire an advance copy of the CD, an extremely entertaining
artifact, in exchange for which my only duty was to interview the mysterious Mr. Mirman. I finally tracked him
down at a sushi restaurant, tipped off to his presence by the fact that he had offered to meet me there. This is
what he had to say for himself.—Francis Heaney
Bridget Regan
STAY FREE! 28 ISSUE NO. 23

STAY FREE!: So, you have a new comedy
CD coming out, which is kind of
daring, because it’s my understanding
that most CDs have music on them.
EUGENE MIRMAN: Comedy albums
used to be a popular thing—one of
the main ways people listened to comedy.
People don’t really quite do that
as much now.
STAY FREE!: There was a big lull.
MIRMAN: But one in which comedy
was on television. HBO had youngcomedians
specials, and there’d be
comedians on one of the three talk
shows, and especially in the ’80s,
there was standup all over television,
so albums weren’t as necessary.
STAY FREE!: How did you decide what
to include on the DVD? I was hoping
“Mr. Robot” would be on it.
MIRMAN: Well, that has a bunch of
music that I don’t have license to, so I
might have to swap the music out. It
has Wilco, Jethro Tull . . . I’m going to
put it on my website because I don’t
make money through that. If someone
gets upset, I’ll probably take it down.
It’s, like, three seconds of music.
STAY FREE!: Paying for rights is exorbitant.
Of course, you could always
just swap the songs with some by
bands you know.
MIRMAN: Yes. That’s my plan if I can’t
keep what I have in there.
STAY FREE!: That brings me to a whole
other thing, which is that you went on
a rock tour.
MIRMAN: I really like playing rock
clubs, but it can be more work if an
audience doesn’t know you.
STAY FREE!: The comedy shows you
host are structured more like rock
shows than comedy. At the crappy
comedy clubs here, they make the
comedians bring X number of people
before they’re allowed to perform.
MIRMAN: Well, that’s a “bringer”
show. None of the people I know do
those shows anymore, or would ever.
That’s when you’re starting out. I find
it easier to get on Conan O’Brien than
to perform regularly at some of the
clubs here, so I just don’t really try
anymore. Not that I tried that hard.
STAY FREE!: So it wasn’t really a complex
thought process of, “Oh, I’m not
going to run my shows like that because
that’s lame.”
MIRMAN: Right. When people ask me
to perform at clubs, or if I audition
for something, I’ll go to a club, but
also it’s different in New York than in
Boston. When I was in Boston, there
were three comedy clubs. In most
clubs you start as an opener, then
you’re a “middler,” and then you’re
a headliner, and there’s this system.
But the system seems pointless and
depressing. Here it’s kind of different,
because there’s just a bunch of people
performing for 20 minutes at a time
at a club, as opposed to an opener.
Anyway, the point is that rock clubs
and alternative spaces are, for me, just
as good if not better exposure, they’re
fun, and you make more money. The
argument against it is that it doesn’t
exist. You have to make it. That’s
what’s inconvenient about it. You
have to create your own thing, which
I personally enjoy.
STAY FREE!: Do you make your living
at comedy?
MIRMAN: I don’t do anything else. It’s
like freelancing. It’s kind of tedious to
be broke, but then a bunch of work
will come in, or I’ll get a writing job,
or, like, Comedy Central recently licensed
the pot movie [a fake public
service announcement in which Eugene
dresses as an angel and warns
viewers against smoking pot].
STAY FREE!: They don’t mind the part
where you describe a bunch of people
jerking off on you?
MIRMAN: They’re gonna beep stuff,
though I’m not sure that’s one of the
things they’re beeping! It’s for a new
show that airs after midnight, so it’s
for people who are already high.
STAY FREE!: What were you doing before
you did comedy full-time?
MIRMAN: In Boston, I had an unspecific
role in the creative department
of a web company. Me and my officemates
turned our office into a bar. I
made my gun video there; that’s where
I learned to edit. That was a great job,
and then I moved here and was lucky
enough to work at a horrible law firm
for about half a year.
STAY FREE!: So it was torture but it
made you a lot of money?
MIRMAN: I wasn’t a lawyer, but it was
a fair amount. Anyone who works at
a law firm will certainly agree that
it’s a very feudalistic place, and they
let you know right away that you
are a serf and there is no hiding it.
I remember being in an elevator, and
there were two secretaries, and one
looks at my “temporary” badge and
says to the other, “How many temps
do we need?” And she was looking
right at me.
STAY FREE!: So you’re a Russian immigrant
and all that.
MIRMAN: Yes, I am all of that.
STAY FREE!: Do you remember anything
about Russia at all?
MIRMAN: When I was in Boston with
my parents at a Russian food store, I
smelled black currant juice and said,
“Oh, this is so weirdly familiar,” and
it turns out that we had a summer
home—I say “summer home,” but it
probably was a cabin in the woods—
and it was surrounded by black currant
trees. But apparently that’s the
only thing I remember. That, and all
our money being redistributed.
STAY FREE!: Your parents speak Russian.
Do you still know any?
STAY FREE! 29 ISSUE NO. 23

MIRMAN: Yes, I speak fluent Russian
with my parents.
STAY FREE!: Could you go to Russia
and translate your act?
MIRMAN: No. It’s one thing to speak
to my parents, but I’m illiterate and I
forget words because I don’t speak it
every day.
STAY FREE!: And some words are never
going to come up in conversations
with parents, like “cunnilingus.”
be funny, though I would prefer a funny
movie or a funny sketch talk show,
or even some kind of new, odd format
that broke all the rules. All of them!
STAY FREE!: Do you have any secret
projects in the works, past the CD/
DVD?
MIRMAN: I’m going to do a full-length
DVD. And I’m trying to come up with
shows, whether it’s a one-man show
or stuff to pitch to various networks.
I would rather wait a year to have
MIRMAN: Actually, I was voted class
clown! But I wasn’t the class clown.
No, I was extraordinarily unpopular
until my senior year, when I ran
for class president, with the slogan,
“It’s not just a change . . . it’s a mutation!”
And though I lost, I converted
students from hating me to thinking I
was a swell guy, and even occasionally
going on dates with me.
STAY FREE!: I was seriously underdated
in high school myself. . . . So you’re
popular with the ladies, right?
YOU KNOW HOW WHEN YOU SIGN UP FOR A CREDIT CARD ACCOUNT YOU HAVE TO
ANSWER A QUESTION IN ORDER TO ACCESS THE ACCOUNT? WELL, THIS CREDIT CARD
ACCOUNT ALLOWED ME TO PICK THE QUESTION, SO NOW WHEN THEY CALL, THEY
HAVE TO ASK ME, “WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?” AND I HAVE TO RESPOND, “I DON’T
THINK THAT’S APPROPRIATE!” —MIRMAN AT CAROLINE’S COMEDY CLUB
MIRMAN: People often ask me, “Do
you know any swears?” As if my parents
were like, “Clean your room,
faggot!” They just wouldn’t say that.
So as a result I can only say things like
“What a beautiful owl! Where’s the
pan? Who wants more food?”
STAY FREE!: Do you ever have to deal
with corporate sponsors for your
shows?
MIRMAN: No, but I’d like to. I’m going
to have a CD release party, and
I really want a scotch to sponsor it.
Dewar’s or Macallan.
STAY FREE!: I’ll tell you who’s a better
bet—Brooklyn Brewery.
MIRMAN: Yes, but I want a scotch.
Even if I get somebody to just give me
a bottle, I think that’ll be fine.
STAY FREE!: Do you want to follow
the traditional standup comedy arc?
Do you want to have a sitcom, or a
sketch show?
MIRMAN: There’s no genre of things
that couldn’t be funny. A sitcom could
somebody approach me than pitch
ideas. I know so many people who go
to pitch meetings and pitch to no real
avail. It seems exhausting to come up
with shows that you don’t really want
to do in order to get on TV. In one
year, if no one has approached me, I’m
going to be like, fuck it. I’ll come up
with some horrible, horrible shows.
STAY FREE!: You could come up with
ones you like first.
MIRMAN: I have, actually, a number
of shows that I think would be fun.
My show is called The Late Show
With David Letterman. And I can’t
wait to tell people about it!
STAY FREE!: If you got the right person
to play David Letterman, that could
be really funny.
MIRMAN: I have someone in mind already:
Jon Stewart.
STAY FREE!: Do you have anything
you were hoping I would ask? Like, “I
want to talk about how, when I was a
kid, I was a class clown. Nobody ever
talks about that.”
MIRMAN: Um, no? I don’t know.
STAY FREE!: Because it seems that
comedy is the most geeky thing that
the public at large still finds at all sexy.
So you don’t feel groupie pressure?
MIRMAN: I don’t feel a pressure in
terms of like, “Oh, I guess I have
to make out with this person.” Yes,
I have a hundred lovers, but I don’t
know how to say it without hurting
95 of their feelings. And that’s one
person with 90 feelings, five with one
feeling each, and 80 people with no
feelings whatsoever. Just to break it
down, I mean. Hopefully, through
fame, I’ll find a wife.
STAY FREE!: What if comedy totally
crashes and burns for you? What
would you do instead?
MIRMAN: I would just keep doing it
in a sad, shitty way. There’s nothing
really to stop doing. There might be
a point at which I become exhausted
of scraping things together, or waiting
for things to happen, but I would
still attempt to change the world with
my comedy. g
Bridget Regan
STAY FREE! 30 ISSUE NO. 23

y Eugene Mirman
Top Park Slope Hangouts
Great Lakes (above)
Maybe my favorite bar. It’s hard to tell with familiarity: am I
used to it or is it the best? A wonderful, warm atmosphere
with great bartenders. Come on by and hit on Julie, but
don’t mistake her friendliness for liking you. She’d rather
you cut it out, unless she wants to make out with you, then
keep it up! Great songs on the jukebox, including a mix I
made for the bar. My home away from home. Literally. I live
in a studio and slowly go crazy throughout the day. It’s like
an awesome jail. But after a day of no human contact, I like
to go to the Lakes and meet up with friends and try to make
out with people. (284 5th Avenue, 718-499-3710)
Bageltique
If it is 3 a.m. and you are hungry, go to the Bageltique and
get this: a bacon, egg, turkey, and cheese sandwich on a
sub roll. There’s other stuff, but you can’t have it. If you
are vegan, you can have a bagel with tofu cream cheese,
and afterwards, tell people some crap about how animals
are shot and robbed in slaughterhouses. (242 5th Avenue,
718-638-1866)
Gorilla Coffee
A great way to run into people you can’t completely
remember. Did we go to college together? No? Well, good
luck with your band, then. Plus free internet. That’s right,
neurotically check your email to see if your friends want you
to come to their show! They do. Super coffee, Chai, White
Mocha Lattes, and a good place to meet sexy moms. (97 5th
Avenue, 718-230-3244)
Al Di La
One of my favorite restaurants. The food, flown in directly
from Italy every morning (probably not) is incredible—like
someone threw a surprise party in your mouth, even though
you said you didn’t want a party, but then you were like,
“This is really fun.” A great place to bring your parents or a
date. Especially if you want to sit next to someone else on
a date. Then you can go, “Hey, are you two going all the
way later?” And one of them will go, “What did you say? I
can’t hear you over my delicious hanger steak!” Imagine a
place with food so good, people can’t hear sexually invasive
chitchat! (248 5th Avenue, 718-636-8888)
STAY FREE! 31 ISSUE NO. 23
continued on page 59

$30,000
$787,999,502
$96,012
STAY FREE! 32 ISSUE NO. 23

Interview > by Carrie McLaren
PRICING THE PRICELESS
How much would you pay for a case of chronic bronchitis? How
many dollars are hunchback whales worth? Frank Ackerman and Lisa
Heinzerling discuss the sordid world of cost-benefit analysis.
Hugo Humberto Plácido da Silva
FOR YEARS, the cell phone industry has harbored a dirty
little secret: talking on a cell phone while driving is about
as dangerous as driving drunk. Even the pro-business
Harvard Center for Risk Analysis recently estimated that
the use of cell phones by drivers may result in approximately
2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries each year. Yet
attempts to ban cell phone use in cars in the U.S. have as
of yet proved feckless. New York and several other municipalities
forbid drivers to use handheld phones but allow
“hands-free” versions, which, research shows, aren’t
any less dangerous.
In their excellent new book Priceless: On Knowing
the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing (New
Press, 2004), Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling show
how the cell phone industry has managed to escape regulation
for so long: by enlisting some of the country’s most
influential economists to perform cost-benefit analyses.
In the case of cell phones, cost-benefit analysis works
like this: economists assign dollar amounts to the lives of
people killed annually in cell-phone–related car crashes,
then compare that number to the amount of money that
people behind the wheel spend on cell phones. Since,
by the economists’ calculations, the money spent on cell
phones is greater than the “value” of those human lives,
they’ve concluded that cell phone use in cars shouldn’t be
regulated.
How do you put a price tag on a human life, you
ask? Number-crunchers at think tanks such as the Harvard
Center for Risk Analysis, the AEI-Brookings Joint Center
for Regulatory Studies, and the Cato Institute have for
the most part focused on workplace data. Dangerous
jobs at construction sites, nuclear plants, and coal mines
tend to pay more than low-risk ones; economists maintain
that this wage difference indicates the price people
are willing to pay to avoid death. Through some fancy
math involving comparing risks to wages, that works out
to be about $5 to $6 million.
The lives of cell phone victims are by no means the
only nontangibles with price tags. Throughout Priceless,
Ackerman and Heinzerling show how regulators have determined
costs for anything from a case of chronic bronchitis
($260,000; EPA, 1997), to the preservation of national
forests ($219,000; OMB, 2002), to IQ points ($8,346
each; EPA, 2000).
The authors oppose cost-benefit analysis and consider
it too inherently biased to base decisions on. Yet in
their critique they remain level-headed and clear, pointing
out blatant errors in logic and calculations—criticisms
that should be of value even to cost-benefit’s advocates.
For example, calculating risk on the basis of wages
assumes that workers can freely choose among several
job options; and it assumes that those workers are perfectly
informed of any risks involved. But when unemployment
rates are high, workers end up taking whatever
jobs they can. The cost of risk, then, says less about how
much someone values his life than about the current state
of the job market. And poor, uneducated people—in any
job market—simply don’t have the access to low-risk jobs
that wealthier people do. Ackerman and Heinzerling argue
that, to correct for this problem, analysts should figure
in the amount of money a rich person would have to
be paid to take a risky job.
Cost-benefit analysis invariably places different values
on different lives. Rich people and young people are
worth more than the poor and the elderly. And if you’re
poor and elderly, you may as well give up: according to
cost-benefit economics, it’s better to let old people die
than to require pollution controls.
At times, Ackerman and Heinzerling’s measured,
point-by-point refutation of cost-benefit logic makes you
want to continually poke yourself to remember that all
this is insane. Deconstructing cost-benefit analysis feels
like getting into a serious debate over whether it’s better
to kill your mother or your father. But Ackerman and
Heinzerling’s book is crucial if for no other reason than
the fact that so many people in power take such stuff
very, very seriously.
Frank Ackerman is an economist at the Global Development
and Environment Institute at Tufts University.
Lisa Heinzerling is a professor at the Georgetown University
Law Center and has clerked for Judge Richard Posner
and Justice William Brennan. We talked by phone in July
2004, and I was immediately taken with both of them.
—Carrie McLaren
STAY FREE! 33 ISSUE NO. 23

