hv chronic vol ii no 2

ChroniC News For THe GreaT recessioN volume 2, No. 2 • miDDlemarcH 2009 oN THe web aT HvcHroNic.com

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If there’s one truism I’ve learned during my late-blooming career in journalism, it’s that everybody seems to love a good animal story. Indeed, the knee-

jerk popular press paid more attention to following the Obama clan’s process in choosing the requisite First Pooch (a politically and allergenically correct, shelter-rescued Portuguese water dog, as it turns out) than it did reporting on the president’s comfortingly mainstream cabinet choices. It doesn’t really matter if a critter saga’s got a happy ending; the papers fly off the newsstands just as fast when some woodsy survivalist chops his sick dog’s head off with an axe as when 20 starving calves are rescued from a veal farmer’s feces-infested death camp. I’m betting the interest level holds true for Chronic read-

In Beekman, a shelter not fit for a dog casts a long, toxic shadow

By Steve Hopkins

Mark Greene relaxes with a friend at Elephant in Uptown Kingston.

Mark Greene has an Emmy, one of the better looking of the big gold-tinted statuettes that can make the difference between an expensive

hobby and a career. His company, Pecos Design, won the 2007 Broadband Public Service Emmy Award for the animation “Big Fun With Global Warming” which it created for the Sierra Club. Mark is one of the three-dozen-odd artistic urban technophiles I met during my

Continued on Page 3

ers as well, although they’ll surely require a little more effort than my just interviewing the neighbors and para-phrasing the sheriff’s report.

With all that in mind, this will be our first attempt at a blockbuster animal yarn. It concerns a big, friendly 8-year-old yellow Lab named Eli, who, having been one of the growing legions of canine victims of the Great Re-cession, was recently rescued from puppy purgatory by a committed group of animal activists called PANT (Part-nership for Animals Needing Transition), and landed in the loving Hyde Park home of the fully employed, ethi-cally responsible Cotton family.

If ever there was an animal needing transition, it was Eli. According to PANT’s vice president and fundraising coordinator, Connie Price, the poor guy was emaciated and covered with chlorine burns from lying in pools of

the chemical left in his cage at the tragically misnamed Beekman Animal Shelter. “He had a staph infection on the stomach, because he was lying in pee and poop, and then had burns on his legs, because he had bad allergies to the chemicals in the bleach and the Pine Sol that they were using,” said Price. “Because basically they’re put-ting the animals back in on bleached surfaces that aren’t even dry. That’s like me cleaning your shower and put-ting you back in and closing the shower curtain door, and the bleach gets you right in the face. It’s not dry. And garage floors take forever to dry, unless you have fans on it.”

We’ll get to more of Eli’s thrilling escape story by and by. But first, there’s some housekeeping to do. Habitual Chronic readers will notice a trend developing: we like

My Kind of Town, Take 2Nobody’s Business By Steve Hopkins

four-year stint living on West Chestnut Street in what I like to refer to as the “Rondout Heights” neighborhood of Kingston. He and his actress wife and business part-ner, Sharron Bower Greene, and their son Gus, live in a lovely hillside home in Bohemian/Park Slopian splen-dor on what they cobble together from the freelance earnings they wring out of the technological and artistic ether. Like many of their likeminded compatriots, they are former New Yorkers who appreciate the relative af-fordability of Kingston, as well as the edgy quasi-urban sense of discomfort it provides to tweak their artistic na-tures from time to time.

The Great Recession may have put a temporary crimp in the flow of burned-out Manhattanites and Brooklynites gushing northward into the Hudson Valley to work the new global economy from a couch in a Midtown Kingston coffee shop, but the impetus is still there. Even with the price-skewing Wall Street thugs out of the way, New York City re-mains one of the most economically unforgiving places to ply one’s trade, while it continues to reign as a global center of artistic and technologi-cal innovation. The dream for hun-dreds of thousands of beleaguered Internet-based entrepreneurs and art-ists remains to ditch the expensive,

postage-stamp-sized apartment, put some distance be-tween themselves and the next terrorism target and find a cheap loft space or house in a small, reasonably funky and aesthetically pleasing city within a day’s drive of Manhattan that has enough crack vials and uncollected garbage lying around to remind them of home.

