By Kiara Downey

When you live in New York City, happening upon entertainers who put every ounce of energy into a bevy of big dreams can seem like an almost daily event.  But once in a while you meet someone whose drive merges with success.  De’Adre Aziza is a local lady who seems to be making just such a union.

With infinite ambitions, she’s a singer, a dramaturg, and an actress who may be a new name to many, but she’s no stranger to the stage or to a television studio.  Currently inhabiting the role of “Bunny” in Dominque Morisseau’s new play Detroit ‘67, she is simultaneously completing work on her first solo album. She is a local girl who fell in love with performing as a teenager and many of her formative experiences explain her wide-reaching interests.

“Just call me an artist. I like art. Period,” says Aziza.  “In addition to working in front of audiences, I’ve been a script advisor, I’ve worked backstage on technical crews, and I have been an acting coach.”  In fact, that stint as a coach says much about her creative and entrepreneurial spirit.  Seeing a need and an opportunity, she approached Spike Lee when he began directing Mike Tyson’s one-man show Undisputed Truth and offered to work as the infamous boxer-turned-actor’s teacher.  This gig required her to draw upon skills she herself acquired as a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  “I actually applied to an NYU program for high school students when I was still attending the Harlem School of the Arts.  I was one of only thirty-two kids accepted into that year’s group.”

While practicing her craft at NYU, Aziza remembers seeing plays that opened her mind to the diverse, and often perplexing possibilities of live theatre.  “Without knowing who he was, I saw two plays directed by George C. Wolfe that blew me away.  I watched his productions of Jelly’s Last Jam and Angels in America, and I thought ‘who is this man?!”

Conversely, she observed some less inspirational creations; “I remember seeing a really bugged out production of Faust one time.  It was vile!  A man actually pooped on stage.”  But she fondly recalls a formative production that left a lasting impression that wasn’t so traumatizing.  The first play that really moved her was August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson with Charles Dutton and S. Epatha Merkerson.  “I was only nine, but I still have a picture in my mind of them on that stage.”

With that as a grounding image, Aziza blossomed into a daring performer (“I’m really shy – until I let the goofy beast loose”) who knows how to walk between two worlds.  As a singer, she feels undaunted: “Singers can walk around with blue hair,” she says, but as a working actress she feels she needs to look “kind of conservative.”  Drifting in and out of each reality, she has successfully combined the two.  In 2008 Aziza received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her work in the comedy-rock-drama musical Passing Strange.

Aziza intends to release her first solo soul album by 2014.  Seed funds for this endeavor began as a Kickstarter campaign and all recording sessions have to take place in between auditions and theatrical rehearsals.   It’s hard to know what this lady likes best – it could be the characters she creates or the songs she sings – she speaks of all with equal joy.  “I love the woman I get to play in Detroit ’67,” she exclaims.  “I can go deep with her, she’s a free spirit.”  The actress also appreciates the play’s weightier topics, “In this play Dominque shows how your life can change in a day.”

De’Adre begins her performances in Detroit ’67 at the Public Theatre this week and she will travel with the ensemble when they transfer to the Classical Theatre of Harlem on March 23^rd. According to Aziza, who is from New Jersey, but has “very strong Harlem roots,” the fact that the play has two different openings in Manhattan will “bring the downtown crowds uptown or it will make it possible for people to stay uptown and see it there.”  Whichever way you go, it’s likely you won’t be able to miss Miss Aziza.  She’s ready for just about anything.

See you at the theatre.

Detroit ’67 runs at the Public Theatre through March 17^th and it will be performed at The Classical Theatre of Harlem from March 23rd-April 28th.

By Angela Barbuti

Bruce Springsteen gets a lot of play—literally. Even President Obama has said, “I’m the president, but he’s the Boss.” And now, after more than 30 years of research, Peter Ames Carlin finally put his respect for the musician down on paper. Replete with interviews from Bruce’s family, the E Street Band and Bruce himself, Carlin has recorded a biography that lives up to all the hype it has generated. Bruce, released Oct. 30, has won the honor of a four-star rating from Rolling Stone. On Nov. 14, the author will be at Barnes & Noble at 18th Street to sign his book, which is the perfect holiday gift for the Bruce fan in your life.

You began writing the book in the fall of 2009, but your interest in Bruce dates back to when you went to a concert of his in 1978. 

I had been collecting material and knowledge starting as a 15-year-old, when I saw Bruce’s show in the fall of ’78 on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. The show was kind of—I don’t want to say “life changing,” that’s a bit much—but it altered my sense of music and possibility. It resonated with me, and I carried that for decades.

After a year and a half of writing on your own, Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau, called you.

