Latest news with #TheBronx
New York Post
7 days ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Andrew Cuomo's independent run: Letters to the Editor — July 16, 2025
The Issue: Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo's decision to stay in the New York City mayoral race as an independent. It is incomprehensible that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo would even think about running for political office again at any level ('Cuo: Hell no, I won't go,' July 15). Does he think people forgot about the decisions he made during COVID that resulted in the horrible deaths of countless elderly people? His involvement in the bail-reform laws have also contributed mightily to the deaths of innocent people and diminished the quality of life in New York City. This is a man with no conscience or self-awareness who is utterly obsessed with power. He just needs to fade into obscurity so we can forget he was ever in the public eye. Robert DiNardo Farmingdale If voters don't want Zohran Mamdani, they should rally around a more competent, although flawed, Cuomo. Mayor Adams is a proven failure. Otherwise, don't complain if Mamdani wins. Robert Berk Manhattan Neither Mamdani nor Cuomo are deserving of the mayorship. However, Adams and Curtis Sliwa need to drop out of the race for mayor and support Cuomo if they truly have the best interests for New Yorkers. Edwin Young The Bronx Why don't Adams and Cuomo swallow their pride and do the right thing for New York City? They should flip a coin or cut cards and whoever loses should support the other candidate. If they truly want to prevent Zohran Mamdani — who is supported by the dumbest of our city — from becoming mayor and completely destroying our city, they will do this for New York. Joseph Napoleone Richmond Hill Cuomo and Adams just don't know when it's time to quit. Cuomo got caught up in a scandal, and Adams got caught up in corruption. They both should go off into the sunset. Sadly, they are not smart enough to do that. Gene O'Brien Whitestone Looks like NYC is going to have a socialist mayor. The once-greatest city in the world will be no more — no thanks to Andrew Cuomo, who is a disgrace. Under his watch, 15,000 nursing-home patients died from COVID and many of his staffers claim they were sexually harassed. He's also known for saying America 'was never that great.' J.R. Cummings Manhattan It's typical of Cuomo and his ego to think he's still relevant to voters. The Cuomo name was ultimately dishonored with his lack of sexual control. I am not a fan of Adams, but unfortunately New York City is so mired in Democratic politics that the chances for Sliwa are slim. Kevin Judge Naples, Fla. The Issue: A fired pediatrician's apology for saying Texas flood victims got 'what they voted for.' The Texas pediatrician, Christina Propst — who heartlessly commented that the flood victims got what they deserved for voting for President Trump — is now trying to take back her shameless remark ('Oh doc, Cry me a river,' July 11). She is saying she didn't know there were any victims when she posted these remarks. Sorry, but that won't fly. Did she expect that there would be no casualties after all that flooding? Warren Goldfein Mount Arlington, NJ This doesn't surprise me; Trump Derangement Syndrome knows no bounds. Propst's apology is weak and transparent. Even if she didn't know about so many dying, it is still absolutely horrible to wish terrible things on people who don't agree with you politically. I am sure glad she was never my kid's pediatrician. Chris Plate Waterloo Want to weigh in on today's stories? Send your thoughts (along with your full name and city of residence) to letters@ Letters are subject to editing for clarity, length, accuracy, and style.
