Latest news with #Pearlman
New York Post
30-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Mayor Adams ‘violated' the law, paving way for City Council solitary confinement ban: court
Mayor Eric Adams 'violated' the law when he blocked the City Council's ban on solitary confinement in Big Apple prisons, a Manhattan judge ruled Monday. 'Mayor Adams acted beyond the scope of his emergency powers,' wrote Manhattan Supreme Court judge Jeffery H. Pearlman in his decision on Monday. 5 A Manhattan judge ruled that Mayor Adams violated the law in blocking a solitary confinement ban passed with a veto-proof majority in 2023. Matthew McDermott Advertisement 'He cannot suspend the law because he disapproves of its impact.' The ruling paves the way for a council law — passed in late 2023 — banning solitary confinement to finally take effect. Days before it was set to begin, Adams signed an emergency order blocking it. Advertisement Hizzoner was sued in December by the City Council and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who argued his order was 'arbitrary and capricious.' 5 Mayor Adams 'cannot suspend the law because he disapproves of its impact,' wrote Judge Jeffery Pearlman. Gregory P. Mango Pearlman eviscerated Adams for abusing his emergency powers, stating that they should only be reserved for emergency scenarios. In a democracy, Pearlman wrote, a mayor's veto powers are the 'single tool' to block laws they don't like. Advertisement But when the law passed with a veto-proof majority, Adams lacked the ability to stop it. 5 Judge Pearlman eviscerated Adams for abusing his mayoral emergency powers, stating that they should only be reserved for emergency scenarios. Getty Images 'By declaring a state of emergency and issuing emergency orders, he violated that process,' Pearlman said. Local Law 42 bans punitive segregation in jails — including at the notorious Rikers Island — beyond a four-hour 'de-escalation' period. Advertisement It also changes the way jailers transport inmates by axing the practice of keeping them in handcuffs and leg irons while on buses or in other vehicles. Pearlman did give Adams credit for noting concerns with the law, which were raised by a federally appointed monitor selected to oversee Rikers. 5 The federal monitor overseeing Rikers noted concerns over the City Council law banning solitary confinement, but the judge said that doesn't give the mayor the right to abuse his power to block its implementation. Leonardo Munoz But he also noted that the mayor should have appealed to the federal judge presiding over the monitor who has 'control over whether the law could actually be implemented' — instead of abusing his emergency powers. Council Speaker Adrianne Adams hailed the ruling and demanded the mayor's administration bring the city into compliance. 5 'The mayor must follow the law, just like every New Yorker, and cannot abuse the powers of the office,' said City Council Speaker Adrianne Adams. Getty Images 'The mayor must follow the law, just like every New Yorker, and cannot abuse the powers of the office.' she said. 'Solitary confinement has been proven to cause physical, psychological, and emotional harm, making jails and our city less safe.' Advertisement City Hall spokesperson Liz Garcia said the law 'creates a new definition of solitary confinement' and will lead to a 'public safety emergency in our jails.' Garcia added that solitary confinement hasn't been used in city jails since 2019.
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judge rules Mayor Adams broke law in blocking NYC jails solitary confinement ban
A New York State Supreme Court judge has ruled Mayor Adams broke the law when he refused to implement elements of a city law severely restricting the use of solitary confinement in the jails. Local Law 42 was passed in December 2023, and the City Council overrode the mayor's subsequent veto in January 2024. Since then, Adams has used repeated executive orders to suspend parts of the law, citing public safety. The Council then sued Dec. 9, arguing the mayor could not use emergency powers to override a decision by the city's duly elected legislature. On Monday, Judge Jeffrey Pearlman ruled in the Council's favor. 'When the City Council overturns a mayoral veto, it is not an emergency. It is a democratic process. By declaring a state of emergency and issuing emergency orders, the mayor violated that process,' wrote Pearlman. Pearlman noted the Council passed Local Law 42 after years of hearings and debate including extensive input from the mayor and Department of Correction. That input led to 'material changes' in the law's language. 'While the court respects the immense power that the state gives the executive, that [the Mayor] disagreed with the City Council on the passage of Local Law 42 cannot be considered an emergency of the sort imagined by the state Legislature.' Pearlman wrote that he was referring to state Executive Law 24, which allows mayors to declare emergencies and use broad powers if 'public safety is imperiled.' That law cites 'disaster, rioting, catastrophe, or similar public emergency' as reasons for issuing such an emergency order. Adams first invoked emergency orders to suspend Local Law 42 on July 27, 2024, the date before the law went into effect. Emergency Executive Order 624 stated the law 'severely limits the use of restrictive housing, de-escalation confinement, restraints in movement and emergency lock-ins' and therefore raises 'serious public safety concerns.' Adams also argued the