Dave’s nights are haunted, knowing that the evil ones are busy plotting out there in the dark. He listens at the doors, at the windows, and can’t hear much of anything, but he knows they’re out there. Massing.
It’s November. Hell yes they’re out there, the creeps.
Dave lives in the woods. Not the woods woods, but the Long Island exurban version – three-quarters of an acre and a terrible lot of trees. Every November they return, wave after wave, parachuting in and lying there all innocent like, the way they do. Then they start sneaking in.
There’s one now. He hadn’t even been outside yet this morning, so it’s no good pretending that the leaf had accidentally gotten snagged on his pants cuff or something. No, he’d specifically swept the entryway last night. Or maybe it was the day before. Who knows anymore, he’s so groggy from lack of sleep. He strolls casually around behind it then pounces, grabs the hideous thing by its stem, opens the door just five inches, hurls it out and slams the door fast, before the others can attack.
Two days ago Dave walked out like the guy in the movie about the birds, stepping gingerly through them all. He opened the car door and there, above the hinge, in the little space no bigger than his hand, for god’s sake, was a sleeper cell. Six or eight leaves just crammed in there, probably hoping to hitch a ride to one of their secret meetings. He cleaned them out but good. Then, yesterday morning, he opened the car door again and there was another gang of them wedged in there. “Don’t you guys get it?” he screamed. “I’m on to your tricks!” His neighbor, Mrs. Rappaport, shot him a worried look, dropped her rake and scurried inside.
Dave considers trying to slow his breathing. That’s what his therapist advised. “This November, Dave, why not try meditating?” he said. “Close your eyes and think peaceful thoughts.”
Dave said he would but he knew he wouldn’t because as soon as he closes his eyes they start trying to work their way into the house again. He’d found one in his jacket pocket that very morning. In his jacket pocket. The fiend.
“Dave, they’re leaves,” the therapist said. “They’re dead.”
Undead, Dave thought.
“They’re not out to get you.”
Then why do they keep coming, Dave wanted to ask. He gets them all raked up and things are okay for a while and then they come for him again. He was about to say that but then he looked down and saw one clinging to his therapist’s sock. Oh god, he thought. It heard everything. Or maybe ... maybe they’re working together. Mind control. The creeps never stop. Dave hadn’t been back to the therapist since then.
Dave goes into the kitchen to make a soothing cup of tea. He’s about to put the kettle under the faucet when he sees it – a leaf floating in the little space between the storm window and the inside window. There was no leaf there last night. It’s fluttering – taunting him. No, wait – it’s stuck! Somehow it had breached the outer window and was on its way in but had gotten caught on a spider web. “Ha!” Dave howls. “Got you, you bastard!” Dave never kills spiders for this purpose; they’re a key part of his border guard. In fact, when he finds one in the garage, he transplants it to the windows.
Dave opens the kitchen window and carefully clasps the leaf with a pair of salad tongs, trying to damage the web as little as possible. He carries it toward the front door to throw it out but stops dead. Blood drains from his face. Impossible. There. Right there. Another leaf on the floor. He’d just cleared that sector, for god’s sake. Dave takes off his slipper and begins pounding the leaf but it’s fairly fresh and keeps springing back instead of crumbling. Dave gives it grudging respect; this zombie can take a lick.
That’s how Dave’s wife finds him when she comes down the stairs: on his knees, one hand slamming a leaf on the floor with a slipper, the other hand clutching a leaf with a pair of salad tongs.
“Hi honey,” she says, stopping and pirouetting so he can check her for stowaways. They’d been through many Novembers together.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Kapell's up-tempo idea to foil foreclosure
My old songwriting buddy W.T. Davidson has a great heartbreak song that contains the hook, “Two people who need each other / are sittin’ alone tonight.”
He might be surprised to find that his lyric crystallizes a possible solution to the housing-mortgage crisis that’s hobbling our economy.
The idea is basically a way around the stark negativity of foreclosure. As it stands, millions of Americans, unable to afford their mortgages, are being forced out of their homes, which then creates two problems: homeless former occupants and unoccupied houses generating no income. In other words, people and homes who need each other are sittin’ all alone tonight.
Into this dilemma recently stepped David Kapell of Greenport, the village’s former mayor and, by the way, a musician himself, having learned bass from Sly Stone. Kapell is known around the North Fork as a problem solver who’s not afraid of bold moves, such as disbanding his village’s police force and court. Moves like that created major stirs in Greenport but ended up slashing the tax rate 60 percent, making possible the creation of Mitchell Park, with its carousel, etc., another controversial matter but one that even detractors agree was an economic catapult.
A while ago Kapell, a realtor by trade, came up with a way to do something about the dysfunction of foreclosure. “The theory is this,” he said by phone. “There’s a large percentage of people in foreclosure or at risk who arguably could never afford the houses they’re in. What do you do with them? If you put them out on the street they just have to look for someplace to rent while their house ends up blighting the neighborhood. Why not turn them into tenants?” Tenants in their own homes, that is.
In addition to sparing the owners the misery of eviction, it would also keep at least some money coming to the lender. A third big benefit would be the creation, through rent levels, of a way of evaluating properties.
That conversion of unpaid mortgages to paid rent, Kapell said, “would have a profound effect [by establishing] values of the so-called toxic debt underlying these properties,” the lack of which continues to hobble the economy.