STAY FREE!: Why do Bush and
other opponents of environmental
regulation like cost-benefit analysis
so much?
LISA HEINZERLING: Well, there
are a bunch of reasons. One, it
requires getting numbers for both
costs and benefits. On the cost side,
this is relatively easy; you can try
to figure out the price of the equipment
required for pollution control,
for example. On the benefit
side, however, there are a whole lot
of important benefits that we can’t
attach numbers to in the first place.
For example, we can quantify the
Making difficult decisions is
what government and the courts
have always done. There’s no
evidence they have failed for
lack of a mathematical formula.
number of certain kinds of cancers
that will be avoided, but there are
other illnesses that can’t be quantified,
and so they’re just left out of
the analysis.
STAY FREE!: They can quantify the
cancer because...?
HEINZERLING: Well, one reason
is that there is a very clear end
point—you get a tumor or you
don’t get a tumor.
FRANK ACKERMAN: Also, it’s the
most thoroughly studied of the
diseases.
STAY FREE!: I guess pain would
be something that you can’t really
quantify because it’s so subjective.
HEINZERLING: Pain or dermatitis,
neurological effects, endocrine
disruption—a slew of serious impairments
can’t be quantified.
ACKERMAN: But even for cancer
cases, the medical data is only part
of what cost-benefit analysts need.
The benefits of pollution control—
lives saved, cancer cases avoided,
damage to ecosystems prevented—
don’t have prices naturally attached
to them in the market. That’s why
we called the book Priceless.
When the EPA did a cost-benefit
analysis of arsenic regulation, it
found that removing arsenic from
drinking water leads to fewer cases
of cancer. So what’s it worth to not
die of cancer? What’s it worth to
avoid a nonfatal case of cancer
that leaves you in chemotherapy
for years? To do the cost-benefit
analysis, you’ve got to put numbers
on both of those things. The EPA
rose to this challenge and made up
numbers. Apparently, it’s worth
$6.1 million to not die of cancer.
The value of avoiding a nonfatal
cancer was estimated by saying,
“We really don’t have a clue what
it’s worth, so we’ll use the value of
avoiding a case of chronic bronchitis,”
which they made up by interviewing
shoppers in a North Carolina
mall in 1987. Those numbers
were treated as hard science and
have been carefully adjusted for
inflation since 1987; unfortunately,
they were never adjusted for common
sense.
STAY FREE!: Are those the only effects
of arsenic in drinking water?
ACKERMAN: No, those are just the
only ones the EPA tried to put prices
on. All the other diseases associated
with arsenic were mentioned
in passing, and then ignored. If
you can’t come up with a number,
it’s treated as zero; that’s where
the great crunch comes in. Many
things that people care about have
no price attached to them. They
don’t appear in the analysis.
STAY FREE!: You’ve argued that
putting prices on things that have
no market value decreases rather
than increases the information
available to decision makers.
ACKERMAN: If you have a long list
of the health effects of arsenic in
drinking water, that’s much more
informative than reducing everything
to a made-up dollar amount.
STAY FREE!: You mentioned arsenic—wasn’t
that the first time the
U.S used formal cost-benefit analysis
to write a major regulation?
HEINZERLING: Yes. But the White
House has for many years said that
they’re going to require agencies to
do cost-benefit analysis for very important
rules. In recent years, that
dynamic has really accelerated.
STAY FREE!: What are some of the
other regulations cost-benefit analysis
has shaped?
HEINZERLING: Every major rule
now coming through the agencies
is evaluated according to cost-benefit
analysis. Let me offer one qualification,
though: the Bush administration
has in some cases avoided
cost-benefit analysis, and troublingly,
those are cases in which
I think the cost-benefit analysis
would have shown that regulation
was a good thing. For example, air
pollution kills so many people and
the effects are so well-documented
that virtually any regulation that
reduces common air pollutants is
going to turn out to be good in
cost-benefit terms. Yet the Bush administration
weakened the rules for
power plants and factories without
doing a cost-benefit analysis.
ACKERMAN: I’m involved in a case
now where the United Farm Workers
are suing the EPA over its decision
to allow very toxic pesticides
to be used on crops. In effect, the
Tim and Annette Gulick
STAY FREE! 34 ISSUE NO. 23

$30,000
$787,999,502
$96,012
EPA just said, “It’s so beneficial to
the growers to use these pesticides
that we don’t have to worry about
evaluating the damage it does to
farm workers.”
STAY FREE!: After the Ford Pinto disaster
(see sidebar, p. 37) and, more
recently, Philip Morris’s analysis
of smoking in the Czech Republic
[which showed that smoking saved
the government health care system
money because smokers die earlier],
are corporations any less likely
to produce cost-benefit analyses on
health and safety issues?
HEINZERLING: Yes, I think corporations
are leery of doing this kind of
analysis internally, for their own
decisions, because, if the public
finds out, they get punished for it.
ACKERMAN: But they’ll definitely
lobby to modify the government’s
calculations and offer competing
analyses. When the government
considered requiring power plants
to install cooling towers in order
to prevent the killing of fish, the
power companies’ experts claimed
that power plants don’t really hurt
fish, because there are virtually an
infinite number in the water, so if
you kill some, more will grow.
STAY FREE!: With new rules on
“takings,” governments have to
pay companies for passing laws
that cost them money. So if I’m
a real estate owner and the state
passes an environmental protection
law that devalues my property,
I could sue the state. What effect
has this had on the environment?
HEINZERLING: Actually, they haven’t
had a lot of success in requiring
compensation for conventional
pollution regulation. They’ve had
some success with land use, saying
“no, you can’t put something
in this wetland,” or “you can’t put
something in this coastal zone”
without paying compensation, because
conservative academics and
think tanks have been pushing this
in the courts for years. Still, it’s
hard to win a takings claim. It’s really
more that they’ve had a chilling
effect. I think a lot of local and
state governments worry that, “if
we lose, we’re in real trouble.”
STAY FREE!: Could you give me an
example of an acceptable takings
claim and an unacceptable one?
HEINZERLING: The state can’t tell
somebody, “you may not use your
land” without paying them for
their property. On the other extreme,
telling a company that it
can’t discharge cyanide into a river
has not been considered a taking.
STAY FREE! 35 ISSUE NO. 23

ACKERMAN: The real sleeper in
this area, though, is that language
similar to takings is sneaking into
international trade agreements.
Buried deep in the seemingly boring
language of NAFTA is a statement
that companies can sue other
governments directly, making a
takings-like claim against the other
country’s regulations. So U.S. companies
can sue the Mexican and Canadian
governments, for example.
That has yet to shake out, but it has
some frightening possibilities.
STAY FREE!: Does cost-benefit ever
include in its accounting who is
paying the cost? Using the cooling
towers example, say killing fish will
cost $10 million in direct costs to
the public, whereas cooling towers
will cost zero in direct costs because
the company has to pay for
them. Why doesn’t the government
conclude that the cooling towers
are cheaper?
ACKERMAN: Because cost-benefit
analysis explicitly does not consider
who’s paying. The theory holds
that if there are net benefits for society
as a whole, then the winners
could compensate the losers. Distribution
is considered a separate
issue. All too often, the winners
chose to keep the winnings and not
share them with the losers, so the
compensation remains purely hypothetical.
STAY FREE!: Are the values of human
lives based on how many
friends or loved ones they have?
ACKERMAN: No.
STAY FREE!: What about insurance
or wrongful death suits? If you
have dependents, doesn’t that affect
the value of your life?
HEINZERLING: In the wrongful
death context, the courts really
only have money to give, so what
they’ve developed are a series of
ways of trying to figure out what
survivors lost as a result of the
death of a loved one. There, what
they’ve come to say is that you’ve
lost mostly income, maybe some
medical expenses; they look at the
true economic losses, and give the
victims that amount. That’s why, in
the context of the September 11th
victims fund, for example, you see
different amounts given to victims
based on their income, because
that’s the traditional way of doing
it in the tort system.
What we’re looking at is the
prospective context—not looking
backward, and trying to figure out
how much to compensate someone
who has been wronged, but how to
figure out who you’re going to save
in the future, or whether to save
anyone.
ACKERMAN: With cost-benefit
analysis, you’d have tremendous
political problems if you started
differentiating by incomes. It’s the
“old black woman” problem: if income
was all that mattered, would
pollution that just killed old black
women be okay?
HEINZERLING: That’s actually the
reason why regulators turned away
from income calculations—what’s
called the “human capital” method—and
toward “willingness to
pay.” They said, “we’re going to
try to value people the way they
value themselves.”
$30,000
$679,666
$353,556,002
STAY FREE!: Are there any critics
of cost-benefit analysis who don’t
share your politics? Any conservatives
oppose it?
ACKERMAN: Conservative policy
wonks generally love this stuff.
STAY FREE!: How do mainstream
environmental groups respond to
cost-benefit analysis? Are they responding
with their own numbers:
“if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”?
STAY FREE! 36 ISSUE NO. 23

The Ford Pinto, one of the bestselling
cars of the 1970s, had a defective
gas tank with an unfortunate
tendency to burst into flames
in rear-end collisions. Instead of fixing
the Pinto, Ford lobbied against
federal regulation affecting fuel
tank safety. As part of the lobbying
effort, the company prepared
a cost-benefit analysis. According
to Ford’s engineers, it would cost
$11* per car, or $137 million per
year for the industry as a whole, to
meet the rollover standard, while
avoiding an estimated 180 deaths
per year, along with an equal number
of serious burn injuries and a
few thousand wrecked cars.
Ford’s cost-benefit analysis valued
those lives at a mere $200,000
apiece. That number was calculated
by the National Highway and
Traffic Safety Administration at the
request of the auto industry, mainly
on the basis of lost wages, plus
medical and legal costs and a small
amount for pain and suffering. At
$200,000 per head, 180 deaths are
“worth” $36 million, not nearly
enough to “justify” a $137 million
expenditure. As Ford saw it, spending
an extra $11 per car to fix the
gas tank just wasn’t worth it.
Despite Ford’s lobbying, the
gas-tank safety regulation was
adopted. Ford responded by immediately,
and inexpensively, making
the 1977 Pinto safer. But the
damage to the company’s image
had been done. The public realized
that Ford had knowingly produced
a dangerous car, leading to
Ford advertisements billed the
Pinto as “the little carefree car”
but neglected to add “with the
exploding gas tank.”
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
preventable deaths. Ford finally
discontinued the model in 1980.
—adapted from Priceless
* Numbers are in 1972 dollars; to correct for inflation,
multiply by 4.4. Thus the cost per car
would be a bit more than $48 in 2003 dollars.
THE PINTO DISASTER
HEINZERLING: Good question. Certainly
when Newt Gingrich’s Contract
with America came to Washington,
environmental groups united
against a so-called “super mandate”
that would have required
cost-benefit analysis for health and
environmental rules. And so you
have that fairly recent experience
when the environmental community
was united against cost-benefit
analysis. Today I hear among environmental
groups some sense that,
“well, this is inevitable, so let’s try
to make it as good as we can.”
STAY FREE!: What about “bioeconomics”?
I’ve read that some environmentalists
have been arguing
for putting a price on natural resources
in order to deter corporations
from plundering the environment
without paying. What has
become of this idea?
ACKERMAN: There have been little
successes here and there, but the
problem is that the market values
of sustainable uses of natural
resources are often much less
than the values of damaging uses.
What happens in, say, the Amazon,
where it turns out that the value
of preserving the trees for tourism
and sustainable industries is
nowhere near the short-term value
of clear-cutting, selling the timber,
and farming the land? To take another
example, if you wanted to
put a price on whales, you could
add up the money people pay for
whale-watching trips, but it turns
out that’s fairly small. It’s easy to
believe that commercial exploitation
of whales could produce a lot
more money than the revenues of
whale-watching trips.
My reaction to those who
want to save nature by adding up
its market value is, more power to
them, but they’re not going to get
us nearly as far as we need to go.
STAY FREE!: You would prefer to
get rid of cost-benefit analysis entirely,
wouldn’t you?
HEINZERLING: We think it’s fundamentally
flawed and that refinements
aren’t going to help in a
meaningful way.
ACKERMAN: The people who are
pushing it are not just relying on its
intrinsic flaws; they’re often cheating
in their calculations. Environmental
groups fighting a rear-guard
action against cost-benefit analysis
can always find ways in which the
benefits numbers are too small, but
that never wins the war.
STAY FREE!: It reminds me of the
divide between police estimates of
the crowd size at a protest verses
the organizers’ estimates. The two
sides are never going to agree on
the numbers, so it boils down to
politics. To play devil’s advocate,
proponents of cost-benefit analysis
argue that obviously some ways of
STAY FREE! 37 ISSUE NO. 23