law 'conflicted' with court orders in the Nunez class action lawsuit which alleged the city failed to deal with violence and use of force in the jails. The case led to the creation of the federal monitor to recommend fixes. Mostly recently, the judge in the case ruled a manager will be appointed to take over some functions from city control. The monitor also cited unease with portions of the law. In a Jan. 12 letter to the city, the monitor, Steve Martin, wrote the law 'could inadvertently undermine the overall goals of protecting individuals from harm.' Adams has reissued the order every five days as required by state law. The Council filed its Article 78 lawsuit Dec. 9 with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, alleging Adams' orders amounted to 'an undemocratic abuse of power that no previous New York City Mayor has even attempted.' 'Mayor Adams' decision to exceed his legal authority, simply because he was overruled, undermines the foundation of our democracy, and it must be invalidated,' Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said at the time. Reps for Adams did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Express Tribune
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Joe Rogan left unsettled as mentalist correctly guesses his ATM PIN on air
Joe Rogan was visibly unsettled during a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience after mentalist Oz Pearlman appeared to guess his secret ATM PIN code live on air. The moment left Rogan questioning how Pearlman could have deduced such a private detail. Joe Rogan gets spooked after a mentalist correctly guesses his ATM PIN code 😳 — FearBuck (@FearedBuck) June 5, 2025 Pearlman, a former Wall Street banker and America's Got Talent finalist, used his appearance as an opportunity to demonstrate his psychological skills. He began with a simple question to Rogan: 'Would your wife know your ATM PIN code?' Rogan answered, 'No,' setting the stage for a series of uncanny psychological tricks. Pearlman instructed Rogan to think of a random four-digit number, which Rogan picked as "2020." Using a combination of body language reading, subconscious tells, and quick improvisation, Pearlman began to deduce the real ATM PIN code. Pearlman boldly guessed that the first digit of Rogan's code was "1." Rogan, noticeably unnerved, confirmed it was correct, though he remained cautious about revealing more. As the interaction escalated, Pearlman eventually revealed a full prediction on a whiteboard. When asked if it matched his actual PIN, Rogan's scepticism grew, leading him to admit the similarity between Pearlman's guess and the actual number. Rogan, sounding shaken, admitted that the PIN had come in the mail, adding to his unease. He joked about contacting his bank, uncertain whether Pearlman had been playing a long game with him.
The Independent
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Patti Smith's Horses at 50: How a reluctant musician made a punk-rock classic
Patti Smith never planned to front a rock band. In 1971, when the music producer and manager Sandy Pearlman approached her about making music, she laughed and told him she had a perfectly good job in a bookstore. Pearlman had seen her performing her poems at St Mark's Church in New York's Bowery against a backdrop of feedback courtesy of guitarist Lenny Kaye. (Also in the audience that night: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Todd Rundgren, Sam Shepard and Smith's ex-boyfriend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.) In Smith, Pearlman saw a rock star in the making, but it took four more years for Smith to warm to the idea. Finally, in 1975, her first LP, Horses, was born. This November, Horses will be 50, an anniversary that is being honoured first with a tribute concert this month at New York's Carnegie Hall featuring Michael Stipe, Kim Gordon, Karen O and more, and in the autumn by Smith herself in a string of concerts where she will perform the album in its entirety. Horses – which is included in the National Recording Registry in the US Library of Congress for being a record that's considered 'culturally, historically or aesthetically significant' – was not only one of the most explosive debuts of the 1970s: it lit the touchpaper for the New York punk rock scene. It arrived five months before the Ramones' self-titled debut, and two years ahead of Richard Hell's Blank Generation, Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols and Television's Marquee Moon. In her 2019 book Revenge of the She-Punks, the music journalist Vivien Goldman describes Smith as 'a new breed of autonomous, self-defined and uninhibited female rock star'. At the time, Smith didn't give much thought to being a woman in a male-dominated scene – at least, not until men started shouting 'Get back to the kitchen' at her during gigs. In the sleeve notes to Horses, she wrote of being 'beyond gender', later explaining that as an artist 'I can take any position, any voice, that I want'. Nowadays she is often called the godmother of punk, or punk's poet laureate, yet it is men who still dominate accounts of the scene. But it would be wrong to attribute that entirely to misogyny. Smith may have provided a template for a new generation of musicians, but musically she existed in a category of her own; you might call it 'punk adjacent'. Horses had a furious passion, and cared little for musical proficiency, but it didn't sound like the work of a snotty upstart reflexively railing against authority. Instead, it