Kapell has always been comfortable on the wonk side of politics. He started his government career as Greenport’s community development director and became locally famous for success in grant writing. In 2003, while still serving as mayor, he completed a one-year master’s program in public administration at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Among those he contacted about the “foreclosure-leaseback solution,” as it’s being called, was Noam Chomsky, under whom he took a course at MIT in 2003 and with whom he’s kept in touch.
Word also reached Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, who, it turned out, had been working on the same idea. They exchanged e-mails, Baker’s ending with the remark, “We’ll see if this goes anywhere.”
The anywhere they’re hoping for is a new federal policy, and in fact there’s a chance. “U.S. government officials are weighing a plan that would let borrowers who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments avoid eviction by renting their homes instead,” began a recent Reuters story.
“The idea is so simple, I was afraid it wasn’t real,” Kapell told me the other day. “But I’ve learned that many times the most complicated problems have very simple answers.”
Baker offered a similar thought in the Reuters story. “It is a very simple, clean way to help these people,” he said. The story noted that he had discussed the idea with White House officials.
Reached in Washington, Baker said his idea and Kapell’s are aligned, and he harbors some hope that the Obama administration might put a version into play. Like Kapell, he thinks a major selling point is the valuation via rentals component.
“It’s why I was able to recognize the housing bubble,” Baker said. While house prices were soaring in the buildup to the smackdown, rents were not. If lenders had based their thinking on the reality of the rental market vs. the cotton candy of puffed-up purchase prices, “this wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / July 31, 2009
He might be surprised to find that his lyric crystallizes a possible solution to the housing-mortgage crisis that’s hobbling our economy.
The idea is basically a way around the stark negativity of foreclosure. As it stands, millions of Americans, unable to afford their mortgages, are being forced out of their homes, which then creates two problems: homeless former occupants and unoccupied houses generating no income. In other words, people and homes who need each other are sittin’ all alone tonight.
Into this dilemma recently stepped David Kapell of Greenport, the village’s former mayor and, by the way, a musician himself, having learned bass from Sly Stone. Kapell is known around the North Fork as a problem solver who’s not afraid of bold moves, such as disbanding his village’s police force and court. Moves like that created major stirs in Greenport but ended up slashing the tax rate 60 percent, making possible the creation of Mitchell Park, with its carousel, etc., another controversial matter but one that even detractors agree was an economic catapult.
A while ago Kapell, a realtor by trade, came up with a way to do something about the dysfunction of foreclosure. “The theory is this,” he said by phone. “There’s a large percentage of people in foreclosure or at risk who arguably could never afford the houses they’re in. What do you do with them? If you put them out on the street they just have to look for someplace to rent while their house ends up blighting the neighborhood. Why not turn them into tenants?” Tenants in their own homes, that is.
In addition to sparing the owners the misery of eviction, it would also keep at least some money coming to the lender. A third big benefit would be the creation, through rent levels, of a way of evaluating properties.
That conversion of unpaid mortgages to paid rent, Kapell said, “would have a profound effect [by establishing] values of the so-called toxic debt underlying these properties,” the lack of which continues to hobble the economy.
Kapell has always been comfortable on the wonk side of politics. He started his government career as Greenport’s community development director and became locally famous for success in grant writing. In 2003, while still serving as mayor, he completed a one-year master’s program in public administration at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Among those he contacted about the “foreclosure-leaseback solution,” as it’s being called, was Noam Chomsky, under whom he took a course at MIT in 2003 and with whom he’s kept in touch.
Word also reached Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, who, it turned out, had been working on the same idea. They exchanged e-mails, Baker’s ending with the remark, “We’ll see if this goes anywhere.”
The anywhere they’re hoping for is a new federal policy, and in fact there’s a chance. “U.S. government officials are weighing a plan that would let borrowers who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments avoid eviction by renting their homes instead,” began a recent Reuters story.
“The idea is so simple, I was afraid it wasn’t real,” Kapell told me the other day. “But I’ve learned that many times the most complicated problems have very simple answers.”
Baker offered a similar thought in the Reuters story. “It is a very simple, clean way to help these people,” he said. The story noted that he had discussed the idea with White House officials.
Reached in Washington, Baker said his idea and Kapell’s are aligned, and he harbors some hope that the Obama administration might put a version into play. Like Kapell, he thinks a major selling point is the valuation via rentals component.
“It’s why I was able to recognize the housing bubble,” Baker said. While house prices were soaring in the buildup to the smackdown, rents were not. If lenders had based their thinking on the reality of the rental market vs. the cotton candy of puffed-up purchase prices, “this wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / July 31, 2009
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Pizza-maker joins convoy of mobile merchants
Property taxes are high. Rents are brutal. In cold months shopkeepers have to pay both when many of their customers are away or snowed in. Grr.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your company could shed all that brick and mortar and simply roll free to where the business is?
Some people are doing just that.
Trucks and vans are bringing beauty parlors to your parlor. Pet groomers make the rounds with spas on wheels. Massage went mobile years ago. Auto detailers are also, fittingly, on the road.
In the Hamptons, Dr. Seth Gordon realized a while back that lots of East End vacationers didn’t have local care for their kids. “In the summer you get an influx of 200,000 kids out here, and the pediatric centers don’t have the capacity to handle them,” said the part-time East Hampton resident in a New York Times story.
