Power Outages

Posted on March 26, 2021 by Harlem Shill

Last month’s power outages in Texas (Thanks deregulation!) led to the exponential use of a previously obscure website that tracks (nationally) power outages. This might be a good site to bookmark, although, the obvious ‘If the power is out, how are you going to look at it?’ question applies: https://poweroutage.us/area/regions

The site shows states with outages and allows you to drill down to look at regional, state, and local level data. Here’s what I found when I checked, 4 customers in Manhattan without power, this evening.

For information about what’s happing right now, see this link: https://poweroutage.us/area/county/2248

I Want Your Vote! (But did they vote?)

City Limits has a fascinating look at who among the mayoral candidates has had a record of voting in New York City elections.

To learn more about the complexity of age, time out of the city, and more, see the full article here:

NYC’s Mayoral Candidates Are Asking You To Show Up at the Polls. Did They?

Lex/125 New Development

GothamToGo has published a report on a new potential development at the corner of Lexington and 125th Street on the south-west corner.

Plans for the East 125th Street Apple Bank Building + Adjacent Lot Unfolding ~ East Harlem

If this project goes forward, it would mark an incredible change for this part of the Lexington and 125th Street corridors.

Drugs and Children

Posted on March 23, 2021March 19, 2021 by Harlem Shill

I Walk on Water

Filmmaker Khalik Allah has a new film – IWOW: I Walk On Water – coming in at a massive 200 minutes.

As with earlier work, Allah returns to Lex/125 and films a hallucinatory portrait of the men and women of the M35, K2, mental illness, and homelessness:

Since 2011, filmmaker and photographer Khalik Allah (Black Mother) has attracted global attention for his radiant portraits of the denizens of 125th and Lexington in East Harlem. In IWOW: I Walk On Water, Allah returns to the intersection as the foundation to explore personal narratives of intimacy, voice, memory, identity and personal transformation.
Allah focuses his attention on longtime muse Frenchie, a 60-something schizophrenic, homeless Haitian man. Over the summer of 2019, Allah and Frenchie’s lives became increasingly intertwined—a relationship that Allah documents with radical, spiritual transparency. In parallel, Allah also turns the camera on himself to document a turbulent romantic relationship and grapple with personal notions of spirituality and mortality – all inquiries about which he gathers advice from charismatic confidants including Fab 5 Freddy, members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and, in deeply moving exchanges, his own mother.
By questioning universal and personal inward dynamics, IWOW obscures the boundary between conceptual art and memoir. Sometimes painful in its vulnerability, often extremely funny in its candor, and always visually extraordinary, Allah’s one-of-a-kind, intimate epic is a contemporary rethinking of the diary film: Gordon Parks meets Jonas Mekas.