Author: hankkalet

At a time when black men and women are being gunned down by law enforcement on what seems like a regular basis, a television show that focuses on the social costs of these shootings and their aftermath may seem both timely and brave. Handled properly, such a television show might just enlighten the general public.

Shots Fired is not that show. The Fox program suffers from numerous flaws — starting with its basic premise. As Shots Fired opens, we see Officer Beck, gun drawn as the camera reveals a white victim and it becomes clear that Beck is the shooter. The Justice Department is called in, an apparent effort to manage perceptions, and our stars — Sanaa Latham as federal investigator Ashe Akino and Stephan James as federal prosecutor Preston Terry — are tossed into the expected tempest. If this premise seems, well, overly determined verging on offensive in the current climate, it is. But then we get the twist — the death of a black teen, most likely at the hands of the cops, a death left uninvestigated by police — and Shots Fired plugs into the zeitgeist.

Except that it doesn’t. The premiere episode, which sets up the federal investigation of this apparently corrupt southern police force and the community’s unbridgeable racial divisions, sinks under the weight of terrible and cliched writing (including an unnecessary Akino backstory involving a custody case), and generally melodramatic storytelling. Rather than offering a groundbreaking TV moment, Shots Fired is standard-fare, if subpar, television show.

I had high hopes going in and, perhaps, the show will find its footing as it moves forward. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. Nothing offered during episode one makes this seem anything more than a pipe dream.

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South Brunswick has issued a Nixle alert announcing funeral services for Mayor Frank Gambatese, who died Friday. The viewing will be Tuesday, 3 p.m. to 8 p.m., and the funeral will take place Wednesday at 10 a.m., all at St. Cecilia’s R.C. Church, 10 Kingston Lane, Monmouth Junction.

Residents are hoping to squash a plan for a 200-unit housing complex on a 12-acre parcel off New Road – despite repeated rulings on behalf of the developer by the state Superior Court.

The property, known as the Stanton tract, is the remaining portion of a larger parcel and has been the focus of litigation and debate since the early 2000s. In 2006, the township purchased and preserved 90 acres of the property, with the remaining portion serving as a legal and political football over the last decade.

The issues at hand, according to the residents, are:

• the potential increase in traffic on an already busy two-lane New Road. A 200-unit complex, conservatively, is going to add something in the neighborhood of 200 cars to New Road, most at rush hour. Given the back-ups that already exist at Routes 1and 27, this can’t help.
• the shape of the property — i.e., like a flag, with a narrow sliver connecting the bulk of the tract to New Road. That means access to New will be via a single entry point.
• the impact on schools. More housing units is likely to mean more students, they say. (This, to me, is a stretch, and something the courts have never allowed as an argument.)
• and the potential disturbance on the adjacent Superfund site, which has been capped. Residents are worried that construction work could release “dangerous toxins and is definitely not worth the risk to health and property.”

The developer has been fighting rather tenaciously to make this happen, with several plans being floated in an effort to break through the impasse. These have included tying the project to a proposed solar farm on the adjacent landfill — a federal Superfund site — and the inclusion of affordable housing units that could be used to meet the township’s obligation, which the the courts have set at nearly 1,400 units, pending further challenges. That’s a lot of units, and the Stanton Girard plan purports to help the township meet the challenge.

I’m not buying it, but I’m also concerned that the township maybe turning away from what has been one of the more admirable records on affordable housing in the state. Thanks to failures by the state Council on Affordable Housing (its various attempts to quantify need and spread responsibility throughout the state were overly complicated, often unrealistic, and resulted in significant pushback) and multiple governors (Chris Christie’s hostility to COAH and the Mount Laurel rules is legendary), municipalities like South Brunswick were left with little direction, even as the need for housing continued to grow. The result has been a messy attempt to require towns to squeeze 20 years of new housing needs into a new plan.