I was doing research on my own with no connection at all to Bruce. I was speaking to a ton of people before that—old friends, people from Freehold and Asbury Park, and veterans from Columbia Records who were extremely eager to talk. The phone rang in January of 2011 while I was sitting in my office—my basement here in Portland—and it was Jon. We got together the next week for a drink, and from that point on, Jon became super-helpful and gave the green light to friends, collaborators and band members.

What surprised you about Bruce?

We spent a lot of time together. Everyone told me along the way that he’s pretty much exactly who you think he is. In a way, that was very true. It was clear to me from his work that he’s a very intense, complicated and, in some ways, conflicted person. He is enormously charming, but there’s also a distance around him to a degree. He wears his moods and inner tension close to the surface.

Photo by Elizabeth S. Ames

You conducted the last major interview with Clarence Clemons. What was he like?

I had a couple days’ worth of interviews with him just a couple of months before he died. Physically, he was a little compromised; he had just had another bout of surgery. He was doing a lot of physical therapy, trying to get in shape for this tour. Mentally, he was incredibly smart, funny, sensitive and intense. He had a lot to talk about and was very excited to do so, which was cool.

You list Bruce’s many accomplishments—120 million albums sold, 20 Grammys, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award. Why do you think he’s able to do so much?

Bruce is, in a lot of ways, a self-invented human being. But these threads—the energy, drive and passion—come from his mom’s side of the family. The part that helps him work onstage for three to four hours a night and pursue his art for 50 years now. His mom’s side is this very vibrant, hilarious, hard-working Italian family. His dad had a lot of emotional problems, and there has been a lot of darkness on that side of the family. The disturbance in Bruce’s soul that has branded him came through his dad’s side.

You dedicate the book to your wife, Sarah, and thank her for thinking of the title. Besides that, did she help along the way?

[Laughs] She helped me by making it okay for me to disappear for weeks on end. And there was a point halfway through the process where I quit the job I had for 10-plus years at The Oregonian. Things had gotten kind of unpleasant there for me, and I knew it was time to move on. When the Bruce thing really got rolling, I had the sense that if anything is worth throwing all your eggs in a basket for, it’s this book that no one else had the chance to do yet. My wife encouraged me to do exactly that.

You mention Café Wha? and Kenny’s Castaways as part of Bruce’s early life. What role do you see New York City as having in his development? 

Oh my gosh—a big role. As big as his earlier bands were in New Jersey and the South, they never tried to play New York for some reason. When he started building his career as a professional recording artist, that drew him to New York. His becoming familiar with it and seeing the world from that perspective transformed his sense of possibility. If you listen to “New York City Serenade” and “Incident on 57th Street,” the impact is everywhere.

Did you listen to Bruce’s music as you were writing his biography? 

Well, sure. I mean, I listened to Bruce music when I was writing about everything else over the years. [Laughs] It’s just part of my internal soundtrack.

What is your favorite Bruce song?

[Laughs] It sort of depends on the day or the hour. The songs have been part of my life on a step-by-step basis since I was a sophomore in high school. “Racing in the Streets” from Darkness. I just feel that there’s something vital in that song that comes from so deep.

What do you think the future holds for Bruce and the E Street Band?

At this point, it seems he’s very committed to the band and to keeping the group going. Bruce himself as an artist, songwriter, musician and performer—he’ll do that for the rest of his life. Because that’s who he is—it’s what makes him alive.

“Protesters have a right to speak their minds, but the exercise of the first amendment should never intimidate anyone from accessing medical care,” said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn on Friday, at City Hall.

Speaker Quinn and various Council Members, along with representatives from Planned Parenthood, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and other pro-choice organizations, gathered at City Hall last week to announce their upcoming brainchild, “The Clinic Protection Project”.  Under this program Council Members will recruit and coordinate volunteers to accompany women to abortion clinics, fielding them from particularly aggressive protesters.

Planned Parenthood and other reproductive health clinics already have “volunteer-escorts” for their patients, but they say they need more. So Speaker Quinn and others are stepping in.

The need for a supplementary service has increased in the last few years, according to pro-choice officials, because there are more protesters outside clinics, many of whom harass women attempting to use the facilities.

“In the last three years…we’ve gone from two or three protesters on a given Saturday morning, to fifty or sixty,” said CEO and President of Planned Parenthood New York, Joan Malin.

At the press conference for “The Clinic Protection Project”, the project’s engineers showed a disturbing video shot by a volunteer-escort outside the Choices Women’s Medical Clinic in Queens, New York. In the footage several pro-life demonstrators actually pin a woman trying to enter the clinic against a wall, after which she runs away in tears.

The President and CEO of Choices, Merle Hoffman, said in a phone interview that protesters outside her clinic wear vests printed with the words, “Unborn Baby Protector”, and hold signs with photographs of gas chambers from the Holocaust, and of black men being lynched. When African Americans enter the clinic, she said, the demonstrators accuse the women of committing “black genocide”. They also videotape the patients who enter, shaming them. Hoffman said one woman who came for an abortion arrived in a panic, because the picketers outside had told her that the anesthesia used in the operation was deadly.

