Culture: saving Mr Hughes' home

As a young girl in Portland, Ore., Renée Watson immersed herself in the words of Langston Hughes, discovering that his poems about black identity mirrored experiences in her own life. Since moving to Harlem more than a decade ago, she has often walked by his old home — a three-story brownstone on East 127th Street with cast-iron railings and overgrown ivy.

The author spent his final 20 years, and wrote some of the most notable literary works of the Harlem Renaissance, in this house. It was designated a historic landmark in 1981. Yet in recent years, the property has remained empty. A performance space opened in 2007 but closed when the tenants were evicted about a year later. In 2010, the current owner listed the house for $1 million but found no buyers.

With her neighborhood experiencing rapid gentrification, Ms. Watson, 38, an author and poet, felt that too many crucial landmarks of the Harlem Renaissance, like Mr. Hughes’s home, were disappearing or going unnoticed.

“It feels like, whether it’s intentional or not, our stories are being erased,” Ms. Watson said.

So, after a year’s worth of planning, she began to preserve the legacy of the house herself. She began a nonprofit organization, persuaded the owner to let her lease and renovate the brownstone, and started raising the money necessary to do so.

If she can successfully open Mr. Hughes’s home and maintain it as a public space, it would be a notable feat, especially in New York City, some preservationists say.

“That’s a pretty remarkable mission-driven desire to preserve a place,” said Seri Worden, senior field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “I do think it’s rare, and it sounds like it’s working.”

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In a city brimming with famous homes and buildings, there could be a historic landmark on every block. Across the five boroughs, more than36,000 properties are designated landmarks by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Mr. Hughes’s former home is one of these properties, meaning the building’s exterior cannot be altered without approval from the commission. But since the brownstone is a privately owned home, the public cannot step inside to the space where Mr. Hughes’ creativity flowed, unless a new owner or tenant decides to convert it to accommodate that use.

With rents and mortgage costs soaring in the city, a small preservation group or nonprofit group like Ms. Watson’s must often confront almost insurmountable financial obstacles in order to buy, preserve and maintain a property.

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The home was designated a landmark in 1981, but in recent years, it has remained empty.CreditUli Seit for The New York Times

“It’s one of the greatest challenges facing historic preservation today,” said David Ehrich, a former banker who has led many efforts to preserve the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. “The cost of historic preservation is almost out of reach.”

Ms. Watson envisions using Mr. Hughes’s home as a gathering space for young artists, tied to a nonprofit she is starting for emerging writers.

In June, the homeowner agreed to lease and eventually sell the brownstone to Ms. Watson’s organization as long as its members could raise the money. Ms. Watson took to crowdfunding and raised more than $87,000, which she says is enough to cover the first six months of rent and renovation costs. She plans to sign the lease later this month.

Ms. Watson would not say how much the owner was asking for an eventual sale. Similar homes nearby have sold in the last several months for about $2 million.

Several famous New York City homes have been converted into museums — such as the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens — but many were sold or donated to the city. Other efforts have failed or stalled because of a lack of funding, resources or cooperation from the building’s owner.

Some historical preservation advocates, like Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts, emphasize the importance of a homeowner’s right to keep a home private, even if it is a historic landmark.

Moreover, many existing house museums across the country have struggledto maintain budgets and build attendances. A house museum, Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel argues, might not be the most effective way to teach the public about a historic figure.

“I care more about who did what in that building,” she said. “I care more about his ideas than his furniture.”

Ms. Watson’s efforts are still a gamble. Like any nonprofit, her collective will need to continue fund-raising in order to sustain the home, she said. They also hope to bring in additional revenue by renting out rooms to artists and authors for events and book launches.

What makes Ms. Watson’s approach unique, Ms. Worden said, is the fact that she does not simply plan to make it a house museum, but rather is creating a space for educational and creative programs.

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The Steinway Mansion, a property in Astoria once owned by the Steinway family of the piano company. The executive director of the Greater Astoria Historical Society has tried for years to raise money to buy the house.CreditUli Seit for The New York Times

“House museums are really challenging,” Ms. Worden said. “We do have to think bigger about some of our historic sites.”