“Seeing a niche,” he created a practice that has no office. Instead, he supplies something your elders might remember: house calls. His only trappings: a cell phone, a medical bag and his car. Starting small, “soon he was inundated with calls for his services,” said the Times story, and his fame and portability went viral.
What’s next? Pizza, of course.
But not just any pizza. Gourmet, wood-oven pizza baked fresh at your backyard party on the back of a fire-engine red 1943 International Harvester truck. It’s the creation of 26-year-old Matthew Michel of Greenport, and the name of his new business tells it all: “Rolling in Dough.”
Michel came to the North Fork from West Haven, Conn., and went into partnership with Barbara Michelson, then of Cutchogue, a well-known caterer and Cordon Bleu chef. “She’s brilliant,” he said. “I learned a lot from her.” Their two-year collaboration ended recently when she moved to New Hampshire.
Looking for his next venture, Michel remembered seeing a catering truck in New Haven, Conn., and, with the help of its owner, went to work on his own version. The 1943 farm truck, found on the Internet, came from Maryland. A $10,000 pizza oven was shipped from Florence, Italy. Wheeler’s Garage in Southold got the motor cranking and Ted’s Auto Body in Peconic applied the flaming paint. Michel built tables. An awning, refrigeration and a freezer were added, along with a cappuccino machine and gelato trays, and already the oven on wheels is firing up people’s imaginations.
“I’ve got 10 parties booked,” Michel said last week. And that was before the photo spread came out in Vogue. That’s right, Vogue, whose editor, Anna Wintour, saw the truck at a function, “fell in love with it and wanted to do a spread,” Michel said.
With such boosts, the young entrepreneur hopes that someday his business really will be rolling in dough. “If I had 100 parties per summer, I’d really be doing well,” he mused.
But first he had to take the leap, and it was a big one, an investment of more than $100,000 on a style of catering new to the East End. Was it scary? “Very much so,” he said. “But I’d rather do something than nothing. You’ve got to take a little risk.”
Some advisers were leery of the idea. “They thought people wouldn’t catch onto the idea of just pizza,” Michel recalled. “I disagreed.” He’d seen a similar venture succeed in Connecticut. “It works,” he said. “It’s definitely gimmicky, but it’s fun and people like to have it at a party.”
What would Michelson, his Cordon Bleu mentor, think of it all? “I think she’d be very proud of me,” he said.
A big plus for him was the minus factor – no property taxes or rent. His only overhead is gas, maintenance and permits, plus a marginal outlay for small amounts of time in earthbound kitchens doing prep work. “I skip a lot of expenses,” Michel confirmed. Finding help hasn’t been too hard, since he was able to call on friends and friends of friends who like the quirky, outdoorsy spin on the catering business.
And when the weather turns bleak and customers go south, he might migrate with them. He’s also weighing the idea of trying a season at a ski resort. When your catering hall has wheels, why not?
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / July 24, 2009
Wouldn’t it be nice if your company could shed all that brick and mortar and simply roll free to where the business is?
Some people are doing just that.
Trucks and vans are bringing beauty parlors to your parlor. Pet groomers make the rounds with spas on wheels. Massage went mobile years ago. Auto detailers are also, fittingly, on the road.
In the Hamptons, Dr. Seth Gordon realized a while back that lots of East End vacationers didn’t have local care for their kids. “In the summer you get an influx of 200,000 kids out here, and the pediatric centers don’t have the capacity to handle them,” said the part-time East Hampton resident in a New York Times story.
“Seeing a niche,” he created a practice that has no office. Instead, he supplies something your elders might remember: house calls. His only trappings: a cell phone, a medical bag and his car. Starting small, “soon he was inundated with calls for his services,” said the Times story, and his fame and portability went viral.
What’s next? Pizza, of course.
But not just any pizza. Gourmet, wood-oven pizza baked fresh at your backyard party on the back of a fire-engine red 1943 International Harvester truck. It’s the creation of 26-year-old Matthew Michel of Greenport, and the name of his new business tells it all: “Rolling in Dough.”
Michel came to the North Fork from West Haven, Conn., and went into partnership with Barbara Michelson, then of Cutchogue, a well-known caterer and Cordon Bleu chef. “She’s brilliant,” he said. “I learned a lot from her.” Their two-year collaboration ended recently when she moved to New Hampshire.
Looking for his next venture, Michel remembered seeing a catering truck in New Haven, Conn., and, with the help of its owner, went to work on his own version. The 1943 farm truck, found on the Internet, came from Maryland. A $10,000 pizza oven was shipped from Florence, Italy. Wheeler’s Garage in Southold got the motor cranking and Ted’s Auto Body in Peconic applied the flaming paint. Michel built tables. An awning, refrigeration and a freezer were added, along with a cappuccino machine and gelato trays, and already the oven on wheels is firing up people’s imaginations.
“I’ve got 10 parties booked,” Michel said last week. And that was before the photo spread came out in Vogue. That’s right, Vogue, whose editor, Anna Wintour, saw the truck at a function, “fell in love with it and wanted to do a spread,” Michel said.
With such boosts, the young entrepreneur hopes that someday his business really will be rolling in dough. “If I had 100 parties per summer, I’d really be doing well,” he mused.