preserving our environment or our
health are cheaper and better than
others, so can’t cost-benefit analysis
help with that?
HEINZERLING: It doesn’t necessarily
help with that. What might help
is setting a goal and then thinking
about creative ways to get to that
goal most cheaply. In some contexts,
that might mean labeling a product
rather than banning or restricting
it. In other cases, when you’re talking
about pollution, it might mean
allowing emissions trading in that
pollutant rather than requiring a
particular control technology.
ACKERMAN: From the beginning
of modern environmental regulation
in the early 1970s right to the
present, there has been continuous
discussion about the best, most innovative
ways to regulate—a search
for cheaper control technologies,
simpler forms of record keeping
and so on. I’m not convinced that
cost-benefit analysis does anything
to accelerate that process. The case
for cost-benefit calculations so often
depends on a strange rewriting
of the past, as if the EPA was once
run by Stalinist bureaucrats who
delighted in capriciously spending
money, and so now we have to
bring in economic analysis to undo
the damage. If you were alive then,
or if you’ve read about the period,
you know that this legendary era
of extravagance never happened.
So cost-benefit analysis is presented
as solving a desperate problem that
never actually occurred.
HEINZERLING: The EPA in particular
has accomplished a lot over the
years. But it has gotten even smarter
and more flexible—
STAY FREE!: Huh? You think the
EPA has gotten smarter under the
Bush administration?!
HEINZERLING: Oh, no, they haven’t
done much of anything under Bush.
But if you go through the Clinton
years, there are a lot of ways in
which they’ve gotten more flexible
and have been very attentive
to critiques; so I just find it ironic
that they’re one of the most vilified
agencies.
STAY FREE!: How do you respond
to economists who argue that costbenefit
analysis helps in making difficult
decisions? If closing off a particular
waterway is going to harm a
couple of types of fish but will protect
a couple of other species, or it
will devastate the livelihood of one
community but not another, can’t
cost-benefit analysis help with making
the best choice?
ACKERMAN: Making difficult decisions
is what government and
the courts have always done, and
there’s no evidence that they have
failed for lack of a magical mathematical
formula.
HEINZERLING: One of the subtle
things that’s also lost when you
decide things according to this formula
is any sense of loss or tragedy.
Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher
at the University of Chicago, has
pointed out that if you reduce everything
to numbers you can easily
think nobody was hurt by a regulation.
It may be, in some cases, that
you can’t please everybody and at
the end of the day somebody is hurt,
but cost-benefit analysis completely
papers over that fact. Sometimes in
human situations when you realize
that people are being hurt you can
actually come up with a solution
that you wouldn’t have thought
of if you were pretending that you
were just trading money around.
STAY FREE!: So do you think costbenefit
analysis is going to be
around for a while?
HEINZERLING: Yes, unfortunately.
There are too many people who
make their living off of it [laughs].
There are too many think tanks. It’s
a huge industry. g
Noah Scalin
IS HUMANITY GETTING CHEAPER?
MID-1970s 2003
The estimated value of a human life
isn’t what it used to be. Cost-benefit
analysts used to price the average life at
around $6.1 million, but recent studies
have found much lower values, around
$2 to $4 million. Why is the market value
of human life declining? The numbers
are based largely on workplace
data. Male blue-collar workers—who
fill virtually all the high-risk jobs—have
faced worsening job opportunities since
the 1970s. If people are desperate for
work, employers do not have to pay as
much to attract them to dangerous jobs.
(The price of risking one’s life, in other
words, is lower.) Moreover, Latino workers,
whose numbers have grown rapidly,
are filling some of the riskiest jobs; and
Hispanics are less likely to seek higher
pay for more dangerous work because
of immigration status and language
barriers. On a brighter note, dangerous
workplace conditions have improved,
leading to fewer worker deaths.
STAY FREE! 38 ISSUE NO. 23

activist corner with helen belcap
THIS WEEK: THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF
SETTING YOURSELF ON FIRE
The many advocates of costbenefit
analysis argue that it
helps people make all sorts
of decisions, so we at Stay
Free! thought we’d try it ourselves.
In conjunction with
this issue of the magazine, we
considered launching a media
project to improve the plight
of Wal-Mart workers. Liza
Featherstone discusses some
of the actions already underway
(page 14): class-action
lawsuits, for instance, and
unionizing. However, since
these options are problematic
for one reason or another, we
thought of a more innovative
one: setting oneself on fire.
Long popular among Asia’s
monks as a means of expressing
dissent, setting oneself on
fire has never caught on in the
United States. Averse to pain,
American protesters choose
“marches” or “voting” without
ever evaluating the merits of
self-immolation. But with the
rise of cost-benefit analysis,
this underdog media strategy
may finally get its due.
COSTS
Human life: $6,100,000 1
Clothing losses: $53.92 2
Gasoline (1 gallon): $1.85 3
Liter of Jack Daniels: $17
Match: $.01
TOTALS
$6,100,072.78
BENEFITS
Media attention to cause
through repeated airings of
burning on news networks, lead
stories on all local news outlets,
circulation via blogs and email:
$8,544,023. 4
Savings from free cremation:
$778 5
$8,544,801.00
BEST
CHOICE!
I should point out, however,
that I would not make a very
good martyr myself (too camera
shy).
1 As calculated in the EPA report The Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act, 1970-
1990, October 1997; via Ackerman and Heinzerling, Priceless (New Press, 2004),
p. 61-62.
2 Wal-Mart apparel at everyday low prices
3 Department of Energy, 9/8/2004
4 Based on an estimated $100,010 per minute in equivalent advertising time; at 3.5
minutes average per national cable channel, or (3.5 x 215) 1023.344 / 347 x 3.
5 Metropolitan Funeral Service Inc., New York, NY
STAY FREE! 39 ISSUE NO. 23

VEHICLE FOR COMPARISON
Feature > by Chris Boznos
“E. coli…moves its whole length in two
nanoseconds. If it were the size of a Volkswagen,
it would be going four times the speed of light.” 51
The VW Bug, with its nearly immutable
design, has been driven all over the world
and all over the movies for the better part
of a century. You’d be hard-pressed to find
someone who couldn’t pick its shape out of a lineup
or, more realistically, a weedy Southern California
backyard. On the web, phrases describing objects
as about the size of a Volkswagen have achieved
nearly pornographic levels of popularity. 52 Of
course, it’s not the only product used as a reference
for scale—comparisons with Buicks 53 and 747s are
popular, too. Big Macs make a showing. None of
them, however, can compete with the sheer number
or variety 54 of comparisons made to the VW. 55 The
Bug is the standard. It is the measure of things. It
is the ruler itself.
Science writers make the most use of the
vehicle, deeming everything in or from space,
made or conceived by man or God to be about the
size of a Volkswagen. 56 The VW-size Mars Global
Surveyor looks down at the planet with cameras
capable of resolving VW-size objects 57 such as the
STAY FREE! 40 ISSUE NO. 23
“nearly” VW-size Spirit and Opportunity, 58 which,
I should note, captured images of VW-size rocks 59
in their travels. For a time, you could experience
the thrill of the VW-size International Space
Station capsule 60 as projected by the advanced
VW-size IMAX projector. 61
As seen in the table to the right, writers
on every topic compare their subject to the
Volkswagen. 62 I even get the impression that some
authors feel the examination of a subject would
be incomplete without a Bug comparison, even
when that reference seems inappropriate. 63 This
phenomenon manifests itself most plainly when a
writer, struggling with an object impossibly out of
line with the VW’s scale, makes do by referring to
only a portion of the vehicle, turning the Bug into
a divisible unit of measure. You probably already
know that a manatee is about half the size of a
VW, 64 but did you know that a mounted bison head
is also that size? 65 Well, it is. Find those references
helpful? All right, but is “half the size of a VW
glove box” really a known quantity? 66 Is “the size

Defined on the internet as
“about the size of a Volkswagen”
of a VW bucket seat” 67 especially useful,
as opposed to some other bucket seat?
Other writers prefer to switch to the
weight of their subject in the pursuit of
some equilibrium with the Bug: “The USS
Wisconsin was one of four ships having huge
16-inch guns, large enough to launch a shell the
weight of a VW Beetle 23 miles!” 68 But these weight
comparisons prove less common, presumably
because a limited number of people can heft the
weight of a VW in their head, as you would,
say, a bowling ball. Moreover, the advantages of
the vehicle’s unchanging design no longer apply,
because the Volkswagen’s weight is contingent on
payload and fuel status.
So what does all this mean? Should we
attribute the extraordinarily persistent desire
to describe objects in VW-terms solely to the
popularity of the vehicle? Is it the snowballing
popularity of the metaphor itself? Is it simply
lazy writing? Or is something more going on?
Maybe we’re missing a unit of measure. Maybe
the volume in question is particularly useful for
description and the VW filled a void? 69 If so, why
not take what has already become a de facto
standard of measurement and bestow upon it the
status of a formal scientific unit, the Vw? 70 After
all, it’s no less arbitrary than our current measures,
both metric and English, and has already proven
to be enormously relatable. Besides, if we do need
a volume unit the size of a VW, why not use the
friendly Bug as the standard—unless, of course,
you would prefer to refer to “a couple of mounted
bison heads.” g
Extinct giant armadillos with spiked, clublike defensive tails 1 • A
target that you can hit from 20 feet even if you can’t hit “beans” 2
A 720-pound pig 3 • 4,000 pounds of concrete 4 • Jason, the 2,200-
pound diving robot 5 • Nomad, a robot designed for identifying
meteorites in the Antarctic 6 • The future state of an 800-pound
award winning dairy goat 7 • The “best general description” of a
Japanese maple, with the caveat that it will reach that description
“but slowly” 8 • Leatherback turtles once considered to be sea monsters
9 • An eerie and gargantuan grouper 10 • The projection of a
dime with a new document reader 11 • Fictional giant, enormous,
and loathsome spiders 12 • Fictional, and presumably radioactive,
giant ’70s sci-fi tarantulas 13 • A brachiosaurus’s heart 14 • A blue
whale’s heart 15 • A termite with which man must do battle in his
nightmare 16 • A red balloon on which a woman must stand in her
dream 17 • The death wish on the shoulder of a fictional and exiled
yakuza boss 18 • The root ball of an oak tree wedged against the
roof of Wayne and Norma Murry’s Texarkana home 19 The cookingoil-disposal
unit of the restaurant responsible for inventing the
fried pickle chip 20 • A “humming blue box” used for treatment
of human waste at oil-drilling sites 21 • A computer disk drive circa
1968 22 • A CAD workstation circa 1979 23 • Loudspeakers placed at
a depth of 200 feet and dangerous to marine life 24 Loudspeakers
playing the Animal House soundtrack 25 • A “floppy Afro wig”
worn in conjunction with “combat boots” and a “plaid granny
dress” by singer Macy Gray 26 • Potentially dangerous de-orbiting
Iridium satellites 27 • A knoll “justifying the money spent on a full
suspension” mountain bike 28 • Artichoke-like treetops found on
“an extinct African volcano” 29 • A lava rock within the tide pools of
Kahumoku (not found on visitor guides) 30 • A glacierlike mound
of methane hydrates surrounded by clam beds 31 Walruses that
require 54 kilograms of clams each day 32 • The lunar excursion
module 33 • A boil sprouting on your back giving rise to your dermatologist’s
concern 34 • The mole on Lincoln’s Mount Rushmore
face, as described by Lincoln himself in a one-man-play about the
president 35 • The tempting steak that “your friend wolfs down”
even though she’s 15 pounds lighter and a dress size smaller 36 • A
pile of “blood-smeared dog corpses…chests splayed open, hearts
gone” 37 • “Serious” body builders 38 • What the “great gods of
the free market have declared” a one-bedroom priced at a “mere
two grand” should be 39 • The bentwood lobster traps used by
Algonquin Indians that, by design, allow younger lobsters to escape
40 • The flash produced by a certain type of firework that is
“completely legal” if created for religious or ethnic purposes and
not sold 41 • The world’s largest conventional bomb, the “daisy
cutter” 42 • The Galileo probe 43 • The deadly Audrey II from the
musical Little Shop of Horrors 44 • A “space mollusk” 45 • The upcoming
Mars Science Laboratory 46 • Many of the thousands of
unplotted minor planets in our solar system capable of causing
“considerable damage” to the Earth on impact 47 • A proposed meteorite
prior to exploding above northwest Indiana that created
a debris field 80 miles long 48 • Debris from the Mir space station 49
Debris from the shattered shuttle Columbia that fishermen saw
splash into the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas-Louisiana
border 50
STAY FREE! 41 ISSUE NO. 23