Forbes
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Frankey Smith On Comics, Culture, And Carving Space For Diverse Voices
Frankey Smith While it's true that superheroes are fictional beings, that doesn't mean there aren't everyday people who are using their own natural gifts or superpowers to create change. That happens to be the case for Frankey Smith, also known as Fantastic Frankey, whose gift of storytelling puts her in a league all of her own. Hailing from The Bronx, Smith currently serves as the co-host of DC Studios Showcase: The Official Podcast, a joint venture with DC & DC Studios & the streaming giant Max. In this role, Smith, alongside co-hosts Tyler Coates and Coy Jandreau, regularly delves into the expansive universe of DC Comics through a unique blend of cultural commentary that combines humor with history. For the New York City native, it's the culmination of a longtime dream she's had.'I've been working for years to be a host of a talk show, and on my list of goals was to work with DC. It's been my favorite comic book company since I was a child, but for a long time, it was just a goal that I said, not thinking I would actually get it,' Smith said. 'To be recognized for my work and to be told that they loved me, my personality, and the way that I spoke, which was so starkly different from everything else that I've seen in this space, truly felt like I accomplished my dream.'Frankey Smith While Smith continues to lean into authenticity within this role and beyond, she wants to continue using her platform to amplify the voices of other diverse individuals. The comic book aficionado considers the position an honor while noting there's still more work to be done in the fight for inclusion.'Honestly, when I began, I wasn't sure that there would be space in this world, and oftentimes I wonder if there still is. But what I will say is that people are looking for something different, especially in the fandom as it continues to grow,' Smith told ForbesBLK. 'It's becoming more diverse, and throughout all the noise, I believe that I have the thickest skin and the loudest mouth, and that's afforded me a leading role in the fight for inclusion in the space. I'm incredibly honored that people put their trust in me and value my input, and I know the work isn't done, but I'm ready not only to continue to lead in the space but to help normalize voices like mine here as well.' FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia LadderWhen it comes to taking the reins on such a colossal platform, Smith is afforded the opportunity to showcase her own superpowers. According to the pop culture pundit, it's her willingness to showcase her true self within her content.'I think showcasing myself is what allows my content to be so multidimensional because I'm a multidimensional person with different interests. I have different views and understand nuance, and a lot of people are the same way,' Smith said. 'I'm in a position where I give my take on topics, highlighting the things where I can spread my net wide because I have an eclectic taste. That's how I've been able to build my following because I have followers who only follow me to hear my thoughts on Comics, while I have others who want to hear my thoughts on other subjects. All of those are part of who I am and what I enjoy, and that makes it easy not to have to box myself in because it's all part of being in a community.'Frankey Smith As Smith continues to shine in accomplishing her dreams, her life's journey isn't without obstacles. In fact, just a few years ago, a professional hiccup unexpectedly led her to hone in on her own ambitions.'I think my biggest rejection or 'no' was getting laid off during the pandemic. I had an opportunity to stay at my job and get paid less in another position, and when I asked to make the same that I was making previously, the answer was no,' Smith said. 'It really put things into perspective for me. I dedicated a significant amount of time to the company and received numerous accolades, but in the end, it didn't mean much. It empowered me to focus on myself and the things I loved, instead of building a company with its own goals. I ended up taking the severance package and decided it's now or never; I'm not sure where my career would've gone if I didn't have the space during that time to really lock in.'As Smith continues to bring her whole self to the world of DC Comics, she encourages others who come through the door she's opened to be themselves and stay true to who they are.'My advice to the next Fantastic Frankey is always to be yourself because that's what makes you special and that's what makes people want to be involved with you. People want to see different perspectives and to see themselves reflected in the media they consume, and more importantly, they want people to highlight things that only individuals from their community would notice. So, set a goal, figure out how to get to that goal, and then drown out all the noise because what works for someone else may not work for you.'
