Remembering NYU fi lm professor Baskin
BY JANE HEIL USYK
Last week on Oct. 1, I wandered up
to Le Pain Quotidien on Eighth
Street and Fifth Avenue, ordered
a coffee, and sat facing the windows
and Eighth Street. I wondered why I
was doing this, and the answer came:
to see if Arnie walks by. It would have
been very bizarre if he had, because he
died on Sept. 24th.
Arnold Baskin was a superb guy who
had spent years in Paris in the 1970s
and had become an expert on French
cinema (and all things French) and
parlayed that into teaching jobs — fi rst
at Boston University and then, for 40
years at NYU, where he was a tenured
associate professor of fi lm at Tisch
School of the Arts.
Arnie was a kind of cultural conduit,
an international yenta, so to speak. He
introduced people he thought should
meet each other and as a result, their
lives were larger, and grander, and
more international.
He had an apartment in Washington
Square Village on Bleecker Street
and lived partly in an apartment on
Eighth Street, where his companion of
40 years, Tia Lemke, lived. Arnie kept
an eye on Tia, and was a constant wise
presence in her life. They “adopted” a
tiny Maltipoo named Alfi e, and took
him with them everywhere until he
died some years ago.
He had done stints in Paris, Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Israel, and Romania. He
learned Cuban and Puerto Rican dances,
which he danced for the rest of his
life. He had an 18-month internship in
fi lmmaking in Puerto Rico at the beginning
of his career.
Arnie, Tia and Alfie.
He was a writer, director, and cinematographer
at the Public Broadcast
Laboratory in New York City, at ORTF
(French Television), and at Israel Television.
He was made a chevalier in the
Order of the Palmes Academiques by
the Prime Minister of France and in
1998, he won a distinguished teaching
medal at NYU.
He taught a course required of every
entering freshman, “Sight and Sound,”
in which each student is required to
write, direct and create fi ve short fi lms
and work on each others’ fi lms. It is a
COURTESY JANE HEIL USYK
very high-pressure course at 14 weeks
long — there is not a lot of time for
thinking and ruminating, and students
have to focus and create, constantly.
He spoke several languages well —
French, Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish,
Russian.
He had been born in Brownsville,
Brooklyn, to a Jewish family when
Brownsville was almost all Jewish.
He had two older brothers. The oldest
had been killed in World War II. The
middle one, Alex, had retired as a history
professor at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook when he died
about fi ve years ago.
I had known him for about 15 years,
but I don’t recall how I met him, except
that it had something to do with my
fi lmmaker cousin Stuart, who lived on
Great Jones Street. Someone invited us
to his grand 70th birthday party, hosted
by Tia, at Gonzales y Gonzales on
Broadway and Houston streets. It was
a crowded event, with food and drink
and great live Cuban music. It was very
cheerful and Arnie danced a lot.
Arnie turned Bruno’s at LaGuardia
Place into his version of the Select
in Paris, continuing the sociable
French practice of hosting groups of
friends outdoors at cafes. When Bruno’s
closed, he moved his coffee hours
to Silver Spurs down the street, a diner
with a sizable outdoor section. But
when Silver Spurs also closed, Arnie’s
coffee hours ended, too.
We never went to one of his classes,
but we knew, because he talked about
it, that a major feature of an early class
would be “cheap restaurants.” Students
new to the Village and to NYU were already
spending plenty, Arnie reasoned,
and they needed guidance on where to
eat cheaply. He told them about Chinatown’s
very cheap dumplings and
Mamoun’s, where you can get a falafel
sandwich for only a few dollars. Students
learned a lot about cheap food in
Arnie’s classes and had great conversations
in addition to learning about
movies. To some of us, that was really
all you needed.
And if any former students hit the
big time, they had an obligation to
take Arnie to lunch at Peter Luger, the
steakhouse in Brooklyn.
Saturday party wraps up 10th Hester Street fair
BY GABE HERMAN
The Hester Street Fair will wrap
up its 10th season with a closing
party on Oct. 26.
The Saturday event, from 11 a.m. to
6 p.m. in Seward Park, will include a
collage activity, coffee from local cafe
Round K, music by Mari MacDowell,
Nice Groove and Zebra Blood, and
plenty of food and fashion from local
vendors.
The Hester Street Fair was launched
in 2010 by MTV host SuChin Pak and
local architect Ron Castellano, with the
goal of bringing new cultural programming
to the Lower East Side, along
with promoting local businesses.
The fair was taken over in 2016 by
David Komurek, who said that what
surprised him most during his fi rst year
was “the sense of community with all
the vendors and the power of making
real-world connections with people.”
Komurek added several regular
events, including an Ice Cream Social,
Kids Day, Coffee Competition, the
city’s fi rst CBD fair, and an all-female
Girl Power event.
Some of the fair’s events also promote
charities like the Lower East Side
Girls Club, Trinity Place Shelter, Green
Beetz and Equality Florida. Local businesses
continue to be featured, including
the new cookie company baKD,
which was founded by a Lower East
Side local and was recently profi led in
The Villager.
“I would defi nitely say that the fair
is continuing to grow and that this
current season, our tenth, shows solid
proof,” according to Janine Ciccone,
the fair’s producer. “We have gained
the attendance of many new vendors
and the interest of more creatives who
would like to use our space as an extension
of their vision. It’s been fantastic.”
Seward Park is located at the corner
of Canal and Essex Streets. The full
lineup for the fair’s Oct. 26 closing
event can be found at hesterstreetfair.
com.
Schneps Media October 24, 2019 15