This line of thinking, which on the face of it is not par-ticularly original, led Mark Greene, a guy with plenty of

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• MIDDLeMaRCH-aPRIL 2009 CHRONICThe Hudson Valley

Editor & PublisherSteve Hopkins

Associate Publisher EmeritusPaul Joffe

ContributorsMolly EaganCarrie Ross

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Gabrielle CompolongoSteve Hopkins

Carrie Ross

Contact us at:phone 914-388-8670fax 866-800-4062

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PhotographyPaul Joffe

Fionn ReillyAndy Uzzle

Steve Hopkins

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CHRONICThe Hudson Valley

Gwenn Gideon channels Anne Frank through 21st Century American eyes.

Get in the Act!

Instead of merely acting out, young people in the Mid-Hudson region have a chance this summer to act, in more than one sense of the word. Auditions

are coming up for a very special summer student pro-duction of The Diary of Anne Frank to be performed at the Center for Performing Arts in Rhinebeck, the proceeds of which will go to organizations that help relieve suffer-ing engendered by human rights abuses around the globe.

The production and the student-run activist theater group that’s doing it, Act 2 Act, are the brainchildren of Rhinebeck High School senior Gwenn Gideon, who already made a bit of a stir in 2006 when as a 13-year-old bat mitzvah candi-date she organized an event called Stomp for Sudan! which raised $11,000 to help Christine, a young, pregnant Suda-nese woman, make her way from a refugee camp in Kenya to a welcoming community in Boulder, Colo., where the baby was born out of harm’s way, as a U.S. citizen. Gide-on’s particularly ambitious “Tikkun Olam” (repairing the world) project made the regional news and was featured on WAMC’s nationally distributed women’s issues program, 51%. Another $4,000 in subsequent fundraising added to a total that paid for the safe passage of two additional Suda-nese refugee women. Gideon has since traveled to Boulder to meet the young women she helped, and is now friends with Christine on Facebook.

“About a year and a half ago, my family traveled to Ethio-pia to bring home my new baby brother,” says Gideon. “I was shocked by the extreme poverty I witnessed there, and on the plane ride home I met a man, Noel Cunningham — he’s from Colorado; I don’t know why everyone who does these things is from Colorado — who has devoted his life to helping kids in Ethiopia. After meeting him I knew I could do something. So over last summer I got in touch with Mr. Cunningham and learned about his project, called Quarters for Kids, which is basically the idea that for four quarters a day, or the price of a cup of coffee, a child in Ethiopia can be fed, clothed, and attend school.” Gideon subsequently organized a large rummage sale and sold jewelry made by Ethiopian children, raising nearly $4,000 for Quarters for Kids, one of Cunningham’s many philanthropic initiatives over the last quarter century to improve living conditions in Ethiopia.

She’s also brought the program into her school, getting students to bring in quarters one day a month and getting the Interact Club involved.

This time Gideon is setting her sights even higher, and has merged her activism with her hereditary love of theater. “Basically we have a student-run, nonprofit theater compa-ny that’s going to be outside of school, for students ages 12 to 18,” says Gideon, whose parents were both actors. “My father still is.”

She’s not kidding. Her father David Gideon was a long-time student and protégé of Lee Strasberg and directed the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute for a time — and will be part of an almost unbelievably qualified advisory board loaded with entertainment industry pros. Other board members include Dutchess Day School music director Susan Bialek; blues musician Guy Davis; Actors Studio voice teacher Jill Edwards; film producer Andres Faucher; “Dramaturgy and American Theatre” co-author Susan Jonas; opera soprano

Saving the world, one play at a time:

New student-run activist theater group searching for young acting talent

By Steve Hopkins

Speaking of the end of the World ...Don’t miss the upcoming Dumb Won

6 p.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday, april 4, at Keegan ales, 29 James Street, Kingstonart Show

Many new pieces, including the much anticipated Puking Beauty #4!

Clockwise from far right: Gwenn Gideon (standing) addresses Lexi Ackerman, Steve Matthews, Ben Agrawal, Adam Baker, Lind-sey Drew, Anna Katomski and Shai Romer at the first tactical meeting of Act 2 Act in late February.

Jill Leasure; mixed media artist, set designer and Dutchess Day School fine arts educator Alison MacFarlane; veteran television production manager Jeff Romano; Rhinebeck High School art teacher Ellen Siebold; and Center for the Perform-ing Arts artistic and managing director Lou Trapani.