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Bronx Museum Picks New Leader
The Bronx Museum of the Arts on Thursday announced the appointment of Shamim Momin as its director and chief curator. Momin, most recently director of curatorial affairs at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and co-founder of Los Angeles Nomadic Division, succeeds Klaudio Rodriguez, who left his executive director post last August. Momin will begin the job in early September, amid a $42.9 million expansion and renovation that is underway and which is expected to be unveiled in fall 2026. She was selected from more than 50 candidates in a nationwide search, said the board chair, Joseph Mizzi. 'We were really looking for an impact player, somebody that was ready to hit the ground running,' Mizzi said. 'We believe with Shamim there is zero learning curve. She has the experience and her work has aligned with the work of the museum.' In an interview, Momin acknowledged the tenuousness around support for the arts in the current political climate but said that only made her want this job more. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Forbes
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Seanchaí, NYC's Underground ‘Irish Rebel Hip-Hop' Group, Is Back
Seanchaí, New York City's influential underground 'Irish rebel hip-hop' group, is back again after a twelve-year hiatus. Fronted by Chris Byrne, cofounder of New York's legendary Celtic punk band, Black 47, Seanchaí also features Ursula Garry, a talented vocalist and flutist who trained under Martin Mulvihill and Jack Coen, and the band's multi-instrumentalist beatmaker, Andrew Harkin. Recently, Seanchaí played an acclaimed series of sold-out Manhattan shows at Ernie O'Malley's. This Saturday, they will be bringing their groundbreaking mix of politically-inflected punk, electronic beats, traditional Irish music, and hip-hop lyricism to rap's birthplace, The Bronx. Seanchaí performs a sold-out show at The Speakeasy at Ernie O'Malley's in 2025. Seanchaí Seanchaí is the Irish term for a storyteller, someone who preserves and recounts communal histories, traditions, and folklore. In Gaelic Ireland, though, seanchaithe (oral historians) had formal status as such in social order alongside ollaim (scholars), filí (poets), and baird (bards). British rule dispossessed seanchaithe of their status, although they remained unofficial – and sometimes countercultural – custodians of collective memory among ordinary people. The seanchaí is thus a paradoxical figure, one mediated by centuries of colonial history, who can speak from both the political margins and cultural centre simultaneously, and whose speech can be both radical and profoundly conscious of tradition. Storyteller Michael Heeney relates a fairy tale in Gaelic to a gathering of villagers in a cottage in Teelin, County Donegal, March 1947. The local word for a storyteller is 'seanchai' or 'shanachie'. Original Publication : Picture Post - 4338 - The Irish Story Teller - pub. 15th March 1947(Photo by Haywood Magee/Picture Post/) Getty Images 'For me,' Byrne reflects, 'the songs that I listen to, whether that's Joe Heaney singing or 'It's a Good Day' by Shungudzo or Grandmaster Flash's 'The Message' when it came out hit me straight away. When it comes to the words, a good story is a good story. Good stories are told well.' If overproduced, commercialized songs play tag with a fleeting moment of pop culture, music with a seanchaí-storytelling ethos often borders the avant-garde because of its willingness to see surprising continuities between the past and present. 'The timing of our return,' Byrne remarks, 'means different things to different people. For Andrew, it's the political atmosphere, and it's not lost on me that there's a very successful Irish-language rap group now. Unlike the generation Kneecap comes from, our generation grew up afraid of hip-hop. We were like a nightmare to them.' LONDON, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 08: Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and DJ Próvaí of Kneecap attend the 27th British Independent Film Awards at The Roundhouse on December 08, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage) Samir Hussein/WireImage In a sense, Kneecap's confrontational postcolonial aesthetic involves historically-minded performances as seanchaithe. Similarly, Sinead O'Connor positioned herself as public, populist seanchaí in songs like 'Famine,' a beat-driven lesson on The Great Hunger, as does Damien Dempsey in his multi-genre performance project, Tales from Holywell . In all these cases, assuming the traditional role of storyteller-historian goes hand-in-hand with an openness to seemingly 'nontraditional' musical forms for Irish music such as rap, reggae, or electronica. 