Today’s weirdest story has to be that of Oscar-winning songwriter Joseph Brooks who is accused of sexually assaulting at least eleven women who he lured to his East Side apartment. Brooks is 71 years old and looks like your Uncle Moe, if your Uncle Moe wears a raincoat and flashes school children, though at the time of the assaults Brooks was merely in his late sixties and doubtless cut a dashing figure. 

According to the Manhattan DA’s office, Brooks — who won his statue for penning the 1977 Debby Boone hit “You Light Up My Life” — worked with a female accomplice to seduce a series of aspiring chanteuses. They found the women, most from the Pacific Northwest online, using sites such as Craigslist, and then flew them to New York. Oscar was just the closer, according to one of the arresting officers, who said Brooks would brandish it and say, “This could be you, this could be you holding the Oscar. If you just do what I say.” 

The power of the prize is nothing new of course. Phil Spector is finally in prison, convicted of murdering B-movie actress Lana Clarkson after luring her to his mansion in Alhambra, California in 2003. Clarkson had been working as a hostess in the House of Blues in LA while Spector was famous for having invented the Wall of Sound and being mad as a hatter. He was also renowned for pulling guns on people (including musicians he worked with) and bringing young women back to the manse he called Pyrenees Castle. A homicide just waiting to happen! (I would also say beware of any one who has a name for his mansion, especially when he has a hair piece like Phil’s.) 

Brooks, for the record, did not kill anyone. And it’s possible that some of his accusers, such as former American Idol contestant Loretta Spruell will actually benefit from the publicity. Personally, I think the man should have been jailed just for writing “You Light Up My Life” but for the women he wronged I suggest another chestnut, an old Ronnie Milsap song that includes the lines: “If they gave gold statuettes/for tears and regrets/I’d be a legend in my time.”

The images of protests coming from Tehran are all the more haunting because of their quality. With a government clampdown on press coverage in effect (not to mention official attempts to hamper access to the internet), the world has been watching events unfold through cell phone cameras. The fuzzy, shaky nature of the pictures — thousands of protesters silently marching, individuals grievously wounded and even killed by paramilitary forces — makes the unfolding happenings look like a nightmare. Or a dream. 

In Wim Wenders 1991 film Until the End of the World, a mad doctor invents a device that allows the user to send images directly to the brain, which lets the doctor’s blind wife see by bypassing her eyes. I know, I know — it’s sci-fi, kids, a particular kind of slightly stoned, rock-and-roll sci-fi at that. But the conceit of going around the official aperture to convey an image of what is really happening remains.

The media has leapt on the idea of events in Iran being another “Twitter revolution” (Moldova’s April uprising having been the beta test), with savvy Peter Pans, raising one hand in protest while texting their homies with the other, flying circles around technically challenged Captain Hookahs of the old guard. There are problems with that conceit. Ahmadenijad’s supporters are using Twitter to spread disinformation (followed by Moussavi supporters ferreting out the fakers), and if the ruling party was not so intent on beating up people and lying about the election results, they could learn to Tweet with the kids and maybe lay down those batons. 

But in the meanwhile we get glimpses of the truth, a sort of Zapruder film of the death of an empire. Even if Iran’s leaders manage to put this particular genie back in the bottle, either by forcefully repressing the current dissent or letting it play out into nothing, the cry for democracy will rise again and be broadcast, one tiny image at a time, to a world waking up to its own dreaming. 

Bruce Ratner has made it official: Frank Gehry is out as designer of the benighted Atlantic Yards Project. Turns out the celebrated enabler of titanium dreams is just too darned expensive so Forest City Ratner has turned the cornerstone of the project, a basketball arena for Ratner’s Nets, over to the firm of Ellerbe Becket, whose unofficial motto is, “If you need a really big box, we will build it!”

Of course those of us opposed to the project, in which the arena has always been a stalking horse for the skyscrapers the Ohio-based developer really wants to build, have said all along that Ratner would drop Gehry. It’s what he does, as architecture writer Nicoloi Ouroussoff recognized in a scathing critique yesterday in which he labeled the bait a “bit of window dressing intended to give the project an aura of enlightenment” and the switch “a betrayal of the public trust.”

“A cold, characterless intersection might thereby be transformed into Brooklyn’s vibrant answer to Times Square, minus the saccharine Disney décor,” Ourossoff continued — and that was him being nice! (In fairness, the Times today said the Ellerbe Becket design was more like an airplane hangar than a box.) Gehry was always just the shiny bauble, or maker of shiny baubles, that lured otherwise sober citizens such as Kurt Andersen into thinking that the Atlantic Yards project might be a good thing for Brooklyn.

“Have you been to Bilbao?” they would ask, referring to the magnificent Guggenheim museum he designed and planted, like a spacecraft, by the river in an ancient Spanish city. Which is how most of the Gehry-lovers thought of Brooklyn in the first place: a distinctly foreign province that could use a good dose of world-class culture, like it or not. I was at a benefit for the the Brooklyn Museum not long ago, seated between a couple of well-heeled benefactors — both, notably, from the Upper East Side — when the subject came up. 

One of them mentioned how much she loved Jhumpa Lahiri‘s last book. I mentioned that Lahiri (or “Jhumpa” as I like to call her) had done a reading at my house to benefit Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, a neighborhood association that opposes the AY project. The silence that followed was deafening, or would have been if you could hear silence in the museum’s cavernous ballroom. “We’re all for not destroying Brooklyn,” one of them finally said, “but we also care about The Future.”

She pronounced it with caps like that, and I don’t think she was talking about the Leonard Cohen song either. She meant a big behemoth, representing progress, that cultural missionaries have always brought to simple primitives like us. The fact that the wheels are coming off Gehry’s glimmering gift gives me qualified pleasure (though it ain’t dead yet, kids! Get involved!). I guess we’ll just have to make do with the blossoming food and music scenes here, the non-stop party that is Fulton Street, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the countless artists, musicians and writers who have chosen to make this area their home. Somehow we’ll make do. 

This expression came to mind when I read about the fruit-foraging movement in this morning’s New York Times. It began in the SF Bay Area (of course); a bartender at Chez Panisse started a neighborhood exchange in which people could pick each other’s lemons, peaches and, of course, loquats. Got too many persimmons? Talk to the guy over the fence with an embarrassment of apples. 

Now the movement has gone national: web sites like neighborhoodfruit.com connect produce lovers from Oregon to Brooklyn. Just reading about the movement reminded me of moving to Auburn as a kid, and stopping beside Highway 49 on the way to school, with my younger brother and sister, to shovel grapes into our open mouths. This was the Valley they were talking about: free fruit, baby!

It also made me wonder about the expression “low hanging fruit,” and how that came to be a business euphemism for easy pickings, and if that was necessarily a good thing. The first time I heard the term in that context was about ten years ago. I was working for a little web company that had just been bought by AOL (which bought everything then). Our strange and creative little sites were being shuttered by the folks in Virginia but we would be retained to help them find the “low hanging fruit” of the business at the time.

“Isn’t that the rotten stuff that the smart animals won’t eat?” one of my colleagues asked. She was soon let go.

One of the chefs quoted in the Times made a walnut liqueur from walnuts she found on the ground. “It’s cooking from nothing,” she said, which is appropriate to these times. I heard from not one but two ex-students in the last few hours who are desperate for a job, any job. Right about now they might be hitting the walnut liqueur.

Remember, kids: It’s a shell game.