Notes:
1. www.utc.edu/Faculty/Timothy-Gaudin/gaudin_educ_resint.html
2. groups.google.com/groups?q=%22size+of+a+volkswagen%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-
8&oe=UTF-8&selm=9am50g%24763%241%40xring.cs.umd.edu&rnum=6
3. www.abqjournal.com/venue/personalities/99276trends10-19-03.htm
4. A mere 400 pounds of concrete is about the size of a desk chair. www.eternalreefs.
com/intown702.htm
5. www.jhu.edu/~gazette/julsep97/aug1897/robots.html
6. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/609905.stm
7. The goat’s name is Chester. www.hsus.org/ace/19652
8. www.worldplants.com/laceleaf.htm
9. www.spaceforspecies.ca/track_real_species/leatherback_turtle/about/
10. www.ms-starship.com/journal/mar00/23.htm
11. www.piercelaw.edu/courtroom.htm
12. www.gdm93.dial.pipex.com/spiders.htm
13. www.cheftalk.com/content/display.cfm?articleid=3&type=article
14. www.cami.jccbi.gov/AAM-400A/FASMB/HOP/health.htm
15. A blue whale’s tongue is, by the way, about the size and weight of a full-grown African
Elephant. can-do.com/uci/ssi2000/mammalsinternet/tsld002.htm. Also see endnote 63.
16. www.tptermite.com/bugzilla_2.htm
17. www.hominoid.org/skr100702.htm
18. www.time.com/time/asia/features/heroes/takeshi.html
19. www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2000/wice1229.htm
20. www.louisvillehotbytes.com/genny.shtml
21. www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/peru0803/nf1.html
22. www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4324
23. According to the Lumagraph website, the CAD workstation in question was also “almost
as noisy” as a VW. www.lumagraph.net/about.htm
24. www.marineconnection.org/campaigns/sonar_sonar.html
25. www.okanagansun.org/menu6.shtml
26. www.startribune.com/stories/1377/4319777.html
27. www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/article.cfm?Id=3
28. www.mtbmind.com/scott.htm
29. gorp.away.com/gorp/activity/climb/africa_berger2.htm
30. www.kahumoku.com/mccabe.htm
31. www.geotimes.org/dec02/NN_hydrates.html
32. www.calacademy.org/calwild/2002fall/stories/whiskers.html
33. arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/getrecord/oai_dc/1974343677/oai:inf.cs.cmu.edu:
pub/161/318667
34. starbulletin.com/2003/10/19/features/memminger.html
35. reviewplays.com/abe_lincoln.htm
36. www.honoluluclub.com/lifedesigns.php?ID=3
37. Here the Volkswagen is used to refer to a sum total of objects. Compare with notes 64
and 65. avar.org/alted/dadl.html
38. www.donramon.net/articles/articles_level2_086.htm
39. www.tenant.net/Alerts/Guide/press/nyt/bh061397.html
40. www.sx2.com/choices12.html
41. www.smithnetny.com/e-adboard/messages/385.htm
42. www.nd.edu/~techrev/Archive/Spring2002/a8.html
43. www.engin.umich.edu/alumni/engineer/00SS/jupiter.html
44. www.adirondacktravel.com/mtco/archive/2002.html
45. From the sci-fi book, Forge of the Elders:
www.free-market.net/features/bookofthemonth/fboty2000.html
46. www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040324-022701-3533r
47. www.atscope.com.au/astrometry.html
48. www.nwitimes.com/articles/2003/03/28/news/region_and_state/dd7b4e9acdf5e04c862
56cf70013e895.txt
49. www.keynews.org/archives/a_miralpha.htm
50. www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/state/7565345.htm
51. www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/mark.guzdial/squeak/oopsla.html
52. A Google search turns up over 3,000 references to objects the size of a VW or Volkswagen.
Interestingly, these are not always references to the ubiquitous Bug, but include comparisons
with the far less common Rabbit, VW Bus, and Golf. Consider if there is something
special about the Volkswagen brand itself. Are a disproportionate number of writer types
familiar with or fond of Volkswagens? One could argue that, for at least the past 30 years,
individuals (from the cultures responsible for disseminating the VW metaphor) driving VWs
have been the more artistic or free-spirited of their societies, and so in theory more likely to
write creatively. Moreover, references to VW-size spliffs and loudspeakers may support the
notion that a majority of VW comparers are from a liberal subculture. The author found no
references to “tax cuts half the size of a Volkswagen” or “VW-size moral traditions upon
which the fabric of our culture depends” (Conservatives reading this: please insert theories
about liberal bias in the media here).
53. About 700 references.
54. Other objects and products of reference are limited in their comparative function. For
example, the Buick and the “football field” are only used to describe objects as large. In
contrast, writers use Volkswagens as a purely scientific frame of reference and to describe
objects as too small as well as too large.
55. Some of the most interesting VW size references involve a convergence of the
Volkswagen with one of these other popular objects of comparison. For example, an article
on Post-Gazette.com referring to a mulching machine includes this quote: “A tree trunk
the size of a Volkswagen can go through here and in 30 minutes, it’s 2-inch shred.” Also,
AccessAtlanta.com instructs that you should “[k]eep a look out for a Big Mac the size of
a Volkswagen Bug.”
56. My space aficionado friend asserts that many satellites and spacecraft probably share
the VW size because of the commonality of the delivery vehicle cargo bays (why the cargo
bays would be the size of a VW was not explained).
57. pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/Mars%20Global%20Surveyor.pdf
58. I should note that this reference is actually quite inaccurate—actual size of the rovers
being much closer to that of a golf cart. www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/2/soa/mars.htm
59. www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/science/space/06CNDMARS.html?ex=1078722000&en=93
db6b3f49ae7493&ei=5070
60. www.smv.org/news/RELS/smvnews.html
61. pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/Mars%20Global%20Surveyor.pdf
62. As the mass of material became clear, the author realized a proper examination of this
subject would require substantial research and that he might not be interested in doing
said research. Pretending that the popularity of the VW metaphor involved some nefarious
cover-up, the truth of which he must pursue as implicitly commissioned by the children of
the world, he was able to not only complete the article but daydream about two-fisted
interrogations of the conspirators, from which he derived mild pleasure.
63. Some subjects even appear to require it. With over 160 Google references to the size of
a blue whale’s heart being that of a Volkswagen, I think I would have to be either a genius
or a fool to attempt describing it any other way.
64. ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/sstans/81469/s06litint.html
65. www.sptimes.com/2003/03/02/Travel/Everything_under_the_.shtml
66. In reference to “showers on the old smokeboats:”
www.olgoat.com/substuff/dex159.htm
67. In reference to spoons found in an Italian restaurant: www.metroactive.com/papers/
metro/02.20.03/dining-0308.html
68. In other references to battleship guns, the distance the projectile travels differs but
the VW remains a constant: “Now decommissioned, the USS Wisconsin was one of four
ships having huge 16-inch guns, large enough to launch a shell the weight of a VW Beetle
24 miles.” www.shepherd-express.com/shepherd/20/50/columnists/gossip_net.html. Also,
“This Battleship has the impressive might of a cannon whose ability to pinpoint its 2,100 lb.
projectile, (the weight of a VW Bug automobile.), 21 miles.” members.tripod.com/~ButlerC/
NEBerkIndex/NAdamsIndex/SB600PeteBergeron/SB600.htm. Finally: “BB’s with their 9-16”
rifles capable of shooting a shell the weight of a VW 36 miles is some awesome firepower.”
www.clubcobra.com/t41263-15-2.html
69. Is it possible that human social or scientific development has been hamstrung in the
past because of the lack of such an appropriate volume unit? Philosophers suggest that
without the vocabulary to express an idea, individuals have a difficult time conceiving of
that idea. Technologically, the pace of human invention certainly has accelerated since the
Bug’s inception, in 1938.
70. Consider these hypotheticals: “Office space for rent! 7.5 Vws. Ample underground
parking available,” or “Raising the sunken cruise ship appeared an impossible task, it being
a full ½ KiloVw undersea—and a choppy sea at that.”
STAY FREE! 42 ISSUE NO. 23

Opinion > by Jack Silbert
JERSEY DUTY
Why hoopsters and hipsters shouldn’t abandon NJ for Brooklyn
WHEN THE NEW Jersey Nets announced the team’s sale and
eventual relocation to Brooklyn, community uproar ensued.
Not in New Jersey, mind you. There are only five or six actual
Nets fans in the Garden State. Yes, the team reached the
NBA Finals in two consecutive seasons, and nearly reached
the Finals this year. But they didn’t win, and in New Jersey,
we demand only the best. This isn’t Buffalo, after all.
Meanwhile, two rivers away, in Brooklyn, civic leaders
are griping about the construction of a new arena and
the subsequent havoc it would wreak on the local environs.
A larger issue looms, however—a compelling reason for the
Nets to remain in the Land of Sinatra, Springsteen, and Sopranos.
Simply stated, no one should ever move from New
Jersey to Brooklyn.
I readily admit to a Jersey-centic bias. I am a Hoboken
resident and have lived in New Jersey for two-thirds of my
35 years. For more than a decade, I’ve socialized with my
Generation X peers and their modern-day counterparts. I
don’t know what this Generation is called, but they all own
iPods. Some of us live in Brooklyn, others in Jersey City,
or Hoboken, or Astoria, and there are hushed rumors of
people actually dwelling in Washington Heights. But the
shared dream, whether admitted or not, is to live in Manhattan
proper. Walking to work! Stumbling home drunk, never
waiting interminably on a freezing or sweltering train platform
in the middle of the night! Manhattan, the shining city,
our own Valhalla.
The problem is, to be under 40 and to live alone in
Manhattan requires two words. One of them is trust and the
other is fund.
So, we take halfhearted pride in our far-flung communities.
Grimaldi’s has the best pizza! Maxwell’s has the best
concerts! You want spanakopita? You came to the right place,
buddy. Plus, the rent is low and it only takes us 15 minutes to
get to work. Okay, it’s 45 minutes, but we’re fine with that.
But Brooklyn had to go and sour the deal. They somehow
won the Hipness Wars. Park Slope! Williamsburg!
Greenpoint! Neighborhood doesn’t have a name? We’ll make
one up! Come to the trendy new gallery/coffee shop/club/
boutique! It’s next to the old-world bakery with an Eastern
European name that we can’t pronounce. Later, come to the
house party. It’s on that block you didn’t think was very safe
eight months ago. Relax! It’s safe now.
And why is this more hip than New Jersey? Three reasons
come to mind. Brooklyn is in New York State, so there’s
hipness by association. Also, it’s on the MTA subway system,
so there’s one less train card to worry about. Lastly,
a cab ride home from Manhattan to Brooklyn is relatively
inexpensive. To take a taxi an equal distance across the Hudson
River, you need to apply for a small-business loan.
Never mind that Brooklyn’s own Robert Lanham, author
of The Hipster Handbook (Anchor Books), was contacted
by the venerable New York Times for an article on Jersey
City’s newfound hipness (March 30, 2003). The article said
that Lanham “thinks Jersey City has potential now that Williamsburg
has nearly reached hipness senescence.” (That’s a
very hip New York Times word, by the way. I looked it up,
and it means “being old.”) But you probably never read that
article, and why? It appeared only in the paper’s New Jersey
section. Foiled again! Though I suppose you can easily question
Lanham’s credibility. I saw his book in an airport bookstore’s
humor section, and how painfully unhip is that?
Brooklyn has plenty more going for it, don’t get me
wrong. I have two fond memories of the borough from my
own childhood. I vividly recall that it was the “fourth largest
city in America” according to a sign shown in the opening
credits of Welcome Back, Kotter. (That title seems to have
passed to Houston, a city that already has an NBA team.)
And at a bar mitzvah, my dad’s side of the family was described
by the DJ as hailing from “Brooklyn, where the girls
are good-lookin’.” So if you’re moving to the greater New
York metropolitan area, and you pick Brooklyn, more power
to you. No argument here.
And if you live in New Jersey, and really want to leave,
move to Manhattan. That makes sense. I see your logic and
I applaud it. But please, if you must turn your back on New
Jersey, do not move to Brooklyn. Three of my good friends
have done exactly that, and a fourth is planning to do so.
Why am I so adamant? New Jersey and Brooklyn are,
simply put, identical. They might as well be merged. You
want charming neighborhoods? Both places have them. Seaside
attractions? Gentrified, pseudo-cool enclaves? Nearby
urban blight? Loud, large men with absurd, outdated accents?
Lengthy commutes on unreliable trains? Either region
will suit you.
So, Nets, stay put. Learn a lesson from the Dodgers.
Brooklyn seemed hip to them too. And then they heard
about Los Angeles. g
STAY FREE! 43 ISSUE NO. 23

The Local Scene > by Tim Harrod
THE MOUSE THAT WHORED
Chuck E. Cheese has hung his hat in Brooklyn, but is it the borough’s
newest fun spot or the latest scar of gentrification?
As the stadium-shaped
brick-and-glass edifice
gradually rose
at the Flatbush/Atlantic intersection,
local residents
hoped for exciting and
convenient new shopping
opportunities, even as we
bemoaned gentrification.
But when the Chuck E. Cheese logo first
peeked from a third-story window, one
thought came to my mind: Isn’t Chuck
more of a Midwest thing? That thought
was closely followed by a second: Am I
an elitist for thinking that?
Well, maybe. But think about it.
What evokes Brooklyn more than a
small, family-owned pizzeria? Just a
few blocks up Flatbush from the newlyconstructed
Atlantic Terminal, Antonio’s—like
any number of local Italian
pizzerias—has been serving up slices for
over 50 years, its handcrafted neon sign
a monument to longevity. The chain pizzerias
like Pizza Hut and Sbarro are few
and far-between for such a populated
area; it’s as though they have the decorum
to lay low in one of the world’s pizza
capitals. On the other hand, if chain
pizza in Brooklyn is inevitable, Chuck
may be the one chain with the spunk
and creativity to pull it off.
Chuck E. Cheese has the same father
as the video games he provides: Nolan
Bushnell. Bushnell, who invented Pong
in the early 1970s and went on to found
Atari, parlayed some of his fortune into
an ambitious one-spot family fun emporium
offering pizza,
a game arcade, and
an automated floorshow.
Passed over by
Disney as a younger
man, he channeled
his disappointment
into creating his own
mouse mascot to
serve as figurehead.
The early Chucks, then called “Pizza
Time Theater,” were groovy places,
filled to the rafters with singing robots, a
revolving cast of characters with a dash
of sly humor. (Four dogs with Liverpool
accents were called “The Beagles”; a
lion in a gold jumpsuit was “The King.”)
The overall experience was like seeing
The Muppet Show live. Chuck himself
was more Kermit than Mickey, a vestand-derby-wearing
vaudevillian with an
actual personality. The chain borrowed
as much from Depression-era Coney Island
as from Disney. Chuck even had a
trace of a Brooklyn accent. Maybe it’s
only fitting that he set up shop on Flatbush.
Could Chuck E. be the large corporation
that breaks the mold and is actually
pretty good for the community?
No, of course it couldn’t. Chuck has
grown to 500 locations
across North America,
and in the new millennium
you don’t get that
big without thorough
experience in cost-cutting
and, all too often,
customer-soaking.
The first noticeable example of bottom-line
economizing is the severely
stripped-down stage area. In the entire
restaurant (which the Park Slope Courier
described as the largest in existence),
there is a grand total of one robot—of
Chuck E. Cheese himself—and over the
years he’s apparently been focus-grouped
down to a bland “big kid” archetype
wearing a baseball cap and jersey. Any
character traits that might set him apart
from the herd of vacuous pop-cultural
doofuses have been squeezed and sifted
out by the demeaning mass-marketing
instinct that kids won’t accept anything
even remotely unfamiliar or challenging.
In a bizarre quirk of design, Chuck
appears to be wearing breezy summer
shorts made from his own fur, and this
is more attention-grabbing than anything
coming out of his mouth.
The remaining show space is
rounded out by large TV screens showing
music videos of Chuck and his supporting
cast, now performed by actors
in suits. Between songs, the Chuckbot
engages in shtick (mostly jokes of the
Laffy Taffy variety) with his pre-taped
pals, who now appear in puppet form.
There’s Jasper T. Jowls, a redneck
dog stealing his voice
from Green Acres’ Pat
Butram; Pasqually, a
mustachioed pizza chef
with a borderline-offensive
Italian accent and
whose association with
video games dooms
STAY FREE! 44 ISSUE NO. 23