“Yeah, it’s not just going to be students running rampant,” laughs Gideon. “The entire company is going to be men-tored by adults. And we’re trying to involve kids from all around the area. If you want to join the company it’s not just going to be about the performance; we’re also going to learn about the different human rights abuses around the world, and promote awareness about that. It’s called Act 2 Act based on the idea that we’re acting, in both senses of the word.”

There are 13 roles to be had in The Diary of Anne Frank; 10 of them speaking parts. None have been assigned to date. The plan is for a young, interracial cast to portray the adult and teenage members of the Frank and Van Daan families, the Dutch helpers, and the “extra guest,” dentist Jan Dussel. Auditions will be held on two occasions at two separate venues: the first is from 7 to 10 p.m. on Monday, March 30 at Temple Emanuel, 243 Albany Avenue in Kingston. The second is from 3 to 6 p.m. on Friday, April 3 at the Center for Performing Arts in Rhinebeck, in the big red barn structure on Route 308 heading east toward Rock City.

“I was 13 when I read The Diary of Anne Frank, which in-spired me to do the Stomp for Sudan! project,” says Gideon. “Anne Frank was around that age when she wrote her di-ary. The people in Sudan who were suffering, many of them were the same age; there’s no difference between us, and no reason to be abusing and killing any of us just because of our ethnicity or religion.”

This is a call to assist this unstoppable young activist in helping the victims of just that sort of abuse, and have a fun-filled, fascinating and morally illuminating time doing it.

MIDDLeMaRCH-aPRIL 2009 • PAGE 3CHRONICThe Hudson Valley

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more than anything else to set up a meandering, unnec-essarily complicated back story. So bear with us as we fully explore the little corner of Hell from which Eli was sprung, in order to make his ascendance to Dog Heaven with the Cotton household that much sweeter …

O little town of BeekmanHardy, quasi-rural Beekman, tucked away in the

southeastern quadrant of Dutchess County pretty much off of anyone’s radar screen, is historically a wild and conflicted place. The still mostly green, undulating landscape, its hilltops once crowned with vast farms, succumbed to the developers’ bulldozer through the go-go ’90s to the degree that it was temporarily dubbed the fastest growing municipality in the county, if not the state. The town’s largest development be-fore the Great Recession hit last year is a 560-odd-unit agglomeration of townhouses and detached homes blanketing much of what used to be stately Dalton Farms, a homestead that once be-longed to a scion of the far-flung Roosevelt family. FDR Jr.’s for-mer house sits in the center of this neo-colonial suburban fantasyland, hav-ing been retooled as a community center.

Dalton Farms was built with its own privately-run water district, which has enough capacity to also ser-vice 24 nearby homes and businesses that were left with poisoned wells during the mid-’90s in a still only partially resolved scandal involving a mob-influenced toxic chemical-dumping operation and the town’s former highway superintendent. As a re-sult of illegally bought solvents having been poured down the drains in the highway garage, two large plumes of chemicals – one containing mostly 1,1,1-trichloroethane (TCA), the other made up of perchloroethylene (PCE) – wended their way “downgradient,” as they say in hydro-geologist’s parlance, into the drinking wells of these 24 property owners. Both substances are still widely used in the dry cleaning and silicone chipmaking industries, and both have been accused of causing leukemia and bladder cancer in laboratory rats.

To make a long story a little shorter, the residents – including Poughquag resident Bob Phillips and his late wife Shirley, had gotten together and filed a class action lawsuit against the town regarding their fouled water.

Interestingly, this was happening around the same time Congressman Maurice Hinchey was sticking his nose across the river into Beekman’s toxic business. He’d sicced his longtime investigator, Arthur Woolston Smith, on the town, and the sleuth quickly hit paydirt. Smith, on loan to the Beekman saga from central cast-ing, was and still is an avuncular, Hitchcockian gentle-man who came out of British Intelligence. Hinchey trusted Smith’s dogged persistence and ruggedly unbrib-able, unthreatenable demeanor – Smith had investigated everything from Watergate to Love Canal to a series of successful mob-busting cases for Hinchey’s former tox-ic waste committee in the state Assembly. He was and still is known affectionately in the gangbuster trade as “Smitty.”