bridged the gap between punk rock and poetry, with vocals that shifted between singing and spoken word. Smith was loud in her appreciation of writers and poets such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Blake, Genet, Plath and her beat-writer friends William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. As she noted in her 2010 memoir Just Kids, when it came to making music, poetry was her 'guiding principle'. Horses was, for her, 'three-chord rock merged with the power of word'. Prior to releasing the album, Smith had taken her first steps as a recording artist with a cover of Jimi Hendrix's 'Hey Joe' in 1974, about a man on the run after killing his wife, but with the murderous protagonist replaced by the kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. It was decent, but it was the B-side that gave a glimpse of what was to come. 'Piss Factory', a raw, incantatory track that started out as a poem, and that recalled her time working in a New Jersey factory aged 16, was Smith's cri de coeur against production-line drudgery. She had been mercilessly bullied by her colleagues, who were annoyed by her insistence on carrying a copy of Rimbaud's Illuminations in her back pocket and instructed her to leave it at home. When she refused, they dunked her head in a toilet bowl of urine to teach her a lesson. Smith's lyrics on Horses would prove similarly visceral, never more so than in the opener 'Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)', a reworking of a Them B-side that wove in excerpts from Smith's poem 'Oath' and began with the electrifying refrain: 'Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine'. More than just a rejection of religion, it was a perfect distillation of Smith's spirit: hypnotic, primal, uncompromising. Elsewhere on the album, there are tales of female suicide (in the reggae-inflected 'Redondo Beach', wrongly interpreted as a same-sex love song at the time), alien visitations ('Birdland') and a dream in which Jim Morrison of The Doors is bound like Prometheus on a marble slab, only to break free ('Break It Up'). In 'Free Money', the most straightforwardly propulsive rock song on the album, she dreams about winning the lottery, climbing out of poverty and 'buy[ing] you a jet plane, baby'. Horses was recorded at Electric Lady Studios, near Smith's New York apartment. Among the musicians were Kaye, Television's Tom Verlaine, Allen Lanier, Smith's then boyfriend from Blue Öyster Cult, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, and Richard Sohl on keyboards. Together, they fashioned a spiky garage-rock sound partly honed during live performances at the soon-to-be punk mecca CBGB, and that would become the signature sound of the late 1970s scene. John Cale of the Velvet Underground, the producer, encouraged improvisation in the studio and avoided smoothing the band's rough edges. Even so, he and Smith clashed repeatedly during the five-week recording, with Smith saying it was 'like [Rimbaud's] A Season in Hell' for them both. Cale later recalled the experience of working with her as 'confrontational, and a lot like an immutable force meeting an immovable object'. Smith's transgressive spirit also inhabited the cover image, which reinforced her 'beyond gender' approach. Taken by Mapplethorpe and shot in black and white at a penthouse apartment owned by the art curator Sam Wagstaff, it showed an androgynous-looking Smith in white shirt and slacks, a jacket slung insouciantly over her shoulder as if she were the sixth member of the rat pack. When Smith's label, Arista, suggested the hair on Smith's upper lip be airbrushed out, they might as well have asked her to don heels and a sparkly dress. She instructed them to leave it be. When Horses came out on 10 November (the death date of her beloved Rimbaud), Smith had already published several poetry collections and was making money writing for music magazines including Creem and Rolling Stone. In her early years in New York with Mapplethorpe, the pair had lived in squalor and often couldn't afford to eat, but by now she was comparatively solvent. With her album finished, she imagined she would keep on writing and perhaps go back to working in the bookstore. As she told an interviewer in 2007, rock'n'roll was something she was 'just gonna do for a little while and then get back to work'. What she didn't bet on was the album's rapturous reception, which led to requests for her to perform all over the world and to record more music (one of the few dissenting voices was that of Greil Marcus, who snippily declared: 'If you're going to mess around with the kind of stuff Buñuel, Dali and Rimbaud were putting out, you have to come up with a lot more than an homage'). In the five years after Horses was released, Smith would make three more albums including 1978's Easter, her most commercially successful LP. Easter included the single 'Because the Night', an air-punching ode to love and hedonism that was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. It remains Smith's biggest hit. Fans accused her of selling out, but she was unrepentant. She told New York Magazine: 'I liked hearing myself on the radio. To me, those people didn't understand punk at all. Punk-rock is just another word for freedom.' To me, those people didn't understand punk at all. Punk-rock is just another word for freedom Patti Smith Smith was still on a commercial high when, in the late 1970s, she retreated from the limelight. By this time, she had met her husband, Fred 'Sonic' Smith of the