Hoffman attributes the increase in protesters to the “rise of the radical right,” and Assemblywoman Deborah Glick said that having a pro-choice president in office has ignited the pro-life movement.

Although the details of the program are still being sketched out, Speaker Quinn said that her team will work on the recruitment and management side, and Planned Parenthood will actually train the escorts. Planned Parenthood already trains its own volunteer-escorts, educating them on the importance of utter confidentiality, adhering to a non-engagement policy with the demonstrators, and knowing which protest activities are illegal. Escorts are also taught how to record and report all pertinent unlawful behavior.

Hoffman speaks with both humor and sadness about the level of resistance her clinic has faced: “Going to the doctor has basically become a military maneuver.”

Courtesy of Choices Medical Center

The Broadway Bomb, an annual longboard “push race” from 116th Street to the Financial District, faced a restraining order Thursday when the State Supreme Court called out its lack of parade permit. The co-founder, Ian Nichols, is relinquishing responsib

Photo courtesy of Matt Werner Photography

ility for the race to avoid prosecution, but its Facebook page is insists the show must go on despite the New York Police Department’s threat to crack down on flash mobs and Bomb-resembling races.

The message reads,

“Attention all Skaters! Ian has received a summons from the City of New York. In order to avoid being prosecuted, Ian Nichols must officially cancel the Broadway Bomb and relinquish all responsibility. However, We are going to flash mob 116th Street and Broadway at 11:50AM and Start the Race at 12:00PM exactly. Get the exact time from your cellphone. Please don’t show up until 11:50AM because there may be a police presence. Please share this post with everyone in order to keep us all safe. See you there.”

In its twelfth year, the race is expected to draw 2,000 skaters in what the website describes as “the highlight of skater’s whole lives.” The idea is to beat traffic by winding past cars and stoplights—slogan “You Could Die”—but past crowds have shut down traffic altogether. The Law Department cited past activity such as “grabbing onto passing vehicles and bicycles” and “instructing vehicles which have the right of way to stop” as further justification for the order. While skaters that show up at 116th Street will be subject to arrest, the post-race barbecue will still occur since it has a permit, which is required for any gatherings of over 50 people.

Mayor Bloomberg, a billionaire and registered Independent, announced on Wednesday that over the next three weeks he will spend millions of dollars on an independent super-PAC that will support local, state and Federal candidates nationwide. His funding will go to politicians who promote tighter gun control, improving education, and legalizing same-sex marriage– and who rise above party lines in their devotion to such issues.

Bloomberg’s Deputy Mayor for Government Affairs and Communications, Howard Wolfson, will supervise the super-PAC.

“The Mayor has always stepped forward to back candidates that are willing to cast aside party politics, and candidates who are willing to stand up to special interests to make the right decisions for the people they represent,” said Wolfson. “This is a major expansion of his efforts nationally, and it’s something I am proud to be a part of.”

The mayor has stated that his money will not go to anyone based on their political party, but on their referenda. The super-PAC marks Bloomberg’s biggest effort to influence national politics, and also coincides with his final term.

Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

While New Yorkers are famously loyal to their own boroughs– Brooklynites could never imagine living in the chaos of Manhattan, Manhattanites could never imagine not living in the chaos of Manhattan–it seems that a less mainstream region of the city is filled with its most optimistic campers: Queens.

A new study by the Muncipal Art Society of New York surveyed New Yorkers in each borough on how they rated their satisfaction with their city, and how optimistic they are about its future.

According to the New York Times, Staten Island’s residents were most satisfied with their neighborhoods, with a whopping 91 percent saying they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied”.  Meanwhile 85 percent of those polled in Manhattan and Brooklyn expressed satisfaction, with 84 percent in Queens and 77 percent for the Bronx.

On the other hand, those living in Queens felt most positively about where the city is headed, with a 14% increase in optimism from last year. All in all, the poll’s findings suggest that the vast majority of New Yorkers seem to be content in their environment. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop griping!

Image courtesy of Wiki Commons.

Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 23, arrived to the United States in January on a student visa, and settled in Jamaica, Queens.  About six months later, according to court documents, Nafis attempted to recruit various men for a jihadist terrorist attack on American land. But there was a substantial glitch in his plan: one of the people he propositioned was an informer for the F.B.I.

On Wednesday, Nafis was arrested after allegedly trying to detonate what he thought was a thousand-pound bomb, in front of the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan, the F.B.I announced in a subsequent press release. The next day federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Nafis with trying to use a weapon of mass destruction and with attempting to provide material support to Al Qaeda.