In Queens, Bob Singleton, the executive director of the Greater Astoria Historical Society, has tried for years to raise money to buy the Steinway Mansion, an elaborate Italianate villa once owned by the Steinway family, of the piano company.

When the house went on the market in 2011 for the first time in decades, he formed a group called Friends of Steinway Mansion, but they failed to raise enough money.

In 2014, the mansion and the surrounding lots were sold to its current owners, who bought the property as an investment. Warehouses and storage units have been built on the nearby land, but the mansion has remained vacant.

Sal Lucchese, one of the property owners, said he would “absolutely entertain” an offer to turn the mansion into a public space, but so far, Mr. Singleton’s group and others have not had the means to do so.

Beyond the financial costs, Mr. Singleton said the zoning and renovating logistics involved with converting the mansion into a community center required support from local elected officials, which he did not yet have.

“You need every component in the community on board for this,” Mr. Singleton said. “Unless you have that, everything else is moot.”

For a different group on Long Island, acquiring a historic home was just the beginning. In 2006, local advocates persuaded the Town of Huntington to buy the dilapidated home of the jazz artist John Coltrane and convert it into a museum. But largely because of a lack of funds, it has taken about a decade for the foundation in charge of the home to make progress on its renovation.

The Friends of the Coltrane Home hope to open the house to the public by late 2018, said Ron Stein, the group’s president. Yet it is still unclear how the museum will raise money to maintain itself.

“The challenge though, is not just saving the house,” Mr. Stein said. “It’s trying to find a workable, sustainable economic plan for the house.”

“It’s not a one-and-done situation.”

Where WorDs WandEr #6: one foot in the door

he early uses of the term 'putting a foot in the door' are straightforward literal ones. It may just describe someone who steps over the threshold of a property, or someone putting a foot in the door in order to prevent it from closing and so continue a conversation. An early example of the latter comes in the American poet and playwright George Boker's work Plays and poems, 1856:

"And he sang to his gittern of love and of war With one foot in his stirrup and one in her door."

We now use 'foot in the door' in a figurative sense, with a similar meaning to 'the thin end of the wedge'. It was the technique of jamming a foot in the door to prevent it closing, used by door-to-door salesmen and political canvassers, that gave us this figurative use of the term. All the early examples are from the USA, 

The Word on Weed #2: Anslinger's War

 Marijuana has been in an “official” state of prohibition since 1937-s Marijuana Tax Act (in the United States). Because, among other reasons, it made supposedly white women desire black men.

Maia Szalavitz has a great takedowen of pundits like Tina Brown and David Brooks, who recently made specious claims that marijuana makes you stupider. Brown actually said Americans who smoke pot won't be able to "compete" with the Chinese. Her moment of xenophobia wasn't out of keeping with the history of anti-pot rhetoric.

Writes Szalavitz:

The truth is that our perceptions of marijuana—and in fact all of our drug laws—are based on early 20th century racism and "science" circa the Jim Crow era. In the early decades of the 20th century, the drug was linked to Mexican immigrants and black jazzmen, who were seen as potentially dangerous.

Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (an early predecessor of the DEA), was one of the driving forces behind pot prohibition. He pushed it for explicitly racist reasons, saying, "Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men," and:

"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."

The main reason to prohibit marijuana, he said was "its effect on the degenerate races." (And god forbid women should sleep with entertainers!)

Although it sounds absurd now, it was this type of propaganda that caused the drug to be outlawed in 1937—along with support from the Hearst newspapers, which ran ads calling marijuana "the assassin of youth" and published stories about how it led to violence and insanity. Anslinger remained as head of federal narcotics efforts as late as 1962, whereafter he spread his poisonous message to the world as the American representative to the U.N. for drug policy for a further two years.

Before marijuana was made illegal, the American Medical Association'sopposition to prohibition was ignored, as was an earlier report on marijuana in India by the British government, which did not find marijuana to be particularly addictive or dangerous. That "Indian Hemp Drugs Committee" reporthad concluded way back in 1894 that, "The moderate use of hemp drugs is practically attended by no evil results at all."