I’ve spent much of the last five years reporting and writing about those at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder — those on state and federal food aid, in homeless camps and shelters, immigrants who have had their wages stolen. Some of these people work in the warehouses along the N.J. Turnpike and deserve better housing than the often subpar apartments they are forced to rent. The amount Laurel decisions and the Fair Housing Act were meant to address this.

South Brunswick must maintain its commitment to building low-income housing and should work with other communities to spread it around the New Jersey, helping to alter the landscape in what is one of the most segregated states in the country.

All of this might point toward approval of the Stanton Girard plan — except that the 12-acre parcel in question is just too small, lacks functional access (without taking property from its neighbors), and will create more problems than it will solve and should be denied. (You can add your voice to the opposition by signing the petition here.

We also need to be realistic. Save purchasing the property and preserving it via a deed restriction, something will be built there. We need to determine what makes the most sense — perhaps a smaller, all-affordable complex — and offer that alternative to the courts.

These are my initial thoughts on this, so if I’ve gotten anything wrong, or neighbors — or the township or builder — have anything to add, let me know.

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The first time I met Frank Gambatese I wasn’t particularly impressed. He was running for a seat on the newly formed South Brunswick Township Council and had come to our office for an endorsement interview.

By our offices, I mean the South Brunswick Post, the paper that served the township for about 57 years before it was shuttered by its parent company — The Princeton Packet — in 2015.

First impressions rarely do anyone justice. During that first meeting, Gambatese came off as willing but not particularly knowledgeable, and we opted not to offer our endorsement — not the only time we withheld our support.

Over time, through his tireless efforts on behalf of South Brunswick, Gambatese proved himself to be a strong leader. Not that he needed to prove anything. He was sure of who he was and what he wanted to do and, in the end, he was exactly what he told us he would be: the man to steer the township through a difficult period. Gambatese was mayor when several local residents were killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. He was mayor during the several unsuccessful efforts at state tax reform that shifted the pain for bad state decisions down to local governments. He helped the township weather a recession.

While I did not agree with every decision — as the chief editorial writer for the Post, I was often critical of the council — I think it’s fair to say he deserves high marks for his overall effort, the work he did, and the things he accomplished — proving my initial judgments wrong.

In the end, I considered Gambatese,who died last night, more than just an acquaintance made during my time as a reporter and editor. He was a friend, and he’ll be missed — by me and by the 45,000 residents of my hometown, whether they knew him in person or only by name.

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The great Paul Muldoon will be reading at Labyrinth Books in Princeton on Tuesday to celebrate the release of a new, career-spanning anthology of his work — Selected Poems 1968-2014.

We corresponded by email and the result is this story in today’s Time Off. But here is a question and answer that did not make the story, but is worth considering in the Age of Trump and the reaction and intolerance that is rampant. This certainly comes out in the aggressive anti-intellectualism of the Trump supporters and others on the right, but also in the boorish and blindered behavior of many on the left. There is a tendency toward certainty rather than inquiry that is deadly for art and politics and places those of us working in the arts in peril. My question to Muldoon, however, had nothing to do with the political moment. His answer, though, captures this zeitgeist and makes it clear that it is not something we can escape.

HK: Poetry, as an art, is both incredibly popular (there probably are more people writing poetry today than at almost any point in history) and something that has been thrust to the cultural margins. Why do you think that is and what impact does this seeming contradiction have on the work that is ultimately produced?
Muldoon: There are a lot of people writing poetry but, I fear, too few reading it. The fact is that anyone can hang out a shingle with the word “poet” written on it in neon. We don’t need to offer any credentials. It’s a bit like hanging out a shingle as a “psychic.” That’s not true, for the most part, of the physician or the programmer. Leaving aside that discussion for another day, I see the present moment in US history as an important one for the poet. We need to be among those willing to try to “purify the dialect of the tribe,” as Mallarme put it. There’s certainly a lot of work to be done in that vein. I think it’s only a question of time before a writer is censored in this country. Perhaps even imprisoned. Then we’ll see PEN having to go to bat not for Azerbaijani or Albanian but American poets.

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