But first he had to take the leap, and it was a big one, an investment of more than $100,000 on a style of catering new to the East End. Was it scary? “Very much so,” he said. “But I’d rather do something than nothing. You’ve got to take a little risk.”
Some advisers were leery of the idea. “They thought people wouldn’t catch onto the idea of just pizza,” Michel recalled. “I disagreed.” He’d seen a similar venture succeed in Connecticut. “It works,” he said. “It’s definitely gimmicky, but it’s fun and people like to have it at a party.”
What would Michelson, his Cordon Bleu mentor, think of it all? “I think she’d be very proud of me,” he said.
A big plus for him was the minus factor – no property taxes or rent. His only overhead is gas, maintenance and permits, plus a marginal outlay for small amounts of time in earthbound kitchens doing prep work. “I skip a lot of expenses,” Michel confirmed. Finding help hasn’t been too hard, since he was able to call on friends and friends of friends who like the quirky, outdoorsy spin on the catering business.
And when the weather turns bleak and customers go south, he might migrate with them. He’s also weighing the idea of trying a season at a ski resort. When your catering hall has wheels, why not?
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / July 24, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Forget the black buffaloes; there are signs of life in the bays
Pardon my paranoia, but it seems that signs and omens are everywhere abounding these days. I know people always say things like that, especially when the sky simply won’t quit raining, but it’s getting a bit overt of late.
Consider the bison. Among many Native American tribes, the birth of a white buffalo is considered an omen of peace and good fortune ahead. So what are we to make of the recent birth of not one but two extremely rare black buffaloes at North Quarter Farm in Riverhead? Will the crops fail? Is recession bound for depression? Could the Shinnecock Indian casino create a quagmire of urban blight and pestilence?
On the positive portent side, hundreds of bottlenose dolphins were recently observed frolicking in the Sound. At the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, that’s being seen as a sign of hope for the health of the Sound.
Of course, doomsayers could attribute the dolphins’ return to warming waters. People are already bewailing the Sound’s infesting plague of sea squirts, bottom-clogging filter-feeders who eat their own brains. Anybody see a Wall Street augury there?
Those attuned to aquatic signs of the apocalypse might have been struck by last week’s letter to The Suffolk Times about a supposed sheepshead caught in Southold. The writer, part-time Florida resident John Glaessgen, said it was actually a black drum, a fish much more at home in warmer waters. Glaessgen finished with a fine summation: “Nature remains mysterious.”
Gene Kelly at Montauk Sport Fishing would agree. All kinds of southern swimmers, like triggerfish and red snappers, have been turning up in East End nets, but they’ve been doing so for a long time. “Guys started catching tarpon over 30 years ago,” he said. Rod-and-reel anglers reported catching cobia and even bonefish in Great South Bay five years ago, he said.
To those who say it’s all about global warming, Kelly tends to side with Glaessgen’s “mysterious nature” position. As Exhibit A he points to the 178-pound porbeagle shark caught off Montauk a few weeks ago. This is a very northern fish, ranging up into Arctic waters. “The weather’s been colder this year, but still, it’s very, very strange.” So, based on the porbeagle portent, should we be on the lookout for global cooling?
In the end, perhaps it’s best if we do as Kim Tetrault does.
Tetrault manages (take a deep breath) the Cornell Cooperative Extension Shellfish Hatchery at the Suffolk County Marine Environmental Learning Center in Southold. On the subject of sea squirts, for instance, he said, “I’ve never seen so many.” Then he adds quickly, “But if I worry about everything, I couldn’t sleep at night.”
Tetrault and others started reseeding East End bays 15 years ago. “Nothing happened,” he said last week. Clam, scallop and oyster seedlings by the millions were sowed every year, only to die. One of the richest bays in the world had become a wet desert.
To many onlookers it started to feel like a lost cause. The seeders began to seem like a mapless army slogging along to a dismal fate. Tetrault recalls banishing that thought, saying, “We’ve just got to keep with it. One year nature will play ball.”
And then, about three years ago, he was paddling around Broadwater Cove in Cutchogue. “I looked on the banks and they were covered with oyster set,” he said. “That was the first time I’d really seen a set take hold well.”
Since then they’ve spread out, to the point where the words “Peconic Bay oysters” aren’t just sadly nostalgic anymore. More good news: “Last year’s scallop crop was the best since the brown tide.” That dark date, 1985, will be forever etched in East End minds.
But this is now, and Tetrault sees a return of “good, fresh bio film,” a kind of “slimy marine coating” that suggests life. There could also be more plankton around. And maybe the bigger bivalve broodstock has finally reached a positive tipping point. “It could just be cyclical,” he said, “but it seems to have taken hold. Nature,” Tetrault concluded with some wonderment, “seems to have rebounded.”
From all this, perhaps we can distill something called the Tetrault doctrine. It is this: Damn the omens (and frustration, and logic) – full steam ahead.
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / July 17, 2009
Consider the bison. Among many Native American tribes, the birth of a white buffalo is considered an omen of peace and good fortune ahead. So what are we to make of the recent birth of not one but two extremely rare black buffaloes at North Quarter Farm in Riverhead? Will the crops fail? Is recession bound for depression? Could the Shinnecock Indian casino create a quagmire of urban blight and pestilence?