According to Smitty, the Beekman mess came about as part of an elaborate scheme involving a mob-tied op-erator named Daniel Luongo and an associate named “Fat Pat.” In 1990 Luongo, owner of a number of bo-gus chemical companies based in Danbury, Conn., pled guilty to federal mail fraud and conspiracy charges as a result of a similar scheme conducted in the towns of Amenia and East Fishkill in which he was paying kickbacks to highway superintendents for buying unde-livered chemicals. He ended up with a light sentence. Smitty maintains that Luongo’s chemicals were in fact delivered, but were actually toxic waste solvents col-lected from regional manufacturers that ended up being stored until they could be dumped over time around the towns.

Operation Double Steal, a push by the feds to inves-tigate mob-influenced kickback schemes in town halls and highway departments across the region, was intro-duced with great fanfare in 1987. However, although Luongo’s kickback scheme was in as full force in Beek-man as everywhere else, the town somehow magically escaped the feds’ noose.

Luongo wasn’t just a small-time corrupter of public officials, and he was no chemical salesman either. His actual occupation, according to Smitty, was getting rid of toxic waste for the mob. His favorite modus operandi was to double-dip – to get paid twice for the 35- and 55-gallon drums he was unloading – once by the customer

Ruff House From Page 1

trying to get rid of them and again by a public official to whom he would offer a kickback in exchange for his or her municipality “buying” them.

He had a lot of “customers.” Beekman’s former high-way superintendent, Bob Clark, told Smitty of his being invited along with dozens of highway supers from towns up and down the Hudson Valley on an all-expenses-paid bus junket to Giants Stadium, arranged by Luongo.

According to reams of eyewitness testimony amassed by Smitty and others in depositions, most of the con-tents of those drums were poured down the drains of the highway garage, causing the aforementioned toxic plumes that were making local residents sick. Yet the town, with the help of a phalanx of lawyers and the Pat-aki administration, was somehow able to protect its rep-utation, minimize its culpability and completely defuse

the scandal by, at different times, either deny-ing that the toxic plumes existed, paying

off the residents to be quiet with a settlement (after paying the law-

yer a quarter of a million dol-lars, they each got a paltry

$20,000 to split between them, plus a promise to

be hooked up to the new Dalton Farms water system), and presiding over a growing list of disappearing evi-dence, including scores of barrels of toxic chemi-cals the high-way super hadn’t

gotten around to pouring into the

aquifer.Hinchey had been

alerted to the exis-tence of this remaining

cache of evidence and swung into gear. “This week

my staff was notified that po-tentially important and relevant

evidence is slated for removal from a Town of Beekman warehouse, for incineration

in Pennsylvania,” he wrote. “…The importance of the drums … is clear. … Several questions demand answers. Are the newly identified drums the same as those pur-chased with public funds which created the state hazard-ous waste site? Who is responsible for the receipt of the two dozen drums on behalf of the town, and where did they originate? Are the materials in the drums the same as the contaminants in the underground aquifer? After so many years, why is the town suddenly so interested in disposing of the chemicals?”

Good questions all, Maurice. But, of course, he never got his answers, because the

drums were spirited away without being tested further. Before being hauled off, according to former Beekman councilman Peter Barton, the labels were spray-painted over in a last-minute attempt to obliterate any possible chance that someone would find out where they came from.

The specific storage room from which those barrels disappeared happens to have been in the very same “kennel” from which the scrawny, heavily chlorinated Eli Cotton was liberated this past winter. The building is situated, as many municipal animal shelters seem to be, disturbingly, in an old landfill.

Bob and Shirley Phillips, the citizens whose property was closest to the town garage, lived their entire adult lives in that location, bathing in and drinking their well water. Shirley worked for the town, right next door, for many years. Theirs was the well that was first to show “negligible” amounts of PCE in tests, and was the first to reach the magical 200 ppb TCA result that set the whole Beekman crisis in motion.

By that time, though, Shirley was already dead. She had retired early, in her late 50s, and went with Bob on a trip of a lifetime to Hawaii. They had to cut their trip short, though, because Shirley was bleeding internally. Six tragic weeks later she died, of liver and bladder can-cer – the very same diseases that PCE causes in rats.