Photos by Claire Houston, with the exception of bottom right, by Chuck E. Cheese
him to be confused with
Mario; and some goddamned
bird.
There’s an irony
here: Bushnell’s first great
brainchild, Pong, revolutionized
coin-op gaming
partly because a video
screen allows far more gaming possibilities
than a pinball table. But another
advantage, perhaps unintended by Bushnell,
made it a billion-dollar industry:
video consoles drastically cut down on
the number of moving parts, reducing
mass-production and maintenance to
grunt work. The screen, the motherboard,
and the controls are the only
parts that might need to be replaced over
the life of the machine.
Many pinball aficionados sneered at
video games as they started to displace
vintage pinball at their local game halls.
The tactile jitteriness of real metal and
rubber colliding was far preferable to
the synthesized beeps and buzzes of the
new bastard child, and the specialized
skill of pinball repair made it a nobler
thing, a subculture unto itself. To this
older generation of gamers, it was like
seeing custom Les Paul guitars gradually
replaced by Casio keyboards.
Now, years after Bushnell sold
Chuck E. Cheese and
moved on, his original
innovation has
returned to compromise
his second. Replacing
a video screen
is much easier than
servicing a Pasqually
automaton, and you
can tell one of the
hourly-wage kids to
do it rather than fly
in a specially trained
technician. But this
robs Chuck’s place
of its magic; we all
have video screens in
our homes. Making a
special trip to watch
TV doesn’t have the
same exciting ring as going to see the
singing robot show—in fact it’s rather
depressing. (But smart business: I’m sure
customers enthralled by an exciting show
spend less on games.) The crowning insult
comes between the mixed-media performances:
As a curtain conceals Chuck,
A photo of the author, courtesy
of Chuck E. Cheese
STAY FREE! 45 ISSUE NO. 23
the video screens show
humanoid puppets
performing threadbare
skits in praise of Hi-C
Sour Blast fruit drink.
In other words, paying
customers are subjected
to commercials.
I guess it’s supposed to be a mitigating
factor that Chuck himself doesn’t endorse
products.
If the Chuck management had invested
more in the floor show, it would
help offset Chuck’s other major sin: mediocre
pizza at exorbitant prices. A thick
Sicilian-style crust is drizzled stingily with
tomato sauce and lightly sprinkled with
cheese—it may very well represent the legal
minimum that one can put on bread
and still advertise it as
pizza. Slices are not available;
the closest menu
item is an individual-size
pie at roughly the same
size—but triple the cost—
of a slice at Antonio’s.
The game room is
a mixed bag. On the plus side, there’s
Centipede, Qix, and Missile Command
for fans of golden-age arcade games, and
a big selling point in the chain’s ads is
that all games cost a single token—even
the giant sit-inside,
18-wheeler racing
game. But by far the
most floor space is reserved
for the carnivalstyle,
ticket-awarding
games—Skee-Ball and
its cousins. The chain
has ingeniously placed
three stages between
cash and prizes to
help cloud the amount
of money dropped to
obtain that Spider-
Man sticker. Cash is
exchanged for sheetmetal
tokens, then converted
into tickets at a
rate dependent on the
customer’s skill. These
tickets are then exchanged for prizes at
predictably confiscatory rates. In the Atlantic
Center restaurant, a new intermediary
step saves precious employee manhours
that were once spent weighing
bowls of tickets: big winners can now
feed their pasteboard strips into a mechanical,
ticket-eating monster, which
dispenses a paper chit bearing the number
of tickets offered. One can view this
with admiration (a clever, efficient way to
give the customer added fun) or cynicism
(making the kids do the work).
Some of the ticket games recall
the kinetic, contraptional quality that’s
missing from the floorshow. There’s a
charmingly retro mechanical baseball
game where tiny sheet-metal men run
the bases, and a wacky game of slapping
plastic eggs onto a conveyor belt. But
the larger and more complex a game is,
the stingier it seems to be with the ticket
payout. Skee-Ball may offer the lowest
payout in the house; to make things
worse, the whole restaurant may see you
playing it on a video screen.
The less skill a game
requires, the closer it
comes to a form of gambling,
and there’s a genre
of ticket game that not
only devours tokens but
puts the kid’s winnings
largely in fate’s hands: the
token pusher. The player drops in tokens
in hope of pushing other tokens,
which push other tokens, which eventually
plunge into the payout chute. One
must play these to understand the appeal
of ripe, juicy overhangs of tokens
ready to collapse if only nudged another
millimeter. These games devour tokens
at roughly one every ten seconds and
seem especially cruel. Worse, the player
doesn’t retrieve the tokens from the bottom
but receives the equivalent in tickets
in a baffling standard of double forms of
fiat currency.
As I cruised the game room, two
kids who had apparently run out of tokens
panhandled me. A third was eager
to operate the shift stick for me on the
18-wheeler game. (I guess he wasn’t spellbound
by the one-robot show, either.)
On the wall farthest from the stage,
there’s a single pinball machine: the new
and hi-tech “Simpsons Pinball Party,”
loaded with moving plastic props and
digitized character voices. It’s the only reminder
in the restaurant that Pong didn’t
actually kill pinball but pushed it to adapt
in order to compete. And that motivation
is what’s missing from Chuck’s new
world order. Fun-seeking families would
probably reject Chuck for nobler chains
that cut fewer costs, if there were any.
continued on page 63

Travelogue > by Mikki Halpin
IT’S NO MOON RIVER
Stay Free! takes a canoe trip down the Gowanus Canal,
Brooklyn’s own little backyard sewer
The first time I canoed down the Gowanus Canal, all I
could think about was murder. I was in the back of a
double canoe, and the potential victim, my friend Marisa,
was seated in front, happily ignorant of the calculations I was
making about tides and the movement of corpses in water,
as she exclaimed about horseshoe crab sightings and the odd
feeling of seeing gentrification’s backside.
The Gowanus Canal was built in 1848, originally to drain
the marshlands of South Brooklyn, and until the mid 1940s
it supported a thriving maritime economy based on goods
ranging from concrete to local oysters. When trucking took
over as a mode of transportation, industry left the area and
gentrification set in across most of it. Today, the canal winds
through neighborhoods of million dollar brownstones in
Carroll Gardens, past sites of the newly built Lowe’s and Home
Depot stores in the still-struggling Gowanus neighborhood,
until it finally empties out into the Gowanus Bay and New
York Harbor.
Travelling the canal by canoe is a wonderful way to get
a glimpse of local history, while also getting whiffs of the
pollution crisis affecting the health of the waterway and its
inhabitants. (One local fish, the tom cod, has so adapted to
its current environment that it will die when placed in water
that is free of PCBs.) Our trip was facilitated by the Gowanus
Dredgers Canoe Club, which runs free canoe trips, bike tours,
and an education program. As the name implies, the club also
lobbies for a government clean-up of the canal.
Despite its Olympic status, canoeing in still waters
requires few skills—the ability to push small amounts of liquid
backwards with a piece of wood will propel you, eventually if
inefficiently. In a double canoe, the rear paddler is in charge of
steering. All that is asked of the front paddler is to match the
stroke of the rear paddler, and to switch sides when asked. If
the front paddler attempts to help steer, the canoe will not make
the required turn, or it will veer too sharply, and occasionally
spin all the way around. As a result of Marisa’s enthusiasm and
desire to steer, I spent much of our trip cursing her silently.
Our guide for the trip was Owen Foote, a local architect
and the most visible member of the club. Calling Owen a canal
enthusiast is quite an understatement. He knows the local
wildlife, and why horseshoe crabs are important for medical
research. He knows that Lowe’s and Home Depot were both
bound by the city to put in waterfront walkways, that he rarely
sees anyone on the Lowe’s walkway, and that the Home Depot
one hasn’t been built yet. He knows when local businesses have
been dumping illegally, and what that will do to hinder the
canal’s slow return to health.
Two things made the Gowanus sick: pollution and the
BQE. The freeway meant the advent of a trucking economy, and
signaled the end of the Gowanus as a commercial waterway. The
pollution is a more complicated story. In the canal’s maritime
heyday local neighborhoods grew and more and more waste
was piped into the canal throughout the late 1800s and into
the mid 1900s. A flushing tunnel, built in 1911, temporarily
alleviated the problem until it was abandoned in 1961. The
flushing station, located at Butler Street, brings water from the
Buttermilk Channel (the channel that separates Brooklyn from
Governor’s Island) and sends it through the canal, theoretically
swooshing the PCBs, asbestos, raw sewage, garbage, and other
bad things out to sea. Since the station’s reactivation in 1999,
the canal is “flushed” six times per day, but this process doesn’t
remove the layers of toxic sediment that lie at the bottom.
Other bits of history are more fun. Turning into the First
Street Basin, and paddling towards Third Avenue, we are within
spitting distance of the outfield of Washington Park, the home
of the Brooklyn Superbas, later known as the Trolley Dodgers
and then, of course, the Brooklyn Dodgers. In addition to the
First Street Basin, there are basins at 4 th , 6 th , 7 th , and 11 th Streets.
The basins, originally built for drainage, are currently home to
a variety of items and activities. In the Third Street Basin, we
canoed in and around a former dry dock, now in ruins. Another
shows signs of drug deals—graffitti, trash, hypodermics.
The Sixth Street Basin holds a surprise: a sort of miniresort
built along the side of what appears to be a trucking
company. There’s a yacht and a ski-doo tied up at the floating
dock, and a gazebo and lights up on land. There are children’s
toys scattered around. It looks like something you’d see in Bay
Shore as you ferry out to Fire Island, not here in the middle
of Brooklyn. No one seems to know who the owner of the
resort is, only that the property owner’s name is “Norm.” Even
Owen can’t help me out on this one, and I must admit going on
several subsequent canoe trips solely to boggle at this set up.
In one sense, the yacht is a sign of hope. Someone believes
in the Gowanus enough to build a little weekend getaway right
on it. Someone, apparently, even lets his or her children play
on or near the water. So many parts of New York’s waterfront
are pretty but hermetically sealed against the rivers—the muchlauded
Hudson River Park along the Manhattan’s west side
Edward Sudentas, Wired New York
STAY FREE! 46 ISSUE NO. 23

practically screams “look, but don’t touch”—that it’s refreshing
to see any kind of life on the water. But it’s also depressing. I
suddenly see a vista of rich yachters motoring up and down the
canal, dressed in white and waving to their other millionaire
friends as they head to a members-only clubhouse in Red Hook
for drinks, dahling.
Right now, the canal faces a variety of futures. If it
continues to heal and has environmentally sensitive dredging,
and if dumping laws are enforced, it has the potential to be
a viable habitat for all kinds of wildlife and marine life. If
green manufacturing and other industries are encouraged, it
could bring much-needed jobs to the area. If Owen and other
waterfront groups have their way, it could become a place
where the public has access to and stewardship of the water.
If Barbara Corcoran gets in on the act, we’ll be seeing ads for
waterfront properties in Carroll Gardens in the “luxury real
estate” pages of the New York Times Magazine.
I’m pondering all this as the trip comes to an end and we
pull the canoes up at the 2 nd Street put-in. Owen and Marisa
have discovered some common acquaintances and interests and
are chatting merrily. I am proud of myself for not killing either
of them, really. g
To book a canoe trip or learn more about the Gowanus Canal,
visit www.waterfrontmuseum.org/dredgers/home.html.
(c)1999 www.gowanuscanal.org
STAY FREE! 47 ISSUE NO. 23

AMY BALKIN: So why don’t you introduce yourselves?
MANOLO MORAGON: I’m Manolo Moragon, M-a-n-o-l-o.
M-o-r-a-g-o-n. He’s Christopher McGrath.
CHRIS McGRATH: C-h-r-i-s-t-o-p-h-e-r M-c-G-r-a-t-h.
MORAGON: About six years ago, when I was in college, I
worked at a place called Berwick Company. So did Chris. It
was owned by a division of Flavor Companies. They made
flavors for industrial purposes, vanillas, and color applications.
We got the job because my mom was a secretary. She
started off as a secretary but ended up running the place.
Kind of fluky how we all sort of fell into the flavor.
JAMES HARBISON: You had no ambitions of being a flavor
tester?
MORAGON: No, it’s just a job.
MORAGON: Well, we’d make a flavor that was so strong, it
wouldn’t even taste like blueberry. If you dropped a couple
drops in a big vat of whatever, you’d make it taste like blueberry.
McGRATH: You know, it’s a concentrate.
HARBISON: So did you know whether it was right just by
smelling it?
McGRATH: We went mainly by the formulas.
MORAGON: Yeah, it was like cooking.
McGRATH: If you do the steps wrong, you screw it up.
MORAGON: Either it would be cloudy, or there would be
little crystals forming in it or something.
Former factory workers discuss the
mysteries of flavor science. Interview
by Amy Balkin and James Harbison,
from Lackluster (issue #1).
HARBISON: Well, once a flavor tester, always a flavor tester. I
mean, do you pick up a Dorito and think, “Blue No. 7”?
MORAGON: No. We didn’t deal with food. We didn’t even
taste things.
McGRATH: We’d get formulas. The formulas would either
be faxed or Xeroxed to us by one of our affiliates, Globe
Extracts, and I guess before that Andy Berwick was a chemist.
Berwick eventually sold the company to Knudsen and
they bought Globe. Knudsen makes milk, yogurts, and they
have flavors, which makes sense. We would make the stuff in
the bottom of the yogurt that makes it taste like blueberry.
But it’s not like you dip your finger in it and “Mmmm! Blueberry!”
BALKIN: It wouldn’t taste like blueberries until you added it
to yogurt?
McGRATH: So we’d have to pour it out and start over.
MORAGON: It was like we were doing chemistry without
actually doing all the math.
HARBISON: Sounds like the kind of job that might inspire
some experimentation.
McGRATH: Well, but we’ve never been like “Oh, instead of
two, let’s take 16 ounces of blueberry oil and use half as
much propylene glycol as we should use.” I mean, you never
do that to the actual product. And we actually never did it as
tests because we didn’t want to waste it.
MORAGON: If you look at deodorant, you’ll see one of the
main ingredients is propylene glycol. We’ve added so much
of that in so many things, you wouldn’t believe!
BALKIN: What is it?
STAY FREE! 48 ISSUE NO. 23