The F.B.I. informer with whom Nafis worked recorded an early telephone conversation they had, in which the young Bangladeshi specified that he was living in New York City, intending to recruit more men, and alluded to “martyrdom”.  F.B.I. agents and members of the New York Police Department worked closely with Nafis throughout the rest of his planning, convincing him that he was conspiring remotely with Al Qaeda’s leaders.

One agent pretended to be an Al Qaeda member and supplied him with fake explosives, at Nafis’ behest. In August, Nafis scouted the area around the bank various times. On the day of the intended attack, Nafis drove in a van with the same undercover official to the bank, parking the car that bore the artificial bomb, the F.B.I. reported. After leaving the van in front of the bank, Nasif purportedly went to a local hotel where he recorded the video he planned to emit after the attack.

During his video, the complaint states, Nassif proclaimed, “We will not stop until we attain victory or martyrdom.”

He then tried, unsuccessfully, to set off the inert explosives by calling a cell phone he had installed as a detonator. Agents traced the calls and subsequently arrested the defendant.

After Wednesday’s arrest, the F.B.I.’s Acting Assistant Director-in-Charge, Mary Galligan, commented on the averted nightmare:  “Attempting to destroy a landmark building and kill or maim untold numbers of innocent bystanders is about as serious as the imagination can conjure.”

Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

Some day, you can explain to your children or grandchildren that Newsweek was once a printed paper.

The Newsweek Daily Beast Company’s founding editor-in-chief, Tina Brown, announced Thursday that Newsweek’s last print edition will run on December 31. The digital format will take over in early 2013, with staff reductions expected.

Newsweek’s decision comes after 80 years of print.

“This decision is not about the quality of the brand or the journalism—that is as powerful as ever,” Brown said.  “It is about the challenging economics of print publishing and distribution.”

The online version will be called Newsweek Global and accessible via paid subscription only. It will aim to cover “world events in a sophisticated context,” as did its tree-born counterpart. Brown’s announcement was largely an explanation of the company’s decision. In it she cited a study that the Pew Research Center released last month, showing that 39% of Americans say they get their news online. She added that this number will only rise in the coming years.

Brown’s statement struck a sentimental note towards the end, as she concluded:

“Exiting print is an extremely difficult moment for all of us who love the romance of print and the unique weekly camaraderie of those hectic hours before the close on Friday night. But as we head for the 80th anniversary of Newsweek next year we must sustain the journalism that gives the magazine its purpose—and embrace the all-digital future.”

Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

100 firearms were seized and sixteen gun traffickers indicted in what amounted to one of Manhattan’s biggest gun busts in the last five years, Mayor Bloomberg, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced on Friday. The confiscations came after two ongoing undercover police investigations in East Harlem. In both cases, undercover detectives purchased dozens of weapons from illegal sources.

The defendants charges include, but are not limited to, multiple counts of Criminal Sale of a Firearm in the First and Second Degrees, Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree, and Conspiracy.  At least ten of the sold guns were reportedly bought in South Carolina,  and smuggled up to New York.

“This investigation illustrates both the problem of illegal guns being purchased in other states and brought here illegally, and the skill and dedication of the NYPD officers who take the guns off the street often at great risk to themselves,” Bloomberg stated.

Thus far, two distinct trafficking rings are being charged, one headed by defendant Dario Wynerman, also known as “D,” 21, who allegedly sold a detective 34 guns. The other ring leader is thought to be Mitchel Collins, 64, an ex-con who goes by “Mickey”.

“It’s unusual to see individuals as old as Mickey Collins still engaged in criminal activity,” Police Commissioner Kelly announced.

Mickey’s network is charged with selling 73 firearms to the same undercover detective. The traffickers purportedly sold these weapons– revolvers and semiautomatic pistols– inside the lobby, stairwells, and hallways of an apartment building at 35 East 106th Street.

“There have been 127 shooting incidents this year in Manhattan, with 152 victims,” District Attorney Vance said. “Gun traffickers are bringing violence to our neighborhoods by selling illegal firearms – they are at the root of the problem of gun violence in this City.”

Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

A bellhop was arrested at the swank Bowery Hotel Wednesday evening, after the porter allegedly sold pot to a few undercover cops at the hotel. The porter, a 25-year-old Brooklynite and college graduate, has no previous criminal record, according to the New York Post. A fellow bellhop, Nick Shelton, 25, told the Post: “I feel like it was an isolated incident. He’s a good guy.’’

On Thursday night the culprit was called in front of court and released on his own recognizance, according to the Daily News. The young man accused the cops of entrapment upon his arrest, while his coworkers claimed they hadn’t known about his other line of work. The Bowery Hotel serves high-end clientele, and was no doubt a profitable market for such a business.

Photo by frangrit. Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.