Music: White Man's [Rap] Burden, a brief (incomplete) history of white rappers

To be a white rapper is a tough row to hoe in an industry with a complex overlay of cultural, social, and capitalist demands. Questions get raised: Are you real enough? Does your background matter? Is it harder or easier for you to succeed in the industry because you’re white? Did you just get signed because the record company knows that concerned white parents are way more likely to buy your stuff for their kids than the music made by some dark-skinned dude with diamond grills? Can you say the n-word? Should you? As hip-hop wrestles with its own rapidly altering identity — the kind of world where a street-verified Meek Mill can come for ex-urban Drake and see his own career nearly cave in as a result — it becomes more and more difficult to tell who has what right to be involved in what music.

Rakim, widely considered one of the greatest rappers of all time, once uttered the line, "It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at." This is the keystone bar of a song, "I Know You Got Soul," that has become something of a manifesto for hip-hop culture. It’s about skills, not your background, Rakim seems to tell us. You spit your rhymes, and that's all that matters. If they're wack, go back and practice until they aren't. Where you come from, what you look like, is beside the point. (Which is precisely how it came to pass that Meek got eaten by Drake.)

That some people interpreted Rakim's words as a call to color blindness reflects the kind of idealism that characterized hip-hop in its nascent stages. Even in 1987, when Rakim uttered that line, people were beginning to enshrine the idea of an earlier golden age when the genre — still bereft of big money deals and corporate intervention, and prior to the crack epidemic and its ensuing nihilistic carnage — was nothing more than a beautiful solution to poverty’s most pressing complications. It was an urgent artistic expression magically created from the simplest of ingredients: turntables, microphones, spray cans, walls, cardboard. Crews were just as likely to battle one another with dance and rhyme skills as with gunplay and violence. The art form was driven by a high-integrity devotion to quality and discipline, or so the story goes.

Who knows how accurate this idea of early hip-hop ever was? The fact remains that it's still clung to today by academics and historians who have cemented a narrative of a music that does not see color. The irony for hip-hop is that its universal relatability is the very thing people use in order to deny what some others see as its spiritual center: self-determination for black and brown youth who are on the losing end of multiple oppressions. As the genre grew from art to hustle to full-fledged industry, multinational corporations began to exert increased control over its products and direction. Protecting its cultural roots against the ensuing opportunistic influx became a martyr's errand; so much so that Rakim himself felt it necessary to reframe his famous line, placing it in entirely different context on his 1990 single “In the Ghetto”: "So I collect my cash, then slide / I've got my back, my gun's on my side / It shouldn't have to be like that / I guess it ain't where you're from, it's where you're at." Rather than an open invitation for all into rap, the line is flipped into a necessary reminder of the genre’s dour beginnings. And possibly a subtle dis at what it was already becoming.

One wonders what Rakim thinks of hip-hop today. Jazz, blues, and rock were once genres invented by the black underclass that became white music over time. With the manifest popularity of contemporary rappers like G-Eazy, Macklemore, and Riff Raff, it’s not hard to imagine rap ultimately going the same route. With that in mind, here is a condensed timeline of white rappers and their slow but steady movement into prominent positions of rap.

1981: The first-ever rap verse on MTV comes from a 36-year-old white woman who broke into the industry singing backup for a '60s folk group called The Wind in the Willows. The song, “Rapture,” by new-wave outfit Blondie, also becomes the first Billboard No. 1 hit to prominently feature rap. New York in the 1980s was home to a heady club scene in which downtown artists like Blondie earned stripes by “discovering” uptown trends like rap, break dance, and graffiti with origins in the South Bronx. So common is this narrative that it's the plot of hip-hop’s first movie, the 1983 indie classic Wild Style, which tells the class-anxious story of a Bronx graffiti writer whose work is made into downtown gallery art by an intrepid white journalist.

1983: Rodney Dangerfield scores MTV’s second rap video with the novelty track "Rappin Rodney." The old man’s got hella bars and wordplay, but the main MC he murders on the mic is himself. Highlights include “I was an ugly kid, I never had fun / They took me to a dog show and I won!” The song peaks at No. 83. No one black has yet rapped on the music channel.