MORAGON: It’s like a clear petroleum-based product you can
add to food products, or shampoo—look at your shampoo.
BALKIN: It’s a base?
McGRATH: Yeah, it’s a base, like a neutral base.
MORAGON: If you stuck your hand in it, it gets warm like
those sex oils and stuff, ’cept it would taste like cinnamon if
we added a little cinnamon flavor to it.
HARBISON: Did it come in huge drums?
MORAGON: Fifty-five gallon drums. With forklifts and huge
tanks and stuff.
McGRATH: Propylene wasn’t super expensive, not compared
to the oils or certain powders.
BALKIN: I was wondering about that, about getting injured.
McGRATH: There was spearmint oil, which smelt really good,
but don’t touch it. Don’t get it on your hands.
BALKIN: What happens if you get spearmint oil on your
hands?
McGRATH: Uh, actually it wouldn’t burn so much. It would
be this sort of chill feeling.
MORAGON: You know that stuff they make pepper spray out
of? We had that in big jugs and you’d make barbecue flavor
out of that. I remember once I was washing a drum out and
it had some of that resin in there. It was stuck to the side
’cos it was really gooey. I sprayed some steamy water on it,
and—“shhhh”—maced myself.
McGRATH: It was corrosive.
MORAGON: At Chinese restaurants, you’ll notice things look
really bright orange. We used to make this stuff called egg
shade flavor, and we’d sell it to companies.
BALKIN: What’s it called?
McGRATH: Egg shade No. 2. It was like imitation color of an
egg yolk. Bright red color was big around the holidays, too.
BALKIN: So did it smell really strong where you worked?
McGRATH: The plant smelled like whatever we were working
on. Normally it smelled like vanilla.
MORAGON: If you went to a certain area in the plant, it
would smell like peanut butter. We had different rooms
where we kept certain things under refrigeration, like a lot of
the Aldehyde C-18, almond flavor. Pure peppermint oil—if
you get that on your skin, it burns.
HARBISON: I was gonna ask you about cleaning up.
MORAGON: We had a big step ladder and a huge tank. We
used to make three hundred gallons at a time. I remember
one time I was on the ladder standing over this thing with
all this alcohol and these vapors; it had heating coils on the
inside and a big propeller that would stir it around. When I
was getting down, I almost passed out [mumbles something
to the effect of]… lots of industrial accidents, but I don’t
want to… you know, they’re bankrupt now. I don’t want to
get them in trouble.
BALKIN: So you worked mostly with natural flavors or mostly
with chemicals?
MORAGON: Mostly chemicals. We’d have to mix our own
food colorings. Food coloring came in two forms: powder
and granulated. You had big warning labels on it saying
“CONTAINS LEAD AND ARSENIC!” Supposedly it was a
STAY FREE! 49 ISSUE NO. 23

yproduct of burning coal, this fine ash.
McGRATH: Yeah. A lot of the times when it’s granulated it
looks like those rocks you see on lawns, only more broken
down, like pebbles.
MORAGON: Sort of like Fruity Pebbles, but clumped
together more.
HARBISON: Let’s say you had a little vanilla left over in the
trough bucket. Did you have a big stump hole to dump out
toxic waste?
McGRATH: We would save it. It was worth money. Most of it
wasn’t refrigerated. We’d put it in the gallon bottles, unless
it was an orange or strawberry. If it was a fruit flavor, then
we would usually put it in the refrigerator.
MORAGON: We did a lot of flavors for yogurts.
BALKIN: So why’d you quit?
MORAGON: I got bored. And it's kind of a toxic job, really.
BALKIN: Did you ever get your hands stained?
MORAGON: You’d blow your nose in the shower, see green
or yellow come out. It was pretty nasty.
McGRATH: Yeah. You spit blue. [Laughter.] Imagine what
your lungs look like.
HARBISON: So you were doing it how many days a week?
MORAGON: Almost every day, I think. I would work from
eight to ten or eleven or twelve, depending on my college
schedule, ’cos my mom worked there. At first I started out
part-time in the warehouse. I hurt my back doing warehouse
work so then I got into making flavors. And we used
to make ’em bootleg-style over the sink. It was crazy. You
McGRATH: Blueberry, boysenberry…
MORAGON: Mother’s Cookies, Otis Spunkmeyer, what
else? That pink stuff, Wright’s Pink Popcorn, that shit that
you see at the ballpark. We made the pink shit that holds it
together. That was us. It’s pretty much powdered sugar and
food coloring and a little bubble gum flavoring.
HARBISON: Did you get any symbols of appreciation from
manufacturers? Any T-shirts? Any free products?
MORAGON: The company did, but we never got anything. I
mean if we had degrees in chemistry, we would have made
forty-thousand a year, but we didn’t.
HARBISON: Doing the same work you did?
MORAGON: Yeah. We were just college students.
know those sinks: you’d press the floor and wash your
hands. They were circular, we’d get our water from there
’cause we really weren’t set up to make flavors, we were in
limbo. We’d get a special order from really good customers
and we had to come through ’cos they’d only order
maybe one gallon a year and we’d ream ’em for that. Or
four gallons a year and we’d ream ’em like a hundred dollars
a gallon.
McGRATH: I ended up accidentally four-folding 96 gallons
of Vanilla 3124 one time and it turned out the formula was
old. We would add BHA.
BALKIN: Oh, BHA, BHT?
MORAGON: Yeah. It’s that kind of stuff.
BALKIN: Well that’s not too poisonous, is it?
STAY FREE! 50 ISSUE NO. 23

MORAGON: It’s not too good for you. I’d have to read the
Cal OSHA manual now to really get the gist. We had a Cal
OSHA manual but I don’t think we ever looked up stuff.
McGRATH: We didn’t want to know. It was like “Oh, get the
formula, make the flavor.”
BALKIN: So you made fruit flavors. Did you ever make beef
flavor?
MORAGON: Very rarely. Every now and then you’d get a cat
food company and they’d want you to make liver flavor.
McGRATH: Make it out of emulsion.
MORAGON: Butter was pretty bad.
McGRATH: Something you don’t want to have spilled on
you: tuna emulsion. You go into McDonald’s, people are
like, “What’s that smell?”
MORAGON: But that diacetyl stuff. One tiny little drop
on your clothes and you stunk. Like I said, I was going to
school, I got a tiny drop on my shoe, and I swear, everybody
at the front of the room was like, [sniff] “Who’s got the
popcorn?” But if you sat next to me, it’d be like “Ugh! Who
stepped in shit?”
HARBISON: Did you wear uniforms?
MORAGON: We wore smocks, like a printer’s smock, and
we had hair nets and goggles and gloves and respirators, but
most of the time didn’t use all that stuff. We should have
had an eye bath.
McGRATH: We just had sinks. I remember a time when
Manolo was making almond extract and you spilled Aldehyde
C-18 in your eye and screamed. I thought you lost
your eye.
MORAGON: You have to rinse for 15 minutes.
MORAGON: Everyone’s smelling their pits and you’re going,
“Hmmm, I hope nobody notices.” It’s pretty nasty.
McGRATH: There was this flavor that was really brutal to
work with—Butter 20—and there was this one ingredient,
diacetyl, that, if you inhaled it, would make you vomit.
MORAGON: You know those movies where they have little
metal bottles that people put things in and cap ’em? It came
in a bottle like that. But you wouldn’t want to get that shit
on you. You can’t describe it, it smells so bad.
McGRATH: Yeah, you’d put a few drops of diacetyl for
twenty gallons of Butter 20 and then mix it with egg salads
and butter derivatives, which is clumpy buttery half-liquid.
It looked like runny cottage cheese and smelled horrible. If
you had the dry heaves, that would do it.
McGRATH: Otherwise, there goes your cornea.
BALKIN: So did you ever work with Blue No. 2?
MORAGON: Oh yeah. Red 40, Blue No. 2, Yellow No. 5.
All that stuff.
McGRATH: Blue No. 1, mostly.
BALKIN: Aren’t some of those colors banned?
McGRATH: Yes, Red No. 3. We worked with that.
MORAGON: We did Red No. 40, mostly. Yellow 5, Blue No.
1, and—
McGRATH: Green No. 3.
STAY FREE! 51 ISSUE NO. 23

MORAGON: And we would make colors from those colors,
black and red and different tones.
McGRATH: Purple from Blue No. 1 and Red No. 40 combined.
BALKIN: So did you guys ever make smoke flavor?
MORAGON: Yeah, you’d use birch tar oil. Really strong stuff,
I hear it’s pretty bad for you, too. Cancerous.
McGRATH: That’s the kind of stuff you wouldn’t want to get
on your hands.
MORAGON: That’s when we wore gloves. We almost always
wore gloves. There’s certain flavors I couldn’t make. I don’t
like bananas, so I couldn’t make banana flavors. You know
that goopy stuff that comes out of a tube and you can blow
bubbles with it?
McGRATH: Super Elastic Bubble Plastic.
MORAGON: Yeah, remember that smell? It was really strong.
It’d go right up your nose. Well, we had flavors that smelled
like that. Like strawberry. It would “scheeoo” right up your
nose, that’s how concentrated it was. It was a Carmi flavor.
They were the worst. And you’d use those a lot for hard
candy and stuff like Jolly Ranchers, Now and Laters.
HARBISON: I have a question. When I was a kid, my mother
was very cheap, so she’d buy us generic popsicles in summer.
They didn’t pretend to be cherry flavor or anything like that,
they would say RED. Do you think that’s more honest?
MORAGON: I still drink Kool-Aid, you know. I love artificial
flavors, and I know what they’re made of. If it is bad it
wouldn’t be legal, right? Hopefully somebody tested it somewhere.
HARBISON: Like you?
MORAGON: I don’t think they put that much money into
testing, personally. I drink a lot of Kool-Aid and it’s got the
worst thing for you as far as bad food colorings go— I mean
it took me three brushes to get the red out. But I’m still here,
you know? And I didn’t pee red, so it’s all good. g
Know anyone in “south central” Brooklyn (Park Slope, Prospect
Heights, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill) with
an unusual job? Stay Free! is looking for good people to interview
for our gigs column. Email cm@stayfreemagazine.org
with any suggestions. Thank you very much.
STAY FREE! 52 ISSUE NO. 23

STAY FREE! 53 ISSUE NO. 23

Interview > by Emily Pugh
Reel People
Chances are those old Laurel & Hardy prints sitting in
your basement aren’t nearly as valuable as your mom’s
home movies. The founders of Home Movie Day talk
about amateur films and what they can teach us.
These days, you think of home movies as quaint and fairly uninteresting. The film technology with which they were
made seems hopelessly outmoded in the age of digital video, and the idea of screening someone else’s memories
brings to mind the cliché of being forced to watch the neighbors’ film of their trip to Niagara Falls. However, though
we all have preconceptions of home movies, few of us have seen them firsthand. It turns out that the reality of
home movies proves much more compelling than the clichés associated with them (think less Niagara Falls and
more backyard dragqueen party). And though film may seem out-of-date, Kodak still makes Super 8mm film, and
many of us have old films of summer vacation or our 8th birthday party stashed by our radiators or in our damp,
moldy basements—and the world’s film archivists are collectively cringing. • In 2002, a group of them, members of
the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Small Gauge and Amateur Film interest group, decided to do
something about it. Their solution: Home Movie Day, a day when people can bring home movies, whether they
found them in the basement or at a flea market, to a local venue and have them projected in public by professional
film archivists. • The first Home Movie Day was held in August 2003 and was so successful that this year’s event was
expanded to 40 cities around the world, including Tokyo, London, and Albuquerque. Stay Free! interviewed Andrew
Lampert and Diana Little who, along with Katie Trainor, were the New York hosts of the event.—Emily Pugh
STAY FREE!: What are the preservation
issues associated with home movies
and how does Home Movie Day
address these issues?
ANDREW LAMPERT: Well, a lot of
people have videotapes of their home
movies that they transferred from film
way back when, and they think that,
since it’s on video, they don’t need to
keep the film anymore. In reality, film
properly kept lasts longer than video,
and if the video player eats the tape,
you need the original film to make a
new copy. Sadly, when people take
their films in to get transferred onto
video, they often leave the films, and
the processing places throw them
away. The goal of Home Movie Day
is to wave a flag and say, “Hey, home
movies need to be taken care of.”
DIANA LITTLE: Also, as archivists, we
generally hesitate to project films that
STAY FREE! 54 ISSUE NO. 23

are unique or fragile, which most of
these home movies are. If films get
broken or damaged in the projector,
they are lost forever. Every time you
project a film, especially if you don’t
know what kind of condition the projector
is in, you’re essentially taking
tiny bits off the life of the film. You’re
scratching it, sometimes mangling it
if it gets caught. That’s why we use
Home Movie Day to give people the
opportunity to see their home movies
projected in a setting where we can
assure them to some degree that the
films will not be damaged.
LAMPERT: Yes, and while we very
much want people to preserve their
films, we do also encourage them to
make a video or DVD copy to use for
viewing. So Home Movie Day is as
much about education as it is about
entertainment.
STAY FREE!: Do most film preservationists
and archivists think home
movies are worthy of preservation?
LITTLE: No. Film preservation in practice
really means duplicating films,
whether it’s for archives or commercial
interests, and no one is going to
spend that kind of money and time
on a film that doesn’t have commercial
value. Most film archives can’t
really afford to recognize the cultural
history embedded in these captured
everyday moments. There’s just not
enough space in archives and there’s
not enough money in it.
STAY FREE!: If their primary value is
as a cultural document, why is it that
these films can’t simply be transferred
to video or DVD and be as valuable?
LAMPERT: Because film will last longer
than any video or digital medium.
With digital media, there are new formats
or software upgrades every six
months, whereas film has been pretty
much the same since its invention.
Super 8mm projectors, for example,
have been the same since 1965.
STAY FREE!: How do you see this ritual
of watching home movies as part
of the larger issues of preserving and
archiving them?
LAMPERT: It’s a huge part. I’ve been
collecting home movies for fifteen
years and one of the great kicks is
to see what a “normal” family looks
like or what a child’s birthday party
is like, because I never had birthday
parties! There’s definitely an element
of voyeurism involved. Also, showing
these films creates a sort of mini
community among the people watching
them together. On Home Movie
Day, I always ask people to talk about
their films. I want them to say, “oh,
that’s Grandma” or to tell us what’s
going on. This idea of community is
actually a really important part of
Home Movie Day. And in New York
City, in particular, the idea of community
is especially interesting. We
have a hugely diverse group of people:
white, black, Puerto Rican, Dominican,
Asian. And people within each of
these cultures make their own, often
unique kinds of home movies.
STAY FREE!: So what are the differences
between the home movies made
by these diverse groups of people?
LITTLE: I tend to feel that there are
more similarities than differences. It’s
interesting, for example, to see how
people in these films will act in very
specific ways. People who might be
reserved or shy normally will suddenly
get wacky and start making
funny faces or waving their hands
around.
LAMPERT: There are a number of reactions
or behaviors that you see people
do again and again in these films, such
as waving at the camera. What I am
interested in is atypical behavior or
activities that are unique to a particular
culture. For example, one home
movie shot about four or five years
ago by a Chinese woman shows her
family conducting a traditional Chinese
ceremony at her husband’s grave
a year after his death. I was fascinated
to watch this very private, culturally
specific moment in a public forum.
Most of the time, home movies lie by
painting an overly rosy picture of life.
They don’t show Dad coming home
drunk, or me not having a birthday
party. The typical subject matter is
vacations at beaches, children’s birthday
parties, Christmas parties—people
gathering together for some significant
event.
STAY FREE!: What about the aesthetic
of these films? What can you say
about how they look or the filmmaking
techniques used to make them?
STAY FREE! 55 ISSUE NO. 23