Shirley Phillips, however, was not a rat. She was a human being, a warm, loving country sweetheart who trusted in her government and her fellow man and felt safe in her cozy little small-town world. “Beekman killed my wife,” said Bob Phillips, who netted just over $1,000 from the Poughquag citizens’ settlement – not even enough to replace his corroded appliances, in 2000. “Beekman killed my wife.”

Digression overBut this is supposed to be a dog story, and so it is. All

of the above is water – er, perchloroethylene – under the bridge, so to speak. It’s just remarkable the way the hu-man and canine stories dovetail together so neatly, and show the continuum of indifference to the public weal evidenced by generations of local officials. As PANT vice president Connie Price brings us up to date, noth-

Continued on Page 4

A Portuguese water dog.


Ruff House From Page 3

Eli cavorts with his adoptive family. From left to right: Joe Cotton, Tara Cotton, and Ashley Cotton.

ing much has changed at the old “kennel.”“Basically the East Fishkill animal control officer

contacted us because they needed to place that dog someplace because he was up for euthanization,” said Price. “The towns of Union Vale, Beekman and East Fishkill have a 10-day hold policy, wherein if the dog is not placed in 10 days, it’s euthanized. They only have four stalls in Beekman. And what happens is that if an-other dog comes into the program, there’s really no cage for him but a large crate. This is an old town highway garage they’re using. It still smells; it smells like septic in there. It’s just an old landfill. You get the back-feeds from the ventilation into the building.” One can only imagine what’s in that “septic” smell.

The Beekman shelter is the go-to facility to warehouse and conduct the final solution for unwanted dogs from at least three other nearby towns: East Fishkill, Union Vale and Washington (Millbrook). “This is the only shelter in four towns,” she went on. “And with all the money that East Fishkill gets from taxes, they keep postpon-ing that they’re supposed to get a new shelter. Now they keep getting bounced around, and the more the funds get tightened and squeezed …”

Animal control has been taking a budgetary back seat throughout the Mid-Hudson region since long before the current economic troubles. Multiple municipalities commonly use the facilities provided by one town stuck with the role in a long-running game of “You’re It.”

The Beekman shelter, Price said, is a cheap alterna-tive for surrounding towns. “I think they’re renting it for like $8 a day for an animal.” But naturally, you get what you pay for. “I talked to the SPCA, and I said, you know, you’ve got an animal control officer that’s deny-ing medical care to dogs that should be turned over to you guys,” said Price. “There’s conflict between the East Fishkill animal control officer and the SPCA, they’ve had run-ins, and I said to the humane officer, I said, you know, Stephanie, I don’t want to get involved, I know you guys have got tit for tat going on here, but you’ve got mammals in crisis that were left behind here.”

Inside helpThe wild swings between cruelty and benevolence

exhibited in overburdened municipal animal shelters mirrors the extremes of human nature exhibited by the morally stressed administrators of human systems of in-carceration. Indeed, there is usually a dog warden’s ver-sion of Schindler’s List. Animal control people are not

without a heart, maintained Price, despite the appall-ingly low standard of care in facilities like Beekman’s. Eli, for example, benefitted greatly from the actions of someone who twisted the rules into pretzels for him. “He should have been re-placed, but his name gets changed, because what the animal control officers do is that they take them out of the shelter for a day or two, then they try to either take them home themselves or they change the dates to keep Ag & Markets and the town off their backs. That’s why this dog was still there and it was more than 10 days. What they do is they change the dates; they usually put the dog in, like if the dog came in at night they’re able to change the date and later on give him an-other 10 days, saying ‘Oh, he came in on the 19th.’ It prolongs it; it’s a nice thing to do, but if they get caught, Ag & Markets can really fine them in violation. And if a town official finds out about it, then the town can fire an animal control officer for altering documents.

“It’s good and bad,” she said. “You know, they try on one hand, and then deny on the other. And basically what happens with animal control officers, right now they’re all being switched and placed into sheriff’s sta-

tions and things like that. The Town of Poughkeepsie animal control officer, they moved her out of the town facility and now, as of last month, she’s under the po-lice department. And she has to report to a sergeant and not to Pat Myers, the town supervisor, any more.

“They’re re-designating these people and moving them out,” continued Price. “And when you put an ani-mal control officer in with the police department, they feel like they want more power. The animals suffer. They want prosecutions; they start forgetting about the animals. It becomes more of a power play. Why they took the job starts to change. And that’s what’s hap-pening.”