On the positive portent side, hundreds of bottlenose dolphins were recently observed frolicking in the Sound. At the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, that’s being seen as a sign of hope for the health of the Sound.
Of course, doomsayers could attribute the dolphins’ return to warming waters. People are already bewailing the Sound’s infesting plague of sea squirts, bottom-clogging filter-feeders who eat their own brains. Anybody see a Wall Street augury there?
Those attuned to aquatic signs of the apocalypse might have been struck by last week’s letter to The Suffolk Times about a supposed sheepshead caught in Southold. The writer, part-time Florida resident John Glaessgen, said it was actually a black drum, a fish much more at home in warmer waters. Glaessgen finished with a fine summation: “Nature remains mysterious.”
Gene Kelly at Montauk Sport Fishing would agree. All kinds of southern swimmers, like triggerfish and red snappers, have been turning up in East End nets, but they’ve been doing so for a long time. “Guys started catching tarpon over 30 years ago,” he said. Rod-and-reel anglers reported catching cobia and even bonefish in Great South Bay five years ago, he said.
To those who say it’s all about global warming, Kelly tends to side with Glaessgen’s “mysterious nature” position. As Exhibit A he points to the 178-pound porbeagle shark caught off Montauk a few weeks ago. This is a very northern fish, ranging up into Arctic waters. “The weather’s been colder this year, but still, it’s very, very strange.” So, based on the porbeagle portent, should we be on the lookout for global cooling?
In the end, perhaps it’s best if we do as Kim Tetrault does.
Tetrault manages (take a deep breath) the Cornell Cooperative Extension Shellfish Hatchery at the Suffolk County Marine Environmental Learning Center in Southold. On the subject of sea squirts, for instance, he said, “I’ve never seen so many.” Then he adds quickly, “But if I worry about everything, I couldn’t sleep at night.”
Tetrault and others started reseeding East End bays 15 years ago. “Nothing happened,” he said last week. Clam, scallop and oyster seedlings by the millions were sowed every year, only to die. One of the richest bays in the world had become a wet desert.
To many onlookers it started to feel like a lost cause. The seeders began to seem like a mapless army slogging along to a dismal fate. Tetrault recalls banishing that thought, saying, “We’ve just got to keep with it. One year nature will play ball.”
And then, about three years ago, he was paddling around Broadwater Cove in Cutchogue. “I looked on the banks and they were covered with oyster set,” he said. “That was the first time I’d really seen a set take hold well.”
Since then they’ve spread out, to the point where the words “Peconic Bay oysters” aren’t just sadly nostalgic anymore. More good news: “Last year’s scallop crop was the best since the brown tide.” That dark date, 1985, will be forever etched in East End minds.
But this is now, and Tetrault sees a return of “good, fresh bio film,” a kind of “slimy marine coating” that suggests life. There could also be more plankton around. And maybe the bigger bivalve broodstock has finally reached a positive tipping point. “It could just be cyclical,” he said, “but it seems to have taken hold. Nature,” Tetrault concluded with some wonderment, “seems to have rebounded.”
From all this, perhaps we can distill something called the Tetrault doctrine. It is this: Damn the omens (and frustration, and logic) – full steam ahead.
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / July 17, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
East End wineries face the music
You’re in the tasting room of an East End winery, sampling a corpulent, jammy cabernet. Life is good. It gets even better when the guitarists in the corner start playing your favorite song, “Unchained Melody.”
But wait. A guy at the next table is writing something in a little black book.
Uh oh. You’ve just unwittingly participated in something that could end up costing the vineyard thousands of dollars. Why? Because “Unchained Melody” isn’t unchained at all.
In fact, it’s one of some 8.5 million copyrighted songs whose use is protected by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, better known as ASCAP.
In recent weeks ASCAP has been cracking down all along the East End’s wine trail. Chris Baiz of Old Field Vineyard in Southold said it began for him with a few letters offering a license that would cover use of all ASCAP songs for the one-year fee of $446. The number, based on such factors as size of venue and number of performances per week, is at the low end; some other vineyards are being charged more than double that.
Those first messages were followed last week with a mailed package noting that Old Field’s payment had not been received. To achieve harmony, the enclosed forms should be filled out and a check sent. Otherwise, unlicensed use of copyrighted material could result in damages of $750 to $30,000 per infringed-upon song, plus attorney fees and court costs.
As of last week Baiz had not written the check for a number of reasons. One is the assumption that Old Field hosts as many as three musical acts per week. “We do zero,” Baiz said.
But other vineyards do plenty. And so, in Baiz’s role as president of the Long Island Wine Council, he was planning to consult with the council’s executive director, Steve Bate.
Bate told me it all began with the Winterfest jazz series, created to help fill East End tasting rooms during the last two off-seasons. “It’s been very successful,” he said. Enough so, apparently, to catch the attention of Wendy Campbell, ASCAP’s area licensing manager.
After hearing of her stops at regional vineyards, Bate called Campbell to seek a compromise and preserve Winterfest. Perhaps a “festival fee” could cover all vineyards at a more reasonable cost. Or maybe a governmental umbrella could be created, since the event has county and state support.
So far, no luck. Meanwhile, the crackdown has stretched to winery music of all seasons, and vintners have begun trumpeting their displeasure.
