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    Ka, Lone Soldier of New York’s Underground Rap Scene, Dies at 52

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    The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      From One Nonagenarian Artist to Another, a Tip of the Hat

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      Alex Katz admired a Mark di Suvero sculpture and gave it to the Brooklyn Museum. It now has pride of place in the museum’s 200th anniversary celebration.Consider two artists, now both in their 90s and both still working, who do not know each other personally despite coming up in the New York art scene around the same time.One of them, Alex Katz, became the painter of some of the most recognizable portraits of our age, the other, Mark di Suvero, a welder of huge steel sculptures that are ubiquitous wherever outdoor art is found.This is not a buddy comedy setup, but rather the philanthropic back story behind the recent permanent installation of a nearly 15-foot-tall abstract sculpture by di Suvero, “Sooner or Later” (2022), on the plaza in front of the Brooklyn Museum.The work is a gift to the museum from the Alex Katz Foundation, picked out by the painter himself, to honor the museum’s 200th anniversary.Katz, 97 and still making new paintings, went back to Paula Cooper Gallery three times to see it, before making the purchase; the gallery said that similar works are priced in a range from $3 million and $5 million.“I saw it in the window and thought it was fantastic,” said Katz, known for his striking, flattened and highly stylized portraits, frequently taking his wife, Ada, as a subject. (He had a large retrospective at the Guggenheim that began in 2022.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brooklyn Museum at 200 Celebrates Beauty and Art’s Hidden History

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      At 200 years young, the Brooklyn Museum, the second largest art museum in New York City, has begun celebrating the bicentennial of its founding. And it’s doing so in characteristic fashion — meaning in ways that make traditionalists crazy. It is emphatically re-emphasizing what it has, basically, long been: an institution with the heart and soul of an alternative space enclosed in the body of a traditional museum.And it does so with two large-scale season-opening projects. One is a complete rehang and rethink of its American art galleries, filtering centuries of art from two hemispheres through a post-Black Lives Matter lens. The other, less radical, is a community-based roundup of new work by more than 200 contemporary artists living and working in the borough.Let me wedge in some history here. The museum was founded in 1823 as a circulating public library in what was then the Village of Brooklyn, across the river and independent from a rivalrous Manhattan. In the mid-19th century, the library, called the Brooklyn Institute, began collecting, along with books, natural history specimens and art. (Among the first pieces acquired was a painting, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness” (1855), by the Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand. It’s in the American galleries rehang.)Asher B. Durand, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness,” 1855.George Etheredge for The New York TimesIn 1898, what is now the museum moved into a version of its present McKim, Mead & White home where, over time, it scored some cultural coups. It was among the first United States museum to present African art as art rather than as ethnology. It organized a nervy survey of avant-garde European modernist art in 1926, three years before MoMA existed. The museum was also one of the first in the country to have an art school, and to create a conservation lab.As time went on it also courted controversy by giving space to art unwelcome elsewhere. In 1980, while two other museums backed out of a traveling tour of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” Brooklyn not only took it in but acquired the installation for its collection. (It’s on permanent view in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, another Brooklyn first.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Treasurer for Little-Known Brooklyn Candidate Is Charged in Fraud Scheme

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      Erlene King sent thousands of dollars to associates and told them to distribute the funds to others who would then donate to the campaign she worked for, federal prosecutors said.The treasurer of an ill-fated 2021 campaign for Brooklyn borough president was charged Wednesday with organizing a fraudulent donation scheme in an attempt to access at least $400,000 in public matching funds.Federal prosecutors said the treasurer, Erlene King, 71, had sent thousands of dollars to associates over roughly two and a half years in an effort to skirt campaign finance rules and boost the campaign of Anthony Jones, who would go on to lose the election after receiving roughly 3 percent of the vote. Mr. Jones has not been accused of wrongdoing.Ms. King pleaded not guilty to wire fraud in federal court on Wednesday after she opted to waive her right to have the charges presented to a grand jury.A lawyer representing Ms. King, John S. Wallenstein, said that he and his client were “discussing potential resolutions” with prosecutors. If found guilty, Ms. King could face up to 20 years in prison.New York City’s public campaign financing program provides funds for campaigns that meet certain fund-raising thresholds. During the 2021 campaign for Brooklyn borough president, the Campaign Finance Board offered to pay campaigns up to $8 for every $1 raised, but only if a campaign first received donations from a minimum number of contributors and raised a total of $50,000 in eligible contributions on its own.In an effort to meet that threshold, Ms. King organized at least $25,000 in fraudulent contributions to Mr. Jones’s campaign, according to prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York. Donations that do not originate with the person whose name appears on fund-raising records are often called “straw” donations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      N.Y.P.D. Understated Woman’s Wound in Subway Shooting, Lawyer Says