1984: Enter Shawn Brown, who scores a minor hit with “Rappin’ Duke,” another novelty tune based on the timeless question, “What if John Wayne were an MC?” Brown is black, but the comedic premise centers on the idea of a white man on the mic. Years later, Biggie Smalls would shout the song out as a seminal rap moment in his own autobiographical debut single, "Juicy." "Rappin' Duke" reaches No. 73 on the Billboardcharts, and black people gather around boomboxes, shaking their Jheri curls in laughter. That’d be funny, we think, if white people actually rhymed.

1986: White people actually rhyme. Fledgling label Def Jam signs The Beastie Boys, three refugees from a dying New York City hardcore scene. They get placed in front of a booming 808 and some sparse beats, and drop the classic Licensed to Ill, which breaks records, selling over 100,000 copies in the first week (with help from a distribution deal with Columbia) and reaching platinum status less than three months after its release. The breakout hit is the straightforward rap-rock frat anthem “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party),” but “Paul Revere” and “Hold It Now, Hit It” are accepted as bangers by New York’s black DJs. They open for Madonna, and, alongside Run-D.M.C. on the Raising Hell tour, they elevate hip-hop’s numbers from niche to mainstream levels, conscripting entire swaths of suburban consumers into the genre’s legions of fans.

1989: Queens duo MC Serch and Pete Nice debut as 3rd Bass, the first white rap act for whom whiteness is not at least in part an uproarious crossover gimmick. Their opening studio effort, The Cactus Album, features legitimate golden-era rhyme skills and the same chunky James Brown cutups as their black contemporaries. Producers like Prince Paul (De La Soul) and The Bomb Squad (Public Enemy) sign on, lending them further bona fides. They later beef with the Beastie Boys on some “there can only be one” shit, and, in 2007, a post-retirement Serch hosts VH1’sThe (White) Rapper Show, wherein he elevates the task of making sure white rappers proceed with proper respect into a spiritual pursuit.

1990: Vanilla Ice, a.k.a. Robert Van Winkle, sets white people back 1,000 years by engaging in the most egregious act of perpetration since The Donation of Constantine. The Miami “rapper” scores a huge hit with his very cool song “Ice Ice Baby,” which he bases on an uncredited Queen–David Bowie sample mixed with a chant from Black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. (He would eventually pay Bowie and Queen, but not the frat.) He then takes his talents from To the Extreme to the screen, probably only narrowly missing an Oscar. After rumors circulate that Mr. Van Winkle has liberally exaggerated his hood upbringing, he is toppled from the throne only to periodically reemerge, Lestat-like, throughout history as a better-than-decent nü-metal act, a reality-show heel, a real-estate guru, and an actual alleged burglar. (Ice reached a plea deal with Florida prosecutors, citing "a misunderstanding.") White people look deep into their souls and question their purpose, including Eminem, who famously stated that "Ice Ice Baby" made him want to quit rapping. It is the first hip-hop single to reach No. 1 on the Billboard charts.

1991: The effervescently named Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch come through with just the kind of "Good Vibrations" white rappers need in their dark post-Vanilla hour. Mark Wahlberg, a.k.a. The Shirtless Southie, steps out of his brother Donnie’s tepid New Kids On the Block shadow and invites “Black White Red and Brown” to feel the Vibration, forgetting perhaps that at least a few of those people had already felt his vibrationlong before he became famous. Nevertheless, the future actor and professional Face of Confusion strikes RIAA gold with this Eurodance/jock jam classic. The song also finds its way to a BillboardNo. 1 spot.

1992: House of Pain’s party hit "Jump Around" finally carves out a safe space for drunk racists to freely enjoy hip-hop. Black people use the song as an inverted North Star to determine precisely which clubs to travel in the opposite direction of. Professional sporting events are forever transformed. Later, Donald Trump plays the song at his rally and House of Pain front man Everlast jumps around in The Donald’s mentions.