“I’m just disappointed in the towns,” she said. “They’ve got all this money, and they’re using a stinky old garage, with no windows. The lights are turned off when they leave, and they’ve got two people from Millbrook who are feeding the animals at 7 in the morning and 7 at night. Basically the dogs never see the light of the sun. Not unless the animal control officer comes and decides to take the dog out for a walk, because she’s there putting one in or showing one to a potential adopter.”

Price tried to get official action taken regarding what she had witnessed in Beekman, but so far noth-ing has been done. “Well, it kind of got passed off. I contacted Joel Miller’s office to try and get some help and he passed it off,” she said. “I actually got a little annoyed because he took my e-mail that I asked him to help me with, and he forwarded it to the SPCA. It was kind of like a pass-the-buck thing.”

By the time the SPCA became involved, thinks Price, someone had tipped the Beekman people that trouble was brewing. “When I talked to Stephanie Fitzpatrick of the SPCA Humane Law, she says, ‘Well, the shelter is fine, I was there two weeks ago.’ And I said, ‘Well then somebody must have given them a heads-up that you were coming.’ She said, ‘Yeah, we were there on something else,’ and I said, ‘So, there you go, so obviously they knew you were coming.’

“Basically that’s it, and I said to Stephanie, ‘You need to go there when nobody else is there.’

“I was there on two occasions. The animal control officer didn’t want to let me in. She wanted help with the dog (Eli) that Kristin (Cotton) got. And I went there, and I said, ‘Well, let me see the dog.’ And she said, ‘Well, I’ll go get the dog. You don’t want to go in there.’ And I said, ‘Well, maybe there’s another dog in there that I may be able to help put in foster …,’ and she said, ‘No, they’re not my dogs. I can’t show them to you.’ So I said, ‘Okay, fine.’

“So then when she brought the dog out, he was per-fect, he had a perfect temperament, we did our testing out in the back in the field, and then I said to her, ‘You know, why hasn’t this dog gotten medical attention? It’s emaciated, it’s got these open wounds, he needs to see a veterinarian right away.’ And she says, ‘Well, the Town of East Fishkill won’t pay for it.’ ‘Did you contact the SPCA?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I’ve had my run-ins with them,’ she says. ‘We’re not on good terms.’

“And I said, ‘Listen, can I have this dog for an hour and a half, so I can take him to my vet, to see what my vet has to say?’ So I rush this dog all the way over to Millbrook, and the vet tells me: ‘He’s a great dog. He’s got burns from chemicals, he’s got a staph infection; it’s gonna be a losing battle if you don’t get him out of there.’ So unfortunately I have to bring the dog back and give it to her, because my foster home couldn’t take the dog until Sunday.”

Nonstop love expressSomehow Eli made it through the weekend and was

united with the Cottons, who have welcomed him with open arms. “He’s nonstop, moving, from morning until he goes to sleep at night,” said Joe Cotton of the gregari-ous, relentlessly playful pet. Joe is attending criminal justice classes at Dutchess County Community College

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MIDDLeMaRCH-aPRIL 2009 • PAGE 5CHRONICThe Hudson Valley

Sick SudokuAs any die-hard puzzlehead knows, Sudoku is not a game; it’s either a

means of warding off dementia, or a form of dementia in itself. Either way, this seemingly harmless little pastime has become an unspeakable facet of daily existence for millions of silent addicts, and a likely root cause for the

simultaneous and precipitous drop in the GNPs of several the world’s leading economic powers. Enjoy this second in a series of brainstoppers. Again,

for the solution, go to hvchronic.com. If you figured it out, go buy yourself something so you can add a little to all the economic stimulus going on.

Puzzle # S0004

Eli cavorts with his adoptive family. From left to right: Joe Cotton, Tara Cotton, and Ashley Cotton.

as part of a training regimen that will qualify him to become a humane law enforcement officer. He vol-unteers to participate in animal trapping operations with Connie Price and PANT, after having been in-troduced to the organization through his younger sister Tara. His stepmother, Kristin, joined PANT’s board of directors as secretary in February, deepen-ing the family’s animal activism.