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      Kerry Gahalal, who was struck when officers shot a knife-wielding man at a Brooklyn station, was not simply “grazed” as officials said, according to a lawyer for the woman’s family.A 26-year-old woman who was wounded when New York City police officers shot a knife-wielding man at a Brooklyn subway station was not “grazed” by gunfire as officials have said, according to a lawyer for her family. Instead, the lawyer said on Saturday, she has a bullet lodged in her leg and is unable to walk.The woman, Kerry Gahalal, was one of two bystanders to be struck when the officers shot the man, Derrell Mickles, during a confrontation last Sunday at the Sutter Avenue L train station in the Brownsville neighborhood. The other bystander, Gregory Delpeche, was in critical condition on Friday.The contention that police officials had minimized the severity of Ms. Gahalal’s injury came a day after the Police Department released video footage of the episode that appeared unlikely to end questions about whether the officers had acted appropriately under the circumstances.The shooting is being examined by the department’s Force Investigation Division and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Police leaders and Mayor Eric Adams have said that the use of force was justified because Mr. Mickles had threatened officers with a weapon. Critics say it was a dangerous escalation of what had begun as an effort to enforce the minor offense of fare evasion.Ms. Gahalal turned 26 the day before the shooting and was taking the subway to Manhattan with her husband for a celebratory dinner when the L train they were on stopped at the Sutter Avenue station, the lawyer for her family, Joel Levine, said.Discussing the shooting, in which Mr. Mickles and an officer were also wounded, Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department, said at a police news conference last Sunday that a male bystander (Mr. Delpeche) had been struck in the head and that a female bystander (Ms. Gahalal) had been “grazed.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shooting Mars Festivities at West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn

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      At least five people were shot and wounded along the route of the bustling event, which continued on despite the disruption.At least five people were shot and wounded along the route of the annual West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn on Monday, briefly disrupting — but not derailing — a crowded and colorful celebration of New York City’s Caribbean community.At least one of the victims was listed in critical condition, with the remaining four expected to recover, the police said.It was not immediately clear what led to the shooting, which occurred hours into the parade, at around 2:30 p.m., near 307 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. But at a news conference, John Chell, the chief of patrol of the New York Police Department, described it as a targeted attack. The gunman, whom Mr. Chell described as a man in his 20s, remained at large as of Monday afternoon.It was another conspicuous episode of violence to occur alongside the event in recent years, but, soon afterward, the parade, an annual celebration of emancipation from enslavement, continued along with its festive music, colorful outfits and decorative floats.Adrianalee Watson, 15, said she was selling bracelets with her mother on Monday when they heard the gunshots and ran into a nearby building for safety. Ms. Watson said she also heard shots fired at the parade last year. On Monday, after ambulances took the victims away, she returned to her spot on Eastern Parkway and resumed her business.“It’s a fun experience, even though you do have people who ruin the fun,” she said. “You’ve just got to be safe about it. You’ve got to have a place where you can go if anything bad happens, and you’ve just got to be aware of your surroundings.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ex-Green Beret Goudreau, Who Planned Failed Venezuela Coup, Is Arrested