STAY FREE! 56 ISSUE NO. 23

LAMPERT: There are certain aesthetic
elements common to most home
movies: shooting with a hand-held
camera, for example; use of available
light, lack of sound. But this brings up
the question of what exactly is a home
movie. At the last Home Movie Day,
we showed a film by an artist of his
trip to Paris. He used gels and various
other filmmaking techniques that
made it clear he was a trained filmmaker.
Some members of the audience
objected to it, and a heated discussion
started over what exactly constitutes a
home movie. I was arguing that if the
filmmaker is willing to call it a home
movie, it counts as a home movie.
LITTLE: If home movies have to be
spontaneous and unplanned, then the
film one guy brought in of his son’s
birth in the early ’60s would not have
counted as a home movie. It had
titles and he and his wife “acted” in
it. Someone else brought in a home
movie of her daughter’s birthday party
in the East Village from the ’80s that
was spontaneous, but also heavily
manipulated. She modified the speed
and shot single frames, for example,
which are not techniques you see in
classic home movies.
STAY FREE!: So I guess there’s a rather
ambiguous line between “home movies”
and “homemade movies”?
LAMPERT: Well, a couple of years ago
I put together a show called “Art Is
Life and Life Is Art” that was made up
of films by noted experimental filmmakers
that blurred the line between
art films and home movies. Actually,
that’s the most common criticism of
experimental films: that they are just
amateur movies or just home movies.
So your question is interesting because
I don’t really know the answer to it.
STAY FREE!: Every year that Home
Movie Day has been held, you’ve
attracted more and more people.
What kinds of people are coming? Is
it all ages, all walks of life?
LITTLE: Oh yeah. This year a lot of
people in their late twenties and early
thirties came with footage of themselves
as children. One guy brought
in footage of his bris! You see a lot
of people bringing in footage of
themselves they’ve never seen before
because their parents packed away the
Super 8 projector when they were 7.
STAY FREE!: So ultimately what would
you like to see happen with these
films? Is the ultimate goal a museum
or archive of home movies?
LAMPERT: Yes, some of us have been
talking about founding a home-movies
museum, a place where people
can donate their home movies and
in return receive a digital or video
copy to have for their personal use.
The originals would then be kept
in proper archival conditions. The
museum would have an open-access
policy, and accept films from all over
the world. After all, these are important
documents of our cultural history.
The films are not shot from the
point of view of the media, for example.
This is our own documentation of
what life was like in, say 1967, not
“The Cold War” or “Nixon meeting
Khrushchev” but what was happening
in people’s everyday lives.
STAY FREE!: Are there any especially
funny or unusual home movies that
you’ve seen?
LITTLE: This year someone brought
in a movie from San Francisco in the
early 1970s—a sort of impromptu
FIVE TIPS FOR HOME MOVIE CARE
1
Transfer your films
to a master tape (e.g.
BetaSP or DigiBeta), and
make viewing copies (VHS
or DVD) from that master.
Andrew, Diana, and Katie recommend
Brodsky & Treadway
(littlefilm.com) in Massachusetts
or the suggestions
provided at filmforever.org
under Resources and Links.
Make sure you don’t discard
the original film. Of course,
making a video transfer is
not the same as preserving.
Store your films in a
2 cool, dry place. Do
not store in the attic
(hot/inconsistent temperature)
or basement (humid).
We also advise against storing
in the refrigerator or
freezer, mainly because cold
storage of processed film requires
special precautions
and some long-term commitment
to maintenance.
3
Keep all films away
from direct sunlight,
and store those with magnetic
soundtracks away from
magnets and magnetic fields.
4
Store your films flat
(horizontally) in nonairtight,
labeled containers.
The individual cardboard
boxes they are currently in
are okay, but if you want to
be even safer, get new reels,
cores, and storage containers.
(See Equipment Suppliers
at filmforever.org.)
Do not project your
5 films unless you have
taken pains to ensure
that they won’t be damaged.
Safe projection of unique archival
film entails the careful
inspection, repair, and cleaning
of both the film and the
projection equipment.
STAY FREE! 57 ISSUE NO. 23

drag ball in his backyard.
LAMPERT: I’ve seen a lot of movies from
the ’50s of particularly wild New Year’s
parties.
LITTLE: One of my favorite home movies
of all time is one our friend Chad found,
which he calls “Penis Film.” It’s old footage
of teenage boys hanging out somewhere
in Michigan, getting drunk, playing
in their band, and frequently exposing
themselves to the camera.
LAMPERT: One of my favorite home
movies is of a Hispanic wedding party.
You see the bride and groom in the
receiving line and then the camera pans
to the right and there’s a bunch of shirtless
guys with beer cans in their hands.
Here’s a culture I’m not a part of, but I’d
like to go to their parties!
STAY FREE!: At Home Movie Day, while
I was watching the film of the Dutch
couple getting married in the 1970s, I
found myself making up stories about
who they were and how they met.
LAMPERT: Yes, home movies are very
much about interpretation. Each one has
a narrative, though it may seem “plotless.”
Often the viewer has to supply it,
but sometimes the people in the films create
little stories or parodies themselves.
LITTLE: I find that watching strangers’
home movies gives me a warm feeling
too. You find yourself thinking, “these
are just normal people.” Maybe these
people are forgotten to everybody but
their grandchildren; maybe they are
dead or far away, but they still exist in
these films.
LAMPERT: People have different haircuts
or different pants depending on what
year it is, but you see them doing the
same things in these films that you’re
doing right now. Home movies show us
that we haven’t really changed that much
over the years. g
Sound off
Pissed off about something
in this issue? Share you
thoughts on the Stay Free!
bulletin board:
www.stayfreemagazine.org
Your ad here
(cheap!)
Call (718) 398-9324
cm@stayfreemagazine.org
Seen Stay Free!'s
Illegal Art Exhibit?
www.illegal-art.org
Bridget Regan
WEB & GRAPHIC
DESIGN
TIP #46: When you run out of ideas,
throw in an adorable monkey.
Or call Stay Free! Because we don’t just produce
money-sucking magazines—we make sensible
things as well: websites, logos, newsletters,
postcards, advertisements, posters, and flyers.
Affordable rates. Stellar references. No hidden
fees or other nonsense. Visit carriemclaren.com
for work samples. Or contact Carrie McLaren
at (718) 398-9324 or cm@stayfreemagazine.org
for an estimate.
Or, in this case, a baby orangutan.
STAY FREE! 58 ISSUE NO. 23

Eugene’s Hangouts continued from page 31
P.S. 321 Flea Market
I love going to flea markets and antique shops to look at odd
crap. Toy guns, old machines, magazines, pants for teens, love
letters from babies to colleagues from the 1920s—it’s all here.
(180 7th Avenue, weekends)
Bombay Grill
Probably the best Indian food in Park Slope. The staff is
friendly and the vindaloo is spicy like a beautiful woman (who
has been marinated in hot peppers). I go there for Sunday
brunch with friends a lot. A great tradition (like Hanukkah,
but without any legend). Even as I write this I kind of want
to go there. And I was there two days ago! Shit! (351 7th
Avenue, 718-768-7777)
Blue Ribbon
A great seafood restaurant that stays open late. Seafood is
my favorite food, so if you want to surprise me at a show,
bring some shrimp. (Please don’t.) Sometimes when I’m at
Great Lakes, I’ll run in for an oyster. Blue Ribbon has some
of the most attentive—but not intrusive—service I’ve ever
seen. Almost spooky. I think they are trained in some odd way,
broken down and then remade as the perfect waitstaff. When
friends visit and want to treat me to a meal, we’ll end up there
at 3 a.m. and have supper. (280 5th Avenue, 718-840-0404)
Commonwealth
Ray’s bar. Who’s Ray? How dare you! He used to be the
bartender at Great Lakes, and picked the music for its world
famous indie-rock jukebox. He opened his own bar, which has
a slightly modernized 1940s feel and an indie-loving jukebox
as well. Spacious and a great place to meet psychologists and
bookworms who like French kissing as much as knowledge!
And now Ray has some snacks. Plus he’s full of great stories
and smiles. (497 5th Avenue, 718-768-2040)
The Gate
For those who don’t like all the youngsters at Great Lakes, the
Gate is their sanctuary. There are times when you want to talk
to someone aged 27–33 and not 21–24. And that’s where the
Gate comes in. Twenty-five- and 26-year olds are not welcome
at either place, sorry. They hang out at Mexican Sandwich
Company, having great food, but no human contact. (321 5th
Avenue, 718-768-4329)
Nana
Thanks for opening near me, friend. Very cheap lunch specials?
Are you sure? Great. Delicious sushi? Okay. Keep talking.
Tuna with quail egg and ponzu sauce? I’m listening. Hot hot
hot Hapaji Shrimp with Pumpkin? What else? Volcano Roll?
What’s in that? Bullshit. Who would dare? Nana, that’s who.
(155 Fifth Avenue, 718-230-3749) g
STAY FREE! 59 ISSUE NO. 23

MY NEW FAVORITE THING
365 Days Project
www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/
Oh, happy day! Those weird old records
I once scoured thrift shops for
have made their way to the web, where
they all seem to appear in this singular
mp3 archive. Louis Farrakhan singing
about a transvestite, calypso-style (“Is
She Is, Or Is She Ain’t?”), a promotional
“rock” version of the Ford Motors
warranty, outtakes from a Christian
radio show, “Hidden and Satanic
Messages in Rock Music”: it’s all here.
It’s like listening to Irwin Chusid or the
Bran Flakes on WFMU, but without the
annoying banter. (In fact, Otis Fodder
of the Bran Flakes produced the site,
and Irwin is a contributor.)
There are 365 mp3s in all, one for
each day of 2003, when the site was
active. (It’s no longer being updated,
but there’s plenty of stuff here to keep
you coming back.) My personal favorites
include “Let’s Make a Record,” a
stripped-down gospel number by one
Sister Gertrude Morman; “Maybe It’s,”
a jaunty pop song by Esther Rolle, aka
Esther from Good Times; the DeZurik
(Cackle) Sisters, an amazing yodeling
duo from the 1930s and 1940s; and the
hilarious recordings Van Morrison made
in 1968 to get out of a contract with
Bang Records, including “Ring Worm,”
“Want a Danish,” and “You Say France
and I Whistle” (which consists of him
saying, “I whistle, you say France. No,
you say France and I’ll whistle. No, I’ll
say France,” and on and on). And to
think that I’ve only covered up to the
first week in March!
Each entry in the archive has images
and background info, often with
links to additional references and songs.
I downloaded “Diary of an Unborn
Child” on a related site, for example,
and was treated to a deeply disturbing
anthem by evangelical Mark Fox, singing
from the point of view of an aborted
fetus. Of course, once you get off track
like this, you may never find your way
back, as one amazing mp3 library leads
to another and pretty soon your day is
shot. But you won’t find a better way to
waste time. —Carrie McLaren
Patton Oswalt
Feelin’ Kinda Patton CD
Those who watched the reality series
Last Comic Standing and thought,
“surely this is not the cream of American
standup” are gently directed to the alternative
comedy scene that’s been incubating
outside of NBC’s ability to know or
care. Seeded by the late Bill Hicks and
kept alive by the likes of David Cross
(whose two-disc Shut Up, You Fucking
Baby! is an excellent primer), the underbelly
of standup has proved a fertile
marketplace of heartfelt opinions and
fresh observations brewing below the
populist Muzak of LCS.
On his debut CD, Patton Oswalt
(best known from the sitcom King of
Queens) joins the elite of this scene by
taking his audience on an uncommonly
cheerful journey through humanity’s
darker facets. His penetrating wit and
adept wordsmithery will restore the faith
of anyone disillusioned by modern standup—Cross
himself could take a page from
Patton’s brisk pacing and word economy.
Even Bush-bashing, an automatic cliché
in most standup circles, takes on its own
life in Oswalt’s deft comparison of Bush
supporters to deluded groupies who believe
a fellated Michael Damian actually
cares about them.
One of the geek world’s most visible
supporting actors (among other roles,
he’s the Dungeons and Dragons spaz
getting maced in a Reno 911 spot played
ad nauseum on Comedy Central), Patton
reveals his formidable Gen-X memory in
lovingly detailed remembrances of PAAS
Easter egg dye and Stella D’Oro’s nightmarish
1970s Breakfast Treats commercial,
without ever veering toward universally
remembered hack premises like
Gilligan’s Island or The Brady Bunch.
When Patton curses, it’s literate and
gleefully warped, but maybe the truest
testament to his skill is that the falldown-funniest
track on the album, “My
Christmas Memory,” contains no cursing
at all. Nevertheless, after two seasons
STAY FREE! 60 ISSUE NO. 23

of recycled “am I right, people?” filler
on NBC, it’s surprisingly refreshing to
hear a comic scream, “Your twat smells
like a baby’s coffin!” —Tim Harrod
Edward Hunter, Brainwashing
(first published in 1956)
I came across Brainwashing in a secondhand
bookstore in San Francisco.
It’s a pulpy-looking paperback edition
from the early sixties, with cover copy
describing it as “The True and Terrible
Story of the Men who Endured and Defied
the Most Diabolical Red Torture.”
With that kind of sensationalist dressing,
I expected it to be a bit of Cold
War anti-communist hysteria, and it
certainly starts off that way. The author,
journalist Edward Hunter, begins
with a discussion of Pavlov’s famous
conditioning experiments, for which
he consults a psychiatrist named Leon
Freedom and a close personal friend,
Ayn Rand. He proposes that scientists
in the Soviet Union have found a way
to use Pavlov’s experiments on humans:
“Any human activity, from the
flow of saliva to an embrace to murder,
could be clinically predetermined in
politico-medical laboratories by connecting
it with a shouted or written
slogan, a hand signal, a smear word, or
the color of a man’s skin.” This sounds
a lot like the original film version of
RED
“Polenta with wild mushrooms is decadently
rich; salmon is expertly roasted; crème
brûlée is irresistible. If you haven’t been here
yet, you should be seeing Red.”
—Time Out New York
“Chef Mark Shenk makes a delicious habit
of serving creative comfort food in small,
neighborhoody places at small, neighborhoody
prices.”
—New York
“A delicious original.”
—Brooklyn Papers
78 Fifth Avenue between St. Mark’s and
Prospect Place • Park Slope, Brooklyn
Sunday, Tuesday to Thursday 5:30–10 p.m.
Friday & Saturday 5:30–11 p.m. • Closed
Mondays • (718) 789-1100
STAY FREE! 61 ISSUE NO. 23