“Are they trying to put us out of business?” asked the events manager at one area vineyard. “How can they control all the music played in the world? It’s going to cost more to patrol than they can collect. It’s absurd.”
Intellectual property lawyer Betty Tufariello of Mt. Sinai, who has worked for the Wine Council before, had some thoughts on that. “ASCAP is very aggressive in promoting and protecting its members,” she said. By throwing its net hard and wide, covering even small vineyards, the company seeks to protect its turf. “It’s not so much the money,” she said. “Principally, they don’t want to open a door and create a slippery slope. If they let one vineyard do it, where do they draw the line?”
She expressed sympathy for ASCAP’s herculean task of protecting its writers, but also concern for the struggles of vineyards and musicians.
To her the key question is: Do vineyards use music in a commercial nature? In her opinion, no. “They’re not selling tickets,” Tufariello said. “They’re selling wine and using the music as background.”
Yes, but they’re using something that doesn’t belong to them, said Vincent Candilora, ASCAP’s senior vice president of licensing. That can be remedied with a license, which he considers cheap for what it affords: access to 8.5 million songs. “I never understand the type of resistance we get sometimes over what is essentially such a low-cost item,” he said. “On a day-to-day basis, it’s probably less than a dollar a day.”
That’s not quite true for vineyards, which tend to offer music twice a week or so, and only during tourist seasons. But Candilora is unmoved when people lament about the struggles of the small-business person. His response: “You want to talk small-business person? Become a songwriter.”
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / July 3, 2009
But wait. A guy at the next table is writing something in a little black book.
Uh oh. You’ve just unwittingly participated in something that could end up costing the vineyard thousands of dollars. Why? Because “Unchained Melody” isn’t unchained at all.
In fact, it’s one of some 8.5 million copyrighted songs whose use is protected by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, better known as ASCAP.
In recent weeks ASCAP has been cracking down all along the East End’s wine trail. Chris Baiz of Old Field Vineyard in Southold said it began for him with a few letters offering a license that would cover use of all ASCAP songs for the one-year fee of $446. The number, based on such factors as size of venue and number of performances per week, is at the low end; some other vineyards are being charged more than double that.
Those first messages were followed last week with a mailed package noting that Old Field’s payment had not been received. To achieve harmony, the enclosed forms should be filled out and a check sent. Otherwise, unlicensed use of copyrighted material could result in damages of $750 to $30,000 per infringed-upon song, plus attorney fees and court costs.
As of last week Baiz had not written the check for a number of reasons. One is the assumption that Old Field hosts as many as three musical acts per week. “We do zero,” Baiz said.
But other vineyards do plenty. And so, in Baiz’s role as president of the Long Island Wine Council, he was planning to consult with the council’s executive director, Steve Bate.
Bate told me it all began with the Winterfest jazz series, created to help fill East End tasting rooms during the last two off-seasons. “It’s been very successful,” he said. Enough so, apparently, to catch the attention of Wendy Campbell, ASCAP’s area licensing manager.
After hearing of her stops at regional vineyards, Bate called Campbell to seek a compromise and preserve Winterfest. Perhaps a “festival fee” could cover all vineyards at a more reasonable cost. Or maybe a governmental umbrella could be created, since the event has county and state support.
So far, no luck. Meanwhile, the crackdown has stretched to winery music of all seasons, and vintners have begun trumpeting their displeasure.
“Are they trying to put us out of business?” asked the events manager at one area vineyard. “How can they control all the music played in the world? It’s going to cost more to patrol than they can collect. It’s absurd.”
Intellectual property lawyer Betty Tufariello of Mt. Sinai, who has worked for the Wine Council before, had some thoughts on that. “ASCAP is very aggressive in promoting and protecting its members,” she said. By throwing its net hard and wide, covering even small vineyards, the company seeks to protect its turf. “It’s not so much the money,” she said. “Principally, they don’t want to open a door and create a slippery slope. If they let one vineyard do it, where do they draw the line?”
She expressed sympathy for ASCAP’s herculean task of protecting its writers, but also concern for the struggles of vineyards and musicians.
To her the key question is: Do vineyards use music in a commercial nature? In her opinion, no. “They’re not selling tickets,” Tufariello said. “They’re selling wine and using the music as background.”
Yes, but they’re using something that doesn’t belong to them, said Vincent Candilora, ASCAP’s senior vice president of licensing. That can be remedied with a license, which he considers cheap for what it affords: access to 8.5 million songs. “I never understand the type of resistance we get sometimes over what is essentially such a low-cost item,” he said. “On a day-to-day basis, it’s probably less than a dollar a day.”
That’s not quite true for vineyards, which tend to offer music twice a week or so, and only during tourist seasons. But Candilora is unmoved when people lament about the struggles of the small-business person. His response: “You want to talk small-business person? Become a songwriter.”
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / July 3, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Building a better bass lure in Cutchogue
The East End has long been a proving ground for marine innovations. I guess that would make it a proving water.
One of the most notable was the USS Holland, the Navy’s first commissioned submarine, which was tested and refined in New Suffolk in the 1890s.
More recently, Chris Pickerell of Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Southold Marine Center developed “seed buoys” to promote the return of eelgrass (and thus scallops) to the bays. And not just our bays. The innovative mesh bags have been used all over the place, from the Chesapeake to San Francisco.
Now another creation is surfacing, often bringing a striped bass with it. It’s called the Bottle Darter.