Detroit band MC5, and was pregnant with their first child. For the next 15 years, she would concentrate on raising their two children; aside from 1988's Dream of Life, made with her spouse, there would be no new music. But then, in 1989, her former soulmate Mapplethorpe died from an Aids-related illness at 42. Five years later, her husband and her brother both died within a month of each other; both were in their forties. As the sole breadwinner, Smith had no choice but to go back to work. Now 78, Smith has outlived most of her New York contemporaries, bar Kaye, who still performs with her, and Cale, with whom she has long made up since those fraught Horses sessions. Her work transcends not just genres but mediums too. The last 15 years have seen her triumph as a memoirist: the award-winning Just Kids, a chronicle of her relationship with Mapplethorpe, is a bona fide masterpiece, a poetic account of youthful love, and a deliciously grimy portrait of the late 20th-century New York scene where music, art and literature collided and culture was remade. Her two subsequent memoirs, 2015's M Train and 2019's Year of the Monkey, provide portraits of the latter-day Smith: always writing, photographing, performing, tending to her cats and paying loving tribute to the artists, dead and alive, who paved the way. Not for nothing does she have the rare distinction of having been awarded an Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by France's ministry of culture for her poetry and, for her musical achievements, a place in America's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The influence of Smith on successive generations cannot be overstated: The Clash, Sonic Youth, Madonna, Courtney Love, Michael Stipe, PJ Harvey, Florence Welch, The Raincoats, Bikini Kill and The Waterboys' Mike Scott have all talked of their debt to her. Stipe said that when he heard Horses, it 'tore my limbs off and put them back in a whole new order'. Go to her concerts now, and you'll see old punks standing in rapturous communion alongside teenage and twentysomething fans all celebrating Smith: an accidental icon and rock's most remarkable renaissance woman. 'People Have the Power: A Celebration of Patti Smith' is at New York's Carnegie Hall on 26 March. Smith performs 'Horses' in full at the London Palladium on 12 and 13 October. Tickets here.
Los Angeles Times
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Jeff Pearlman goes from sportswriting to throwing fastballs at O.C. politicians
Jeff Pearlman is one of the most successful sportswriters of his generation. His must-read articles appeared in Sports Illustrated and ESPN in the 2000s before he switched over to penning best-selling books on everything from Bo Jackson to the 1986 New York Mets to the Showtime-era Lakers, the latter which was turned into the recent HBO series 'Winning Time.' His biography of Tupac Shakur is scheduled for release in October. And yet last month, Pearlman announced he was embarking on an altogether different kind of mission: to write about Orange County politics. Talk about a wicked curveball! As a faithful reader and lifelong Orange Countian, I immediately signed up for his website, The Truth OC. There, on a near daily basis, Pearlman uses the same puerile-yet-potent invective against local conservatives and President Trump that he once reserved for sports fools. Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns? He's 'Bull Connor meets Bobby Knight meets Officer Krupke.' Laguna Woods Republican Club president Pat Micone? Belongs to the 'genre of person who needs to be told, repeatedly, not to answer her cell unless she recognizes the number.' Capistrano Valley Unified School District trustees are a 'four-headed wackadoo squad of hard-right board members.' Rep. Young Kim is a 'coward' for not standing up to Trump. Those are the barbs I can quote in a family-friendly newspaper. Pearlman already scored a scoop by unearthing a video that went viral of Capo Valley trustee Judy Bullockus using the N-word during a board meeting. While I was pleasantly shocked by Pearlman's pivot, he's a much-needed chronicler for a region of 3.2 million that has served as a political bellwether for decades yet has a much smaller press corps than before. Still, Pearlman writing about O.C. politics seems a little like Gustavo Dudamel quitting the L.A. Philharmonic to moonlight as a drummer at the Dresden Room. Shohei ditching the Dodgers to join a local pickleball league. 'I'm profoundly down' about national politics right now, he said when we recently met at a cafe near Chapman University, where he lectures on sports journalism. Gawky and bespectacled but with the brio of a scrapper, Pearlman was dressed like a quintessential sports geek: black-and-yellow Pittsburgh Pirates hat and Pittsburgh Maulers shirt, the latter a long-gone professional football team. Flip-flops. Sweatpants that looked like jeans. 'Like, these are not happy days for me. But every time I write a new post, I feel really good,' he said. 'Every time I see people reading and the subscriptions keep going up, I'm like, 'All right, this is a way to feel a little like you're doing something.'' Other sports journalists also occasionally opine on politics, long a no-no in their profession. But Galen Clavio, director of the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana University in Bloomington, feels that what's especially fascinating about Pearlman's latest focus is that almost all of his peers 'aren't going into hyper-local things, because most followers will think, 'I don't believe you're really into this, so why bring it into the equation?'' 