Eli is one of many successful animal rescues per-formed by the people at PANT. In its short three-year history in Dutchess, the group has rescued, spay/neu-tered and placed nearly 800 adoptable dogs and cats in permanent homes. In many cases the animals were saved from euthanasia or from a life on the street. The innovative foster program, which boasts a 95 percent success rate, allows PANT to give its animals time to adjust in a home environment with people, other animals and children. Adoption counselors work with the foster homes to ensure proper place-ment of all animals into a “forever” home best suited for the needs and preferences of each animal.

If you want to find out more about PANT, perhaps even slip them a donation or look into following in the Cottons’ footsteps and volunteering your time and energy, check out the organization’s website at www.pant.org. The increase in man- and womanpow-er would not be unappreciated. Said Price of the fate of animals in these hard economic times: “So many people are leaving their pets behind. We’ve got ani-mals left in their carriers at churches; I mean there’s just no room in any shelter. I’m averaging between

three and four calls a day from people who need help with their animals because they’re leaving their homes. Some of these people can’t even af-ford to pay for food and litter. I’m sure it’s hap-pening everywhere, because it can’t just be an epidemic in this county. I took Joe Cotton to one just the other day. They had the keys in the car, the car loaded, and left the animals in the house to die.”

By the way, for anyone who’s interested, the Beekman toxic waste story is only the fingertip of a very large iceberg, something for which I’ve been hoarding three filing cabinets full of docu-ments and evidence, in case anyone ever ques-tions my work. The project, a 23,000-word re-port for The Nation Institute titled “Adventures in Patakistan: Toxic Waste Dumping, Politics and the Mob in Upstate New York,” took the better part of a year out of my life, and has never been published. It names names and casts asper-sions in a manner that might have made editors of The Nation squirm had they chosen to run parts of it, which they decided against because, since George W. Bush didn’t pick George Pataki as his running mate in 2000, the story lacked national appeal.

If you want to read it, send 20 bucks and I’ll fire off a copy. Otherwise, it’s probably best to let sleeping dogs lie – or at least fester in their own pee and excrement while lying in a pool of toxic chemicals.

PAGE 24 • DECEMBER 2008 CHRONICThe Hudson Valley

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My Kind of Town, Take 2 From Page 1

originality and more than a little chutzpah, to turn the concept over in his head, looking for a way to wrestle a potential profit center out of it. He came up with a brain-storm. Having lived in Kingston long enough to witness its cash-starved mayor and economic development peo-ple falling all over themselves trying to woo a succession of big-pocketed developers into cozy tax-exempt deals to build luxury housing without any tangible result, he developed a PR-driven economic development plot of his own for the mayor and company to try on for size. Dubbing Kingston the “Upstate Digital Tech-Friendly City,” Greene’s initiative, which he developed while catching the ear of Mayor James Sottile in a series of e-mail exchanges beginning last year, is now an official campaign, having been touted by Sottile in his annual “State of the City” address to the common council in February. The initiative was dutifully reported in the lo-cal media, as well as by WAMC’s intrepid Hudson Val-ley bureau chief, Susan Barnett, and is gaining traction as Greene hits up everybody he knows in person and through online social networking tools like Facebook to spread the word with their techie friends.

Personally, I would like nothing better than to lure all my friends and family, tech-savvy or not, to Kingston, a city I have grown to love not in spite of, but because of its surly reputation. So, to that end, I’ve retooled a little paean to my former town in the hopes of luring some of my delightfully misanthropic NYC-based associates who may otherwise miss Mark’s message. For every suc-cessful transplant I coax to cross the city line to buy or rent, I’ll gladly accept a 5 percent cut of the resultant tax windfall.

My pitch:As an incubator of pointless anger, Kingston is ground

zero in the Mid-Hudson. It has been a crucible of dark feelings since the dawn of recorded time. That a fat loser chose the local mall to act out his frustrations with a semi-automatic rifle is not an anomaly. It’s more like the tip of the iceberg.

