ORGAN GRIND
        Journalism, home & abroad          

We’ve come quite a distance from the virally virginal days of early March when we were still adjusting to certain grim realities I need not elaborate upon. Since then, the public’s psychological pendulum has swung, in some quarters at least, from caution and prudence to the reckless impulsiveness of ill-informed hoople-heads (e.g., the heavily armed, wannabe militia men who cowed the Michigan State Legislature last month). But most people aren’t reacting to the crisis in a ma

Johnny Huynh, Bushwick native and owner of Lucy's Kitchen These are, to put it lightly, keenly anxious times for the restaurant and bar business in New York. There are the hourly and/or tipped employees, the suppliers and the proprietors whose livelihoods are threatened; and then there are those who, in the weeks, months or even years leading up to Governor Cuomo’s coronavirus-related bar/restaurant closure announcement, had been in the midst of unveiling new contributions to

Let’s assume, for a moment, that blatant, vicious police brutality perpetrated against black people has only recently compelled you to put a shoulder to the stalled, sputtering Greyhound bus that is America on the seemingly interminable, blood-smeared highway to the achievement of truer racial and social justice. While there are several ways to get the leaden beast to budge, one in particular allows for march-sore feet to pause in their labor, if only for a moment - while pu

Chef Lisa Fernandes with Tom Colicchio on the set of Top Chef. Here’s a (long-winded) Jeopardy question for all you Bushwegians: “A queer Toronto-born-and-raised chef living in Bushwick with multiple seasons of Top Chef under her belt whose 5-year-old Southeast Asian-centric food truck Sweet Chili morphed into a brick-and-mortar (likewise Bushwick-based) last November and then closed following the Cuomo’s decision to shutter restaurants against the COVID19 pandemic.” The answ

L to R: Marie Estrada of Moto Distillery and Shinobu Kato, owner of Kato Sake Works For those of us born into circumstances commonly, if chauvinistically, described as “First World”, the notion of security - of being cushioned like a lot of pampered, powdered Marie Antoinettes from a pitiless, fickle and treacherous universe - is very often seen as something like a birthright. Undergirding that notion is the assumption that everything, even here in one of the industrialized d

Steve Sciacca, longtime Bushwick restauranteur (Mominette, Bushwick Bakery), takes his last name from the coastal Sicilian town from whence came his ancestors. (“Just like Vito Corleone!” you exclaim, before being sharply admonished in the most scandalized of tones for saying something so insultingly reductive.) But his newest venture, Pizzette in East Williamsburg, borrows from Sciacca’s Sicilian heritage something far more profound than a mere name; an entire philosophy of

Compared to beer and wine-making, distillation is a violent process. Where the former substances gently bubble away under fermentation’s yeasty ministrations, distillates like whiskey, gin, rum, and tequila, result from the hellish boiling of already-fermented liquids and the subsequent condensation of highly concentrated vapors. According to Colin Spoelman, founding owner of Kings County Distillery, Staten Island was the home to America’s first distillery, a nameless entity

For centuries in New York the slippery, opalescent oyster dominated the shores, their bone white shell fragments crunching underfoot. They were so ubiquitous as to be almost an afterthought, a cheap one at that, costing nothing at all before the arrival of the Dutch. That was then. Now, a plump, innocent-looking little Kumamoto from Puget Sound will easily rob you of $3.50 in even a mid-range New York restaurant. This rampant inflation...click here for the full article. #oyst

[Editor's note: The following six paragraphs were from the writer's original edit of this Bushwick Daily article - which were not included, sadly, in the final version. Enjoy!] First of all, the superficial nature of this, a cursory survey of a group of Bushwick restaurants that constitute a kind of Latin American “buffet,” cannot be overemphasized. It is the smooth rock skipping over the glassy surface of Lake Titicaca, the long, curved knife yielding a razor thin curl of or

For Brooklyn activist Fury Young, Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” proved to be an important catalyst in the creation of Die Jim Crow, a non-profit dedicated to giving currently or formerly incarcerated musicians avenues to creative self-realization. The book concerns...click here to read the full article. #diejimcrow #furyyoung #mattfink #fattmink #organgrindcom #organgrind #hiphop #prisonart #prisonhiphop #prison

Somewhere along the road of our musical acculturation, we were set upon by various forces, both sinister and benign.​ They told us what to like and what to shun, lest we lose standing in whatever playground social circle we occupied. Various sub-genres of hip-hop, r&b, and rock were safe, while country music meant permanent exile. Meanwhile, jazz and classical were so far down the musical food chain that there wasn't even a need to be warned away from them by your supposed be

Italian pop is huge in Italy, but only occasionally reaches the shores of America, gaining a foothold for a time, only to lose it. Even the country's biggest stars are only slightly more than obscure among the majority of Americans, except for icons like Andrea Bocelli, whose oeuvre straddles...click here to read the rest of the article. #GianlucaVacchi #italianmusic #italianpop #italianpopmusic #popdust #popdust #mattfink #fattmink #organgrind #organgrindcom

Blick Bassy's new album, named for the year a key figure in Cameroon's struggle to cast off the colonial yoke was murdered, reminds us that freedom, political stability, and material security remain elusive for many African countries. While many of these countries are technically free from Western control, they continue to suffer from the effects of colonialism. All this and more is expressed in 1958, produced by Feist and Manu Chao collaborator, Renaud LeTang. From a mid-tow

While it isn't the first art form to bind itself to music, cinema has arguably achieved the closest symbiosis therein. Because while musical scores for, say, Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" or Wagner's "Ring Cycle" are routinely listened to independent of dramatization, very few subway playlist includes selections from "Jurassic Park 2." The exception is the movie soundtrack consisting, mainly, of songs which exist entirely on their own. But such is...click here to read the re

Escamoles, or ant eggs, on a puree of cauliflower and parsnip, course four at Alcalde Without a doubt the jewel piercing the otherwise linty outie bellybutton of Mayor Alfaro’s recently-christened “gastronomic corridor” (being a collection of restaurants dotting Avenida Mexico between the perpetually congested Lopez Mateo and Golfo de Cortes roundabouts), Restaurante Alcalde is also a headliner on the city’s capacious culinary scene as a whole - perhaps its chief attraction,