'I wish I didn't have to do this … but this feels more important,' the fast-talking Pearlman replied when I asked him why he's now focusing on the micro instead of the macro. He recently covered a rainy Friday afternoon pro-democracy rally outside Irvine City Hall, for chrissakes. 'We don't need another me screaming about Trump, which I do a lot. It doesn't really resonate. There's a million people screaming, but there's not that many people screaming about local politics.' I wondered why he didn't just volunteer for a local Democratic club, or write a check to a politician, instead of devoting time and energy to something he's doing for free. 'This is important — I'm being serious,' he shot back. 'I want people to know that not everyone is doing sh-t for the money. Like, I'm just doing it because I'm mad.' The East Coast native moved with his family from New York to South O.C. in 2014 after years of visits for his work, which included covering the 2002 World Series that saw the Angels beat the San Francisco Giants (he thinks the Halos are the worst franchise in Major League Baseball). 'We wanted a yard for our kids,' he cracked. Pearlman was initially the classic O.C. suburbanite, preferring to focus on the good life instead of local matters. But he always kept in mind the experiences of a good friend. 'She used to tell me what it was like to be a Black person in Orange County and being stopped here' by police constantly. 'And I'd notice weird things, and she was like, 'Well, that's Orange County.'' In 2018, Pearlman came across the words of Huntington Beach-area Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, long an outlandish figure who once said during a congressional hearing that dinosaur farts caused global warming (he later claimed it was a joke). 'I never actually never had exposure to people like this,' the 52-year-old said. 'I had read about them, but that was it.' He started a website that tracked some of the crazier things Rohrabacher said, which I remembered as being funny but not really revelatory. In hindsight, Pearlman was personifying the awakening of O.C. liberals, who made history in 2018 by electing an all-Democratic congressional delegation for the first time ever two years after making Hillary Clinton the first Democratic presidential nominee to take Orange County since the Great Depression. 'That was a real turning point,' Pearlman said. 'And I didn't think [Orange County] would ever go back for red.' Trump's triumph last year (although not in O.C., which he has never won), coupled with local election victories for MAGA acolytes, snapped Pearlman back into action. Shortly after the election, he went to a local meeting of liberals. 'They were very nice people, but basically the whole vibe of the meeting was, 'Who wants a hug? You need to get in touch with our feelings.' And that's just not me at all. I'm not saying I don't have feelings. But to me, you have to punch them [MAGA nation] in the face.' His pugnaciousness reminded me of O.C.'s oldest political blog: Orange Juice Blog, which began in 2003. Publisher Vern Nelson started off as the resident loudmouth in its lively comments section before becoming a contributor, then taking over Orange Juice altogether in 2010. He hadn't heard of The Truth OC until I told him, and he asked if he could read some posts before offering his opinion. When Nelson called back, he was laughing in appreciation. 'He's doing a lot of good stuff,' Nelson said. 'We need another good political blog. I'd say to use his previously existing fame, but he's probably going to piss off a lot of his old readers.' Pearlman thinks his sports background actually makes him ideal to write about politics. 'We deal with people who are mad at us all the time, and we have to come back the next day,' he said. 'And, like, you have to write fast. You have to turn around copy quick. You have to make it punchy. Like, it can't just be flat.' He admits to being a 'community college student, second semester freshman year' when it came to knowing about his new beat. He knew none of the historic names I threw at him, and nothing about Santa Ana, where a new generation of Latino voters are bringing L.A.-style progressive politics to the city. When Pearlman tried to rationalize the conservative leanings of his neighbors — 'I think my neighbor is upset about his taxes. I don't think he's upset about a Black family here' — I retorted that his neighbor would be up in arms if it was a Mexican family, and he conceded the point. 'But I'm taking whatever people have to give me,' he added. 'I'm open to learn.' Pearlman doesn't know how long he'll do The Truth OC and even admitted, 'I know I'm definitely gonna burn out. That doesn't mean I won't keep going.' But he hoped that his example will bring attention and vigor to a political scene that desperately needs both. 'You'll go to these [local Democratic] meetings and they'll be like, 'All right, guys, tomorrow we're going to have a letter-writing campaign to Young Kim's office, and we're going to send 100 postcards. And it is done earnestly and with very good intentions. I'm not bashing anywhere, but it's not f—— working.' He stayed silent for a second — a lifetime for Pearlman. 'I sent 50 bucks to [Rep. Hakeem] Jeffries' office. It's another 50 bucks he has. What's it going to do, buy 100 postcards?' A half-second of silence. 'What these people [politicians] don't like is being embarrassed.'