Indeed a lot of the music, as well as the art and writ-ing of Kingston and environs seems to feature this same high degree of unexplained anger and frustration. While anger is a common response to growing up and seeing for the first time what a manure pile your parents have left you, there’s more to it than that, especially in Kings-ton. The anger emanating from here is more than just personal. It’s not just a reaction to the vapidity of general existence in 21st-century America. There’s a historical

aspect to it. It’s ancient — and nasty. Like a curse.For almost 500 years, Kingston and environs has

slowly deteriorated at the hands of the European mer-cantile class that still runs things today. Their swords, musket balls, fires and bacteria wiped out the Esopus Indians, and their great-great-great-grandchildren re-main in place as the landlords, judges, lawyers and bu-reaucrats who decide who gets a building permit. They still lord it over the swarthy lower classes, giving all the crap jobs to undocumented Latinos glad to work five to a Social Security number. In Midtown, beat-down descendants of the slaves from Africa who worked the fields and lugged the stones that built all these marvel-ous, historic Ulster houses hang on by a thread, as ev-erywhere else in America, and the southern European and Mediterranean classes, while eventually managing to “pass” as WASPs and wrestle some of the local power away from them, still occasionally squabble over the right to fix their toilets or haul away their filthy garbage. It’s not hard to imagine at least one dying, pissed-off Indian laying a curse on the Dutch and English usurp-ers of this once beautiful land, judging from what has happened since.

Because Kingston surely seems cursed. It’s a true post-industrial wasteland, largely populated by the prog-eny of underemployed factory workers left over after it was stripped of its original white-man’s purpose as an iron-smelting, brick-making, mining backwater. When these industries died and left the town a rusting hulk, IBM came in and finished the job, making sure to dump millions of tons of toxic chemicals into the streams and aquifers before they split and left half the popula-tion without a job. Check out the cancer death rates in Kingston and Lake Katrine, out by the mall. They’re the highest in the state, and it’s not a secret why.

This cursed, toxic evilness is affecting the art com-ing out of Kingston, whether the artists know it or not. In this environment it’s only natural that punk remains alive and well, even as its anger fades elsewhere. CBGB might be just a fond memory in NYC, but here two hard-drinking, dissipated yet highly intelligent Kings-ton punks thrash about onstage at The Forum, turning their obsessive fear of a super-volcano lurking beneath Yellowstone National Park into screaming, distorted art. Down the street a grimacing singer growls “Murder murder, death and murder,” as dancers hurl themselves into each other. Another band’s lead singer tries to miti-gate his natural nice-guy lyrical tendencies by throwing

furniture at the crowd. People are getting drunk, acting badly, letting their anger fly, starting fights over noth-ing.

Kingston has always had a nasty reputation. My good friend Spike, a Kingston native who was a roommate in a dingy party apartment when I lived in Albany, was perhaps the angriest young man I ever met. He was a short, seething fireplug of a kid who carried a German luger, and wasn’t afraid to use it if his fists failed him, which was never. On a bet, he once beat the tar out of a black belt kick-boxer in the ring, using only his hands and his vicious, pit-bull nature. He personified Kings-ton, and told me many of the urban Kingston legends that defined the place for me. Now that I have lived there, I can see he wasn’t lying.

Kingston will remain angry, even as the carpetbag-gers and tech geeks move in and take over the slums, trying to gentrify the place. No amount of pastel paint and fancy brick sidewalks will change that. The city still has freight trains running through it carrying garbage, toxic chemicals, plutonium bars and God knows what else that’s emanating and leaking into the brains of the poor saps who live along the tracks. Brain-rotting drugs are still being concocted in local coke and meth labs. Countless thousands of rusting 55-gallon drums leach-ing perchlorethylene and trichloroethane into the water table are still buried under every school, shopping plaza and sports complex. Even if all this poison doesn’t give us cancer, which it eventually will, it’s giving us head-aches and making us as angry as treed wolverines.

But again, all of this is why I like Kingston, and would have never moved away had there been a real choice in the matter. I like its stubborn post-apocalyptic vibe, and that it will never be tamed. Then there’s the entertain-ment factor, as half the people you see walking down the street are fantastically ugly and hilariously dressed in ways I have never seen anywhere outside of an old Star Trek episode.

I like the edgy feeling of walking into a bar not know-ing if some jockomo is going to blow his top and start punching people. And I like Kingston’s pointlessly pissed-off arts and music scene, and how people have a way of expressing themselves by yelling at the top of their lungs.

If this Kingston-based geek initiative can somehow bottle that anger and sell it to the angry masses yearning to break free of the Big, Rotten Apple, it should do just fine. Good luck, Mark, and I hope this helps.

MIDDLeMaRCH-aPRIL 2009 • CHRONICThe Hudson Valley

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