1993: MC Snow confuses everyone at once by being a White Jamaican Canadian rapper and dropping the wildly catchy “Informer,” which presages both the Stop Snitching Movement and the Glasses on the End of the Nose Movement. People laugh, but unlike a lot of MCs, Snow is about that life, serving time on an attempted murder charge while his breakout single is in postproduction. The song reaches No. 1 on theBillboard charts and sells almost 2.3 million copies worldwide.

1997: Limp Bizkit and Insane Clown Posse both make their major label debuts, ensuring that white kids have a form of rap that no one will try to horn in on. Goatees gain spiritual significance. Millions of boys refuse to wash their flat-brimmed baseball caps for an entire year. Skechers and calf tattoo stocks go through the roof.

1999: Marshall “Eminem” Mathers drops his first major-label single, “My Name Is,” produced by N.W.A.’s Dr. Dre. Spitting under the alter ego of the drug-dealing, murderous, sexually violent, and downright sick Slim Shady, Eminem captures the imagination of a bunch of white boys and terrifies everyone else. But his skills are very hard to deny. The song reaches No. 36 on Billboard, and the Detroit MC would go on to record 13 top ten hits, and five No. 1s (two of them with Rihanna), while also becoming the lone white representative in the greatest-rapper-of-all-time discussion.

Early 2000s: “White Dude” supplants “Mentally Unstable Dude” as clique-based hip-hop’s hottest must-have accessory. The Wu-Tang Clan expands its ranks to include fellow Staten Islander Remedy, whose somber track "Never Again" marks both the beginning and the end of the short-lived Holocaust Memorial Rap subgenre. Meanwhile, Three 6 Mafia lightens things up with the inclusion of the underrated Lil Wyte, who drops "Phinally Phamous," an impossibly dirty Dirty South anthem that would be used to test the bass on car stereo systems throughout Memphis and the surrounding areas. A few states over, Timbaland joins forces with future founder of country rap Bubba Sparxxx to gleefully embrace the uglier side of white rap.

2004: Houston’s Paul Wall ice-grills the whole notion of a white rapper by simply being a white guy who raps. His debut, "Sittin' Sidewayz," stalls at No. 93 on the official charts but goes genuinely hard as a street classic. He proceeds to drop a workmanlike eight studio albums, cementing himself as a mainstay of Houston rap. He also manages to avoid nearly all race-based controversy by simply being trill AF and ridin’ dirty alongside fellow Houstonites Slim Thug and Chamillionaire, nabbing three Ozone awards and a Grammy nomination in the process.

2009: Asher Roth reclaims rap for people who aren’t actually part of hip-hop culture with the anodyne frat track "I Love College." Minivans everywhere bump this while the world struggles to solve the Inception-esque brain teaser: If you make a serious version of a Lonely Island parody, is that, too, a parody?

2011: Seattle comes hard, as Seattle is wont to do, when Macklemore & Ryan Lewis drop The Heist, a self-released album that goes on to dominate the charts on the strength of “Thrift Shop” and “Same Love.” My then 8-year-old son declares Macklemore the greatest rapper to ever live. I am disappointed to learn that an 8-year-old child is too old to abandon at the fire station. The Grammys, however, side with my kid, leading to the surreal 2014 moment when Seattle’s Illest sweeps the awards' rap category and is thusly declared a better rap artist than everyone alive, including Kendrick Lamar. Macklemore would privately text Lamar to say how bad he felt about robbing him, and then publicly post that private text to Instagram.

2014: The Bay Area throws its five-panel hat into the white rapper ring in the form of G-Eazy, thus placating everyone who ever wondered what it would look like if an EDM DJ had bars. Gerald Gillum’s tech-bro appearance and features on pop tracks like Aussie singer Grace’s cover of "You Don’t Own Me" garner him some side-eye from Guardians of the Culture, but the East Bay hustler scores a rare nod of approval from inappropriate grandpa Too Short, earning him a highly provisional hood pass.

Somewhere in Time: Riff Raff happens. No one knows what it is. No one feels OK about it. Everyone who makes eye contact with him develops a mysterious underarm itch within 24 hours. Ebro on Hot 97famously goes for his jugular, but is widely declaimed as a hater and reverse racist for his efforts. It’s Meek vs. Drake all over again for the first time. The only voice of reason is, ironically, Paul Wall, who a little while later goes on the show to kindly and respectfully back Ebro up, without actually dissing Riff Raff, proving once again that Paul Wall is the scientifically engineered perfect iteration of a white rapper.