“I’ve been making lures all my life,” said Larry Welcome of Cutchogue. He was 10 and living in Long Beach when he created his first by snipping a tuft of hair from his sleeping sister’s head. “[Almost] 50 years later she hasn’t forgiven me yet,” he said. On the other hand, the lure worked “worked great.”
Welcome is 58 now, retired in 2005 after 27 years as a tech specialist for Brookhaven National Lab, helping build its superconducting accelerator. When not at work through all those years, he was usually fishing.
And designing lures. The best yet is the Bottle Darter. So good that he spent six months and $5,000 patenting it, and three years and $50,000 developing it as a commercial product.
He needed a hand to make that happen. Though he built about 5,000 of the lures in his shop out of wood over the last 15 years, it took an engineer to help him make the commercial leap. As it happened, he knew one.
After church one Sunday about 15 years ago, Welcome was talking to somebody about, you guessed it, fishing, and a young man intruded. “I heard the word and I perked right up,” said Rob Koch, now 29, of Mattituck. The two would go on to become the best of fishing buddies. Along the way, as luck and fate would have it, Koch decided to become an engineer, graduating in 2002 from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Three years ago, after catching “tons and tons of fish” with Welcome’s homemade Bottle Darters, the duo decided to take the lure to market. They formed Northbar Tackle LLC, named for the famed fishing reef off Montauk, and went to work on computer modeling, eventually leading to an injection-molded plastic product.
Three weeks ago they took the prototypes to an undisclosed Sound shore location for field tests. Fifty casts with the yellow model and nothing, so Koch switched to black and purple and something very big happened. “The first cast a fish came up and just inhaled it,” he said.
Welcome, who was fishing a bit downdrift, saw the striped bass swim by. “It looked like a submarine going past me,” he said. “I never saw a fish that big landed in the surf.”
It turned out to be a 63-pounder, a personal record for Koch and a roaring debut for the new Bottle Darter.
(What’s different about it? It combines the shape and action of two great lures, Welcome said: the Montauk Darter and the Bottle Swimmer. So instead of one lure that zig-zags and another that wiggles, you one that zigs, zags and wiggles. “It really works,” said the inventor.)
“Three years of prototyping and we finally got it right,” Koch said. They took a photo of the fish, “did a high-five and said, let’s go.” Since then, 2,500 have been turned out by their manufacturer and are now in tackle shops all over the Northeast for about $18.
What struck me about this story is the blend of belief, stubbornness and good fortune that attends the birth of so many innovations.
“When I started getting into this, I was meeting guys in tackle shops and every one of them said I wouldn’t last three years,” Welcome recalled. “It was so discouraging.” But it was also “one of things just makes you dig in and say, yeah, we’ll see.”
He conceded, however, that “99 percent of the time, guys who start building lures bail out. It’s too difficult, there’s not enough money,” etc.
Welcome and Koch appear to be among the one percenters.
TOP PHOTO: Rob Koch with the 63-pound striped bass caught on the Bottle Darter prototype.
INSET: A Bottle Darter.
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / June 25, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
Recession ends at Hamptons wine auction
If, like me, you're sick of The Recession, you’re desperate enough to look anywhere for signs of The Recovery. So how about this: Somebody recently paid $11,400 for some old wine.
It happened at Christie’s Fine and Rare Wine auction in Westhampton Beach earlier this month. A case of 1989 Chateau Haut-Brion brought $11,400.
Impressive, but pale compared to the top draw, a 1982 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, which went for $20,400.
And that was for eight bottles.
Not even a case.
It was the first time Christie’s ever held a wine auction out east. “This unique auction will be held in the Hamptons at the historic Atwater Estate, built between 1900 and 1903 for coal baron William C. Atwater,” said a Christie’s promotion. Over 700 lots from around the world were offered.
“The Hamptons Sale offers several collections befitting such a regal estate,” said the announcement, “including a magnum of 1929 Moët consigned directly from the winery, large format Domaine de la Romanée-Conti [DRC], and smaller lots from boutique domaines on the Côte d’Or.”
That “extremely rare magnum” of 1929 Moet was described as “the star lot,” just released this year “to commemorate the 81st anniversary of the Academy Awards ceremony,” reported Fine Wine Journal. “The bottle’s wooden case has been autographed by Hollywood celebrities and Oscar attendees Tina Fey, Robert Downey Jr., Matthew Broderick and host Hugh Jackman.” That single bottle went for $6,000, which was donated to the Motion Picture & Television Fund.
If, as suggested above, you’re desperate for signs of The Recovery, this kind of extravagance could serve. Unemployment’s up, spending’s down, big-ticket spending’s way down, blah blah. The famed Napa Valley Vintners’ wine auction, held recently in St. Helena, pulled in about half of last year’s record amount ($5.6 million, compared to $10.3 million).
By contrast, the Atwater auction “achieved $1,199,994 and was 86 percent sold and 91 percent by value,” reported Christie’s.
“We are particularly encouraged by prices that continue to rise for the classics of the fine wine trade,” Christie’s Charles Curtis said in the announcement. “This is true of lots such as the 1982 Lafite and 1959 Margaux that led the sale, but also for wines such as the 1982 Mouton that sold near the top of the estimate, and the many lots of Burgundy from DRC that surpassed the high estimate.”