'A lot of Chris's songs are educational,' Garry reflects. Byrne's lyrics present lessons from the Irish and Irish-American legacies of colonial repression, diaspora, revolution, generational urban life, and working-class politics. One song celebrates Ernesto Guevara Lynch. Another retells the story of Gypo Nolan from Liam O'Flaherty's 1925 novel, The Informer . Yet another reminds us that American military-industrial elites 'have never had it so good since the Gilded Age / Raising an army / Not the minimum wage.' A poster for John Ford's 1935 drama 'The Informer' starring Victor McLaglen and Heather Angel. (Photo by Movie Poster) Getty Images If these are a seanchaí's lessons in terms of content , Seanchaí demonstrates an important point about how the forms of Irish music evolve. Diasporic cultures tend to bridge the felt distance between home and away, past and present, self and other, with a kind of experimental traditionalism. Take Jean-Michel Basquiat for model, whose exploration of a repertoire of ideas was firmly rooted in 'suggestive dichotomies' between 1980s NYC and a panoply of heroic figures, saints, and kings that evoked Catholic Haitian traditions. 'A lot of my politics in terms of writing,' Byrne remarks, 'came from Sandinista by The Clash. I revisit it every few years.' But for the NYC-based Byrne, NYC-based rap like 'The Message' made 'the most punk sense of anything else I'd heard at the time. So that's what we set out to so, break down all the rules. Why not just do it all if you can?' Seanchaí promotional poster from April 2025. Seanchaí There are continuities between, say, Fontaines DC's 'Big,' The Jim Carroll Band's 'Catholic Boy,' and Seanchaí's 'Irish Catholic Boy,' that speak to free circulation of shared expressive language across geographical distances and generations rather than centres and margins of cultural influence. The same might be said of Seanchaí's defiant 'Fenians,' penned by Byrne – an ex-NYC cop – and famously played on loop overnight at a West Belfast radio station. Like Black 47 before it, Seanchaí educates its fans, but not in the sense of asking pupils to re-present the lessons of a schoolmaster on command. 'When something moves me,' Garry reflects, 'it's more about someone's voice. What we're doing is clearly giving people something that's fun to dance to or listen to, but they don't know they're being educated,' at least in a conventional sense. If education is potentially liberatory, it is only so when it involves active participation. This is a point made by radical educators like Paulo Freire, who draws a stark distinction between the 'banking' and 'problem-posing' models of education, or Augusto Boal's 'Theatre of the Oppressed,' which asks audience members to actively participate in the direction of dramatic storytelling and performance. BOSTON, MA -July 2006: (MANDATORY CREDIT) Black 47 performs. July 2006 in Boston. (Photo by) Getty Images Part of the necessary creative and social risk assumed in Seanchaí's experimental traditionalism is that you will get shaken from placing yourself or others into simple categories. 'If James Connolly were alive today,' Byrne stresses, 'I don't see him campaigning for a lot of people running for office at the moment,' an important reflection in a fraught New York City election year. 'I've always tried to keep with a philosophy of presenting really good thinkers who went against the status quo but didn't put on a jersey. It's a lot harder in 2025, presenting the case of really good thinkers without saying you're on the team.' Celtic Rock musician Chris Byrne, of the group Black 47, plays uilleann pipes as he performs onstage at Paddy Reilly's Music Bar, New York, New York, January 1, 1992. (Photo by) Getty Images And part of Seanchaí's experiment involves seeing what tradition becomes in the hands of an audience this year. Byrne is the former owner of the legendary NYC bar, Rocky O'Sullivan's, which hosted writers such as Jimmy Breslin, Roddy Doyle, Frank McCourt, and Edna O'Brien. It is not surprising that Seanchaí is performing at New York venues that further freewheeling conversations about Irish and Irish-American culture, such as Ernie O'Malley's or The Burren Public House, which regularly host notable writers, storytelling events, and original performances with an edge. Playwright and WBAI personality, John McDonagh, hosts 'Say It Ain't So' at Ernie O'Malley's. John McDonagh 'It just struck me,' Byrne reflects. 'I don't know if we're changing people's perspectives or vice versa. They don't want to kill us now. They're my people. I know them. I know their politics. And people in general know that society's screwed. And people like to dance.' Ar ais arís – Seanchaí is back again. They will be performing this Saturday at 9pm at The Burren Public House, located at 4342 Katonah Avenue in The Bronx. Limited tickets are available on Eventbrite here.