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      Jordan Goudreau, 48, had taken credit for a failed coup attempt against Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. He faces federal charges of illegal arms smuggling.A former U.S. Green Beret who orchestrated a disastrous failed coup attempt against the authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in 2020 was arrested Tuesday in New York on federal arms smuggling charges.The federal authorities accused Jordan G. Goudreau, 48, and a co-conspirator, Yacsy Alexandra Alvarez, of exporting military-style rifles, night vision devices, lasers, silencers and other military equipment without a license to Colombia beginning in November 2019 for use in carrying out “activities in Venezuela,” the Justice Department said in a news release on Wednesday.The charges appear to refer to the botched cross-border raid carried out in May 2020 by dozens of armed, self-declared freedom fighters, including former Venezuelan soldiers and former American Special Forces operators, who aimed to topple Mr. Maduro.Mr. Goudreau, of Melbourne, Fla., who did not participate in the raid, publicly took credit for the failed incursion known as Operation Gideon, which he said he had planned with disaffected Venezuelan officials. The audacious rebellion left observers around the world wondering why a decorated former U.S. Special Forces soldier who had served several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan was leading a foreign insurrection.A group of only about 60 men had planned to land on Venezuelan soil near the capital, Caracas, from speedboats and ultimately capture Mr. Maduro. But they were repelled by the Venezuelan security forces. Six men were killed and 13 others were detained, including two former Green Berets who were said to have been recruited by Mr. Goudreau, according to The Associated Press. The Americans were sentenced to 20 years in prison by the Venezuelan authorities in August 2020 but were released in a prisoner exchange deal with the United States late last year.Mr. Goudreau and Ms. Alvarez, a Venezuelan national who lives in Tampa, Fla., face charges of conspiracy to violate export laws, smuggling goods from the United States and violating federal firearm export control acts, prosecutors said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Heat Wave Doesn’t Stop Mermaid Parade on Coney Island

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      Dolly McDermott and her mother, Patricia McDermott, were making their way along Surf Avenue on Coney Island shortly after noon on Saturday. They were trying to get to the registration table for Brooklyn’s annual Mermaid Parade, but it was slow going — spectators kept asking them to pose for pictures.The daughter was wearing light-rimmed sunglasses, peach-colored frills, necklaces, bangles, and a foam seashell anchored to her back. Her mother struck a gothic contrast in black and white, with face paint and a full mermaid skeleton running the length of her outfit.“One more! One more!” a photographer pleaded with them.“It’s taken us half an hour to walk this far,” the younger Ms. McDermott, an artist and a self-styled “professional eccentric,” said. “Only because we look as good as we do,” her mother added.Marchers lined up in the shade before the start of the parade.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesThe pair said they had been marching in Coney Island’s pageantry of aquatic weirdness for several years, and that they had not been deterred by a citywide heat advisory. The temperature was already 86 and climbing as costumed marchers and spectators assembled under a cloudless blue sky.But the mood was upbeat as DJs on floats tested their speakers and marching bands tuned up near the staging area at Surf Avenue and West 21st Street.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Miser’ Review: Updating Molière, but Missing a Key Ingredient

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      This Molière in the Park production doesn’t have the sharp satirical bite of the original.The support beam of theater in France, Molière is nowhere near as famous in the United States. Yet the comic high jinks, star-crossed lovers and long-lost relatives that pop up in his play “The Miser,” first produced in 1668, will be instantly familiar to anybody who has ever seen a Shakespeare comedy.Where Molière stands out, however, is as a sharp social satirist whose denouncing of the vain, the hypocritical and the simply deluded have not aged — once timely, they are now timeless. Unfortunately it is precisely that element that is missing from the Molière in the Park production of “The Miser” at the LeFrak Center in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.The title character, Harpagon (Francesca Faridany), is a curdled, choleric, elderly man consumed by greed. It’s not even that he wants money to live in luxury: Harpagon just wants to possess it.The play relentlessly ridicules Harpagon and his pathological greed, along with his tyrannical ways at home, where he lords it over his two daughters, the flighty Elise (Ismenia Mendes) and the flashy Cleante (Alana Raquel Bowers). Complicating matters, Elise is in love with her father’s steward, Valere (Calvin Leon Smith, fresh from a terrific turn as the closeted Larry in “Fat Ham”), while Harpagon and Cleante both covet the fetching Marianne (MaYaa Boateng, from “Fairview”).That women are playing Cleante (a man in the original) and Harpagon indicates that the director Lucie Tiberghien, who is also the artistic director of Molière in the Park, is not stuck in tradition. Although it doesn’t gum up the works, why keep Harpagon as a male character, for example, and make Cleante a female one? This is where Molière’s relative obscurity in the United States becomes an asset since many audience members would not even be aware of the difference, as everything is played matter-of-factly.Trickier is Faridany as Harpagon. An essential part of the play is that the character covets the same woman as his son (OK, daughter), so his being an elderly man adds an element of discomfort. This does not hit as hard when he is played by a woman who is far from “over 70,” Harpagon’s intended age.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More