Curtis added via e-mail: “After a slight correction in prices last fall, the global wine market has been trending back upward throughout the spring auction season. At our recent Hamptons sale, we saw active participation from New York-area wine collectors, including a good number of local Hamptons residents...”
This comes in the wake of a January New York Times story, “Hard times hit auction houses,” which reported significant downsizing by both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and consolidation of various departments to save money.
So it’s possible that I’m wearing rosé-colored glasses, but could we squint hard and see the Atwater auction as a sign of hope? I asked Kathleen Coumou, vice president of Christie’s Great Estates.
“I think so,” she said. “We handle a lot of great estates in the Northeast, and I really think we’ve seen the bottom. I think Americans are extremely optimistic, and want to see things begin to move again. We’re beginning to see things trade on the high end. We’re starting to come back.”
In addition to wine, the Atwater estate itself was offered in “an unprecedented cooperation between Christie’s Wine Department and Christie’s Great Estates,” according to the company’s Web site. Despite Coumou’s positive outlook, the property didn’t sell that day, but she didn’t expect it to find a buyer as easily as the wine did.
“It’s a glorious estate,” she said, mentioning the 10 acres, the boathouse, dock, carriage house and four subdivided acres, all on the market for $29 million.
It would have been nice if somebody had bought the place and simply moved some of the Chateau Rothschild to the wine cellar, Coumou agreed. It didn’t happen, but she’s confident a buyer will come along.
Meanwhile, the auction “was a wonderful opportunity to promote the property internationally,” she said, adding that it was also a nice day for a glass of wine in the Hamptons.
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / June 18, 2009
It happened at Christie’s Fine and Rare Wine auction in Westhampton Beach earlier this month. A case of 1989 Chateau Haut-Brion brought $11,400.
Impressive, but pale compared to the top draw, a 1982 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, which went for $20,400.
And that was for eight bottles.
Not even a case.
It was the first time Christie’s ever held a wine auction out east. “This unique auction will be held in the Hamptons at the historic Atwater Estate, built between 1900 and 1903 for coal baron William C. Atwater,” said a Christie’s promotion. Over 700 lots from around the world were offered.
“The Hamptons Sale offers several collections befitting such a regal estate,” said the announcement, “including a magnum of 1929 Moët consigned directly from the winery, large format Domaine de la Romanée-Conti [DRC], and smaller lots from boutique domaines on the Côte d’Or.”
That “extremely rare magnum” of 1929 Moet was described as “the star lot,” just released this year “to commemorate the 81st anniversary of the Academy Awards ceremony,” reported Fine Wine Journal. “The bottle’s wooden case has been autographed by Hollywood celebrities and Oscar attendees Tina Fey, Robert Downey Jr., Matthew Broderick and host Hugh Jackman.” That single bottle went for $6,000, which was donated to the Motion Picture & Television Fund.
If, as suggested above, you’re desperate for signs of The Recovery, this kind of extravagance could serve. Unemployment’s up, spending’s down, big-ticket spending’s way down, blah blah. The famed Napa Valley Vintners’ wine auction, held recently in St. Helena, pulled in about half of last year’s record amount ($5.6 million, compared to $10.3 million).
By contrast, the Atwater auction “achieved $1,199,994 and was 86 percent sold and 91 percent by value,” reported Christie’s.
“We are particularly encouraged by prices that continue to rise for the classics of the fine wine trade,” Christie’s Charles Curtis said in the announcement. “This is true of lots such as the 1982 Lafite and 1959 Margaux that led the sale, but also for wines such as the 1982 Mouton that sold near the top of the estimate, and the many lots of Burgundy from DRC that surpassed the high estimate.”
Curtis added via e-mail: “After a slight correction in prices last fall, the global wine market has been trending back upward throughout the spring auction season. At our recent Hamptons sale, we saw active participation from New York-area wine collectors, including a good number of local Hamptons residents...”
This comes in the wake of a January New York Times story, “Hard times hit auction houses,” which reported significant downsizing by both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and consolidation of various departments to save money.
So it’s possible that I’m wearing rosé-colored glasses, but could we squint hard and see the Atwater auction as a sign of hope? I asked Kathleen Coumou, vice president of Christie’s Great Estates.
“I think so,” she said. “We handle a lot of great estates in the Northeast, and I really think we’ve seen the bottom. I think Americans are extremely optimistic, and want to see things begin to move again. We’re beginning to see things trade on the high end. We’re starting to come back.”
In addition to wine, the Atwater estate itself was offered in “an unprecedented cooperation between Christie’s Wine Department and Christie’s Great Estates,” according to the company’s Web site. Despite Coumou’s positive outlook, the property didn’t sell that day, but she didn’t expect it to find a buyer as easily as the wine did.
“It’s a glorious estate,” she said, mentioning the 10 acres, the boathouse, dock, carriage house and four subdivided acres, all on the market for $29 million.
It would have been nice if somebody had bought the place and simply moved some of the Chateau Rothschild to the wine cellar, Coumou agreed. It didn’t happen, but she’s confident a buyer will come along.
Meanwhile, the auction “was a wonderful opportunity to promote the property internationally,” she said, adding that it was also a nice day for a glass of wine in the Hamptons.
Jeff Miller / Long Island Business News / June 18, 2009
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