The Rogovoy Report 12.23.24

From around the corner to around the globe...

Dec 22, 2024

Have you enjoyed this free, highly curated, weekly digest of local, regional, national and international news, reviews, features, and analysis? And its weekly companion, the Berkshire and Hudson Valley Weekly Cultural Preview? If so then perhaps you might consider kicking off the New Year with a voluntary paid subscription to The Rogovoy Report to help support and sustain my efforts. Thanks and best wishes for the holiday season and the new year.

REQUIRED READING

How Walter Benjamin’s Iconic Antifascist Essay Escaped Europe

(LitHub) - Portbou, a provincial Catalonian fishing village of only a thousand souls framed by steep hills descending towards the temperate Mediterranean, is situated where the eastern most part of Spain kisses France. That is where the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin ingested a fatal dose of morphine tablets in a dingy room at the Hotel de Francia near the town’s gothic cathedral square, believing that the Falangists were about to deport him back to Vichy France where he’d be turned over to the Gestapo. Benjamin, along with other German intellectual luminaries including Herman Hesse and Bertholt Brecht, had been struggling over the Pyrenees for months with the intent to make it to Portugal where they could then sail to the United States. On September 26th, however, the forty-eight-year-old Benjamin had learned that by Franco’s orders the border would be sealed beyond Portbou and refugees were to be returned to the Reich’s authority. Contemplating the necessity of rational self-extinction, Benjamin understandably opted for the poppy. Benjamin entrusted his hallucinatory and oracular, prophetic and profound final essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” to his friend the philosopher Hannah Arendt before he committed suicide. She was able to escape Europe, supposedly reading passages from Benjamin’s final essay to her fellow Jewish exiles aboard the S.S. Guine as it made its way across the frigid north Atlantic towards New York.

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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Composer and recording artist Paul de Jong of North Adams, Mass.

Old Voice Mails? Instructional VHS Tapes? They’re Music to His Ears.

(NYT) NORTH ADAMS, Mass. - Paul de Jong was busy digitizing “Doug Wead Narrates the Promises,” a 1981 reading of Bible scriptures on cassette. It was a drizzly November afternoon, and he was deep into the Book of Job. Outside his studio in North Adams, Mass., the darkening Berkshire Mountains loomed. De Jong, 60, is a Dutch American artist best known as a member of the collage-pop duo the Books, alongside Nick Zammuto. The band broke up in 2012, but de Jong continues to make collage music under his own name, and the raw material fills the main room of his high-ceilinged studio. The walls are lined with towering shelves crammed with vinyl, cassettes and VHS tapes that make up, as de Jong puts it “the fringes of the world of media.”

READ MORE:

Paul Winter Consort still gets solstice music, and its mood, right (ATU)

Berkshire Bach Society brings 'Bach at New Year's' to Mahaiwe (iBerkshires)

Lee songwriter series aims to give a voice to Berkshires’ newest artists (Berkshire Edge)

The Local in Saugerties announces early 2025 performance lineup (Daily Freeman)

Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill receives artwork painted by Sarah Cole (Daily Freeman)

NEWS FROM THE BERKSHIRES

Lenox School Officials and Police Investigate Swastika Found on Whiteboard of a High School Classroom

(Berkshire Eagle) LENOX, Mass. - School officials and police are investigating the recent discovery of a swastika in a Lenox Memorial Middle and High School classroom. The antisemitic symbol was found scrawled on a whiteboard in one of the high school classrooms. Last April, the Anti-Defamation League issued a report on hate incidents in Berkshire County. The report cited a swastika and antisemitic comments drawn in a boys bathroom stall in May 2023 at Monument Mountain Regional High School; antisemitic slurs directed at a Jewish teacher at Nessacus Regional Middle School in Dalton, also in May; and swastikas and anti-LGBTQ+ slurs targeting a student at Lenox Memorial Middle and High School, found in April 2023. The ADL report stated that the number of incidents deemed antisemitic in 2023 were the highest ever recorded in Berkshire County and statewide.

READ MORE:

Sunday morning shooting in Williamstown leads to college campus lockdown (Berkshire Eagle) Read also, Williamstown police looking for suspects after Cole Avenue shooting (iBerkshires)

Pittsfield Mayor, Superintendent respond to outcry over scandals at Pittsfield High School: 'I had no clue' (WAMC)

Angel Breault didn’t set out to go viral. But her video has turned Pittsfield and its school system upside down (B Eagle)

Lawsuit by Pittsfield High student details alleged sexual harassment by English teacher who retired in June (B Eagle)

A third Pittsfield High School staffer is now on leave due to a pending investigation (WAMC)

Selectboard votes to hire attorney for acquisition negotiations with Housatonic Water Works; not everyone pleased with selection (Berkshire Edge)

Developer revives proposal for a major hotel and residential project at the former DeSisto School property in Stockbridge (B Eagle)

NEWS FROM THE HUDSON VALLEY

The Fraught History of Catskills Water Quenching New York City Thirst

(ATU) THE CATSKILLS - In October, the latest battle in a century-long skirmish between the Catskills and New York City over water ended up a win for the upstaters. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection agreed to end land purchases in most of the Catskills region, “winding down a decades-long program that has protected the watershed of the city’s upstate reservoirs while angering many residents and local officials.” The uneasy relationship between Catskills watershed towns and New York City effectively began in November 1916, when one of the most expensive and challenging infrastructure projects in state (and perhaps world) history first delivered water to Manhattan. The aqueduct system was “one of the most notable engineering enterprises ever undertaken,” Harper’s magazine crowed in 1909. “Ranking with the inter-oceanic canals at Suez and Panama, the Assuan irrigation works in Egypt, and the projects which are converting western America’s (land) wastes into fruitful fields, the Catskill aqueduct, with its tributary reservoirs, probably surpasses any one of them in the variety of problems to be solved.”

READ MORE:

Furgary shacks plan presented to Hudson city council (HV360)

Hudson Development Corporation (HDC) backs out of purchase of J.L. Edwards school due to staggering cost of asbestos and mold remediation in the building (HV360) Read also, The End of Due Diligence (GoR)

Developer presents revised plans for Hudson public housing complex redevelopment (HV360)

Hudson holds final comprehensive plan workshop meeting (HV360)

Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan returns from summit against antisemitism (WAMC)

Despite new signs, confusion remains at Albany International Airport (ATU)

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