The Manchurian Candidate, in which a
brainwashed Korean War veteran falls
into a trance whenever he is shown the
Queen of Hearts, obeying whatever instructions
he is given at that time—even
instructions to kill.
But in the personal stories of prisoners
of war that make up the bulk of the
book, “brainwashing” is less hypnosis
and Pavlovian conditioning than interrogation
and torture techniques that induce
POW’s to “confess” to things they
haven’t done. The Communist soldiers
starve prisoners, prevent them from
sleeping, hang them by their thumbs
from the ceiling, make them sit in freezing
buckets of water, and beat them. After
wearing them down, often for months,
the captors offer them food, cigarettes,
or medical care, if they will only confess
to something. Hunter implies that this is
why several soldiers ended up publicly
denouncing the United States and staying
behind in Korea. Korean War veterans
were at first mocked in the media for
“losing” the war, so Hunter seems to be
on the defensive, trying to prove that the
special communist torture in Korea was
fiercer than what American soldiers experienced
in World War II.
Of course, it’s not only the diabolical
Reds who use such tactics. Brainwashing
puts one in mind of Abu Ghraib
and recent cases in which suspects make
false confessions. The book also foreshadows
the furor over subliminal advertising
that erupted when Vance Packard
published The Hidden Persuaders a
year later, in 1957 (See Stay Free! #22).
Like communism, mind control was a
specter that haunted Cold War Americans
as they came to see their world as
less individualistic and more conformist—rationalized,
streamlined, dominated
by mega-corporations, and swayed
by advertising. —Allison Xantha Miller
Philadelphia Independent
This quirky newspaper arrived in my
mail this summer and I’ve been hooked
ever since. A large, general interest
paper based in the city of its name, the
Independent resembles one of those late
19th century newspapers you can occasionally
find at flea markets, in both
writing and design. It reminds me of my
favorite local publications, the now-defunct
Three Weeks, from Queens. (In
fact, Three Weeks’ Henry W. Brownejohns
is a frequent contributor.) Though
the Independent caters to the people of
Philadelphia, much of its coverage—on
drug clinical trials or the war in Iraq,
for instance—would appeal equally to a
broader audience.
As a publisher myself, I’m as impressed
by the Independent’s business
savvy as I am by the high quality of
writing. The newspaper is staffed by a
meager, underpaid staff; contributors
are almost all volunteer. Yet this puppy
runs like a well-oiled machine—or, at
least, appears to—with a regularly updated
and cleanly designed website
(philadelphiaindependent.net), on-time
production schedule, and a top-notch
media kit. Everything these guys produce
maintains the consistent, old-timey feel.
In a few years, some major media
cartel will no doubt buy them out, so
send them your $5 for a subscription
now, before it gets lame: Philadelphia
Independent, 1026 Arch Street, Philadelphia,
PA 19107. —Carrie McLaren
Ghost, Hypnotic Underworld
(Drag City); and live at the Knitting
Factory, 9/21/04
Ghost is a Japanese psychedelic rock
band that has been around since 1986
but didn’t begin to make a name in the
States until about the mid-’90s. They
are said to rehearse at Buddhist temples
and ancient ruins around Japan, but
whatever mystical explorations they
make can’t hide the plain fact that they
fucking rock.
On their latest record, Hypnotic
Underworld, they weave a little Zep
bombast into trippy jams; quieter tunes
take on the trappings of both Eastern
(Zen) and Western (Syd Barrett) mystical
traditions. A mellow folky bass riff
underlies the sound of electronic water
drops, as bandleader Masaki Batoh intones
hypnotic Japanese. A song suite
begins with 13 minutes of meandering
STAY FREE! 62 ISSUE NO. 23

electronic noise, shifts to a seven-minute
mind-altering crescendo, bursts the
chrysalis for a two-minute Tolkien pop
ride, and closes with 30 seconds of
sprinting drums.
Live, they lose the dynamics and
textures somewhat, but hammer one
tune after another into glorious psychedelic
anthems. Batoh is as skinny as a
stick-figure anime wizard, but he has a
massive presence and a solid array of
rock gestures. The rest of the band looks
like Japanese rockers as drawn by Daniel
Clowes, not least the neurasthenic
version of Ray Manzarek on keyboards.
—Jay Huber
Shannon Burke, Safelight
(Random House)
My friend Shannon Burke—an omnivorous
polymath who observes and listens
closely—was a paramedic in Harlem for
five years. After years of toil, his first
novel is finally available, and it’s great.
The protagonist, Frank, drifts
through New York City in 1990 working
as a paramedic in Harlem, taking
candid photographs of the sick, dying
and dead. We meet Frank, just as he’s
launched himself on an arc of self-destruction,
and Burke produces an engaging
array of lowlifes, luckless, corpses
and loved ones (in the late-20th-century
dysfunctional way) for Frank to pinball
through. It’s easy to forget New York
in the years before low crime rates and
bourgeois propriety, but Burke vividly
captures the chaos and decay, the filth of
Travis Bickle’s disgust leaching into yet
another decade. This is a lean tale told
in sharp dialogue and quick strokes.
The precision of Burke’s eye and prose
shears away sentimentality and carries
the story swiftly along. —Jay Huber
Running Level 3, Mini Crew
.
Thorlos socks
Since I view footwear as an unforgivably
baroque social imposition, to be resented
along with credit ratings and marriage,
the discovery of breathable comfort
socks came as, well, a breath of fresh
air. With the exception of one barefoot
summer in Cambridge, Mass.—where
the sidewalks are paved with brick—I’ve
never felt this good about my feet. Running
in Thorlos, as I plan to do in the
Detroit Marathon, feels like walking.
Walking in them feels like walking on a
path strewn an inch deep with rose petals.
Seriously.
Thorlos were, like me, invented in
1978; unlike me, they represent the culmination
of a great deal of scientific research.
Thorlos are the cyborg of socks.
Though made almost entirely of a synthetic
material called THOR•LON,
they appear to have been pieced together
from several different sources.
The top is pantyhose sheer, as though
there were no sock there at all. The heel
and toe are padded with a thick knit.
The toe-knuckles are protected with a
smooth weave. The arch, the ankle—all
different.
The radical attention to ergonomics,
as well as the obscure diacritic that
appears above the first “o” in the brand
name, vaguely suggest that Thorlos
originate somewhere in Scandinavia, but
they were, in fact, invented and manufactured
in the good old U.S. of A. by
people with names like Jim and Steve.
At least one of these people (as related at
www.thorlo.com) took the time to isolate
the “7 Elements of Comfort”: moisture,
stimulus, circulation, temperature,
posture, shear, and pressure. Attune
each element to the requirements of a
specific sport—hiking, tennis, you name
it—and, voilà, a sports sock is born. Just
don’t tell the salespeople at the running
store that you only plan to wear the
socks around the house. —Matt Daniels
CHUCK E. CHEESE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 45
But Chuck merged with its prime competitor,
ShowBiz Pizza, in the 1980s and
helped drive competitors like Discovery
Zone out of business. When you’re the
most fun pizzeria available, there’s simply
no need to be the most fun pizzeria
imaginable. g
STAY FREE! 63 ISSUE NO. 23

Stay Free!
for the holidays
By mid-November, Stay Free! will be taking orders
for our annual holiday gifts. For $25, you can give
your friend or loved one a subscription to Stay
Free!, our mixed CD of weird and wonderful Xmas
music, and a personalized card. We'll also have
t-shirts and other goods available soon, so watch
www.stayfreemagazine.org for details.
Image from Roger la Borde wrapping paper
STAY FREE! 64 ISSUE NO. 23

Fake Classifieds
EVIL GENIUS demands obedience of
world’s leaders or will unleash death
laser. Death laser went over budget,
must use classifieds rather than hacking
TV signals. Serious, though.
OTHER STONED GUY needed to
watch Mexican version of Sesame
Street, laugh ass off. 226-9032.
SHITTY IMPROV TROUPE FORMING!
Please come prepared with too much
energy, Schwarzenegger impression.
CALL #5569
ARTIST NEEDS NUDE MODELS.
Top dollar, gateway to modeling career.
Am lying. Will strangle with bungee
cord.
FOUND. 3x3" wax paper square, poss.
wrapping for confection. One of collection.
Also, 1/3 crueller, good shape.
BULLY wants your lunch money, or
will kick ass. Now. Leave in P.O. box
26413, Bklyn
ROBOT, ALIEN, wants to know what
this thing called “love” is. Also, laughter.
CALL#1099
NEED A BLOW
dryer. Prefer portable 1200-watt with
adjustable settings, expandable combs
and heads. 332-1919.
LOST DOG 4 yo beagle-great dane
mix, answers to Bucky. Want him
back! Chet 718/555-8877. Park Slope.
RECENTLY LIBERATED DOG
beagle/dane mix, Bucky, wants everyone
to keep Chet away from me.
MEN seeking MEN
MEN SEEKING MEN
Narcissist seeks self. No drugs.
CALL#1099
PEOPLE PEOPLE who WHO need PEOPLE NEED PEOPLE
Are the luckiest people in the world.
CALL#6502
INANIMATE INANIMATE
Thick, lush shag carpet seeks cannistertype
vacuum. You know what I want.
Kirbys a plus.
PET seeking PET SEEKING OWNER OWNER
Friendly, fit, brown spaniel seeks active,
attentive owner/s. Young preferred. Am
willing to fetch, shake. Full companionship,
benefits. Please, no Jews.
Jason Torchinsky and Tim Harrod
BROCCOLI
312-7490
2 BR APT, landfill adj, 1 bath, kitchen,
bdrooms, all in same room, 275 sq ft,
tire incinerator conv., $2000
I STUFF ENVELOPES! My envelopestuffing
skills are nonpareil. Seek
position at top of industry, minimum
$2,000, $3,000, up to $4,000 a week.
BEADED SEATCOVERS for the
subway, armchair, bike. Why should
cabbies have all the fun?
LOSE WEIGHT FAST! Not fast as in
rapid, fast as in don’t eat. Brochure
tells how. $5
STOP SMOKING.
Or don’t. See if I care, $15
BASSIST WANTED, into Shins, Wht
Stripes, Pixies, Beck to pretend to be in
band with me, tell girls I’m cool.
MISSED MISSED CONNECTIONS CONNECTIONS
YOU: Playing Frisbee in Prospect Park
Saturday, 10/9/04, Pink shorts & green
top. ME: Walking my golden retriever,
iPod & gray jogging suit. You had a
weird, squinty sort of look and kind of
a big ass. Not interested.
MEN SEEKING WOMEN
Are you the one? This clever, witty
DWM, early 30s, MFA, PhD, wealthy,
urbane, literate, loves Camus, Kafka,
Coffee, Calisthenics, Camille (Paglia),
Calder, climbing and Klimt; seeks
smart, attractive, intelligent WF (race/
religion unimportant) to vigorously
rub my genitalia. CALL#6502
WOMEN WOMEN seeking SEEKING MEN MEN
Attractive, SBF Columbia student,
nice body, funny, seeks older WM
prof. to stop bothering me. You know
who you are.
M Cat seeks earthy F owner. Must
have tuna, many insects.
ADVERTISEMENT
STAY FREE! 65 ISSUE NO. 23

One of these days we’ll get around to compiling a list of stores across the U.S. that sell Stay Free! But for now, here’s info on
Where to find us in Brooklyn
BOERUM HILL
Bachhus
Brawta
Flying Saucer Café
Stir It Up
CARROLL GARDENS
Main St. Ephemera
Union Max
COBBLE HILL
HomeCourt
Micromuseum
Shakespeare’s Sister
Salonike
Smith & Vine
Videomania
PARK SLOPE
7th Ave. Kids Books
7th Ave. Books
Bierkraft
Beacon’s Closet
Brooklyn Industries
Bklyn Superhero Supply
Community Bookstore
409 Atlantic Ave.
347 Atlantic Ave.
494 Atlantic Ave.
514 Atlantic Ave.
205 Columbia St.
110 Union St.
286 Court St.
123 Smith St.
270 Court St.
155 Smith St.
246 Smith St.
170 Smith St.
202 7th Ave.
300 7th Ave.
191 5th Ave.
220 5th Ave.
206 5th Ave.
372 5th Ave.
143 7th Ave.
Cousin John’s Bakery
Eidolon
Girasol
Great Lakes
La Taqueria
Lucia
Ozzie’s
Scaredy Kat
Slang Betty
Southpaw
Tea Lounge
Yakatori Canteen
PROSPECT HEIGHTS
Café Shane
Gen
Half Wine Bar
Hibiscus
Housebroken
Prospect Perk Café
Ripple
Sepia
70 7th Ave.
233 5th Ave.
69 7th Ave.
284 5th Ave.
72 7th Ave.
272 5th Ave.
57 7th Ave., 249 5th Ave.
229 5th Ave.
172 5th Ave.
125 5th Ave.
837 Union St., 350 7th Ave.
131 6th Ave.
794 Washington Ave.
659 Washington Ave.
626 Vanderbilt Ave.
564 Vanderbilt Ave.
603 Vanderbilt Ave.
183 Sterling Place
769 Washington Ave.
234 Underhill Ave.
Thanks to these local businesses for supporting
independent media. Local businesses interested
in carrying the magazine should contact Carrie at
cm@stayfreemagazine.org or 718-398-9324. The above
list is in progress as we go to press. For additional places,
see www.stayfreemagazine.org.
Jenny Erickson
Whoops!
American Gentrifier isn’t a real magazine, but we think
you’ll enjoy the magazine that created it. So flip this over
and start again with Stay Free!’s first-ever Brooklyn issue.
STAY FREE! 66 ISSUE NO. 23

OUR DONORS MAKE US HAPPY
Readers often ask,
“Where do you get
your money?” to
which we respond,
“What money?”
Stay Free! is published
by volunteers on a
shoestring budget.
When we raise enough
money through
donations, ad sales,
and subscriptions,
we cover expenses.
When we don't, we
turn to crime. • Okay,
not really. But your
support keeps us
going despite some
rather daunting odds,
and, for that, we
sincerely thank you.
THE ILLUMINATI
Brewster Kahle
John Romkey
Susan Kornfield
THE MASONS
Bart Weiss
John Canning
Kembrew McLeod
KIWANIS CLUB
Aaron Goodman
Aaron P. Kruse
Acacia Duncan
Albert Brenner
Alexander Hooke
Amish Nishawala
Bertrand Grimault
Brian Baxter
Brian Merrikin
Charles Leduc
Cheryl Furjanic
Christopher Conte
Christopher Harrington
Christopher Nolan
Dan Macias
David Brinker
David Flanagan
Douglas Inglish
Evonne Hyla Wetzner
Frederic Kahler
Gretchen Skogerson
Hanno Bennert
Jaimes Valdez
James Byrnes
Jason Dowd
Jason Persse
Jeff Wishnie
Joe Estes
John Mcgrath
John Redpath
Jonathan Williams
Joshua Zyber
Julie S. Dorcey
K. B. Fisher
Kimberly Mims
Laura Teodosio
Lawrence Baca
Lee Anne Schmitt
Marc Perlman
Mark Gondree
Matt Fee
Matthew Fantaci
Michael Mcdermott
Michael Terry
Neil Duncan
Ntennis Davi
Pat Johnson
Robert Newton
Robert Ovetz
Roy Batchelor
Sarah Schenck
Shannon Lamb
Stewart Foster
Stewart Foster
Susan Brown
Vikki Dempsey
Wayne Richard Hayes
William Stotler
Stay Free! is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization. Donations are tax deductible and can be made online at
stayfreemagazine.org or via mail to Stay Free!, 390 Butler Street, Third Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Donations
of $30 or more will be acknowledged in the magazine (albeit in small type); these donors will also receive
a our Illegal Art Exhibit DVD-R (including copyright-infringing videos by Eugene Mirman, Todd Haynes, and
more). The Illuminati includes donors of $300 or more; the Masons, $50–$299; Kiwanis Club, $30–$49.