Literature: Unseen Godfather of the "Latin Lit" boom, dies

Gregory Rabassa, a translator of worldwide influence and esteem who helped introduce Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and other Latin American authors to millions of English-language readers, has died.

A longtime professor at Queens College, Rabassa died Monday at a hospice in Branford, Conn. He was 94 and died after a brief illness, according to his daughter, Kate Rabassa Wallen.

Rabassa was an essential gateway to the 1960s Latin American "boom," when such authors as Garcia Marquez, Cortazar and Mario Vargas Llosa became widely known internationally. He worked on the novel that helped start the boom, Cortazar's "Hopscotch," for which Rabassa won a National Book Award for translation. He also worked on the novel which defined the boom, Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," a monument of 20th century literature.

Garcia Marquez often praised Rabassa, saying he regarded the translation of "Solitude" as a work of art in its own right.

"He's the godfather of us all," Edith Grossman, the acclaimed translator of "Don Quixote" and several Garcia Marquez books, told the Associated Press on Tuesday. "He's the one who introduced Latin-American literature in a serious way to the English-speaking world."

Rabassa's other translations included Garcia Marquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch," Vargas Llosa's "Conversation in the Cathedral" and Jorge Amado's "Captains of the Sand." In 2001, Rabassa received a lifetime achievement award from the PEN American Center for contributions to Latino literature. He was presented a National Medal of Arts in 2006 for translations which "continue to enhance our cultural understanding and enrich our lives."

Survivors include his second wife, Clementine; daughters Kate Rabassa Wallen and Clara Rabassa; and granddaughters Jennifer and Sarah Wallen.

Poetry: Kamau Braithwaite for "The Frost"

The Poetry Society of America is honored to announce that Kamau Brathwaite (right) is the 2015 recipient of the organization's highest award, the Frost Medal, presented annually for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. Previous winners of this award include Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Lucille Clifton, Charles Simic, Marilyn Nelson, and Gerald Stern, the 2014 recipient.

 Brathwaite was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1930. He studied at Harrison College in Barbados, graduated with honors from Pembroke College, Cambridge, England, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Sussex. He is the author of numerous books of poetry include Elegguas (Wesleyan University Press, 2010), Born to Slow Horses (2005), Ancestors (New Directions, 2001), Words Need Love Too (2000), Black + Blues(1995), Roots 1993), and Trenchtown Rock (1993), among others. He has taught at Harvard University, and New York University, the University of the West Indies, as well as serving in Ghana's Ministry of Education.

The 2015 Annual Awards ceremony, which will honor Kamau Brathwaite and celebrate the winners of the Poetry Society of America's 10 other annual awards, will take place on Thursday, April 16th at 7:00 pm at the National Arts Club.

The Poetry Society of America, that nation's oldest poetry organization, was founded in 1910 for the purpose of creating a public forum for the advancement, enjoyment, and understanding of poetry. Through a diverse array of programs, initiatives, contests, and awards, the PSA works to build a larger audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the art, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life. The PSA's signature program is Poetry in Motion, featuring poems on transit systems across the country. 

Amazing Film Fact: Al Pacino and Martin Scorcese have Never worked together....until now

Pacino

Scorcese

Al Pacino has great news for all Scorsese fans: The Irishman film is still alive and kicking!
Scorsese, who’s currently up to his neck in upcoming projects, including Silence, is apparently still moving forward with The Irishman—despite moving at a glacial pace—according to Pacino, who will star in the film. (This will be Pacino’s first time working with the director.)
He even added that Bobby Cannavale has joined the cast, which already includes Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci.
The Irishman, based on Charles Brandt’s book I heard You Paint Houses, is about Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a real-life mob hitman believed to have committed more than 25 murders, including Jimmy Hoffa’s.
Waiting a little longer for this film is a small price to pay to see the Scorsese, De Niro, Joe Pesci trifecta back in action.

-from COMPLEX