Category: Video Essays

Long Island Gun Enthusiasts

Posted on by chrismellides

A Life in Firearms

A Look at Long Island Gun Enthusiasts

In West Babylon, the Old Bethpage Rifle and Pistol Club sits in the middle of a large industrial park. The facility is private and custom-built, housing an indoor shooting range in the basement just below the upstairs meeting lodge.

The oversized guest book at the entrance point is hard to go unnoticed as you amble past it and through the narrow doorway leading to the dimly lit indoor range. The book is littered with a long list of names, all of which belong to club members who are free to fire anything from rifles to revolvers.

Gary Hungerford is a stout man sporting a bushy grey mustache. A jet-black 4-inch barreled .357-caliber revolver rests in a tan holster hung high on his shoulder. Gary is a very active member of the West Babylon-based club. He is also a board member for the clubhouse and works with the Suffolk Alliance of Sportsmen, which is the sportsmen’s federation for the county. Well-versed in gun law and its associated politics, he’s been involved with firearms for most of his life.

“Everyone in my neighborhood had someone in their family who was a fisherman, or a hunter or a clammer or a crabber,” said Gary when asked about his initial interest in firearms. “As a consequence, it was a natural thing for all the kids in the neighborhood to be very comfortable with firearms.”

Gary grew up in New York City during the 40s and 50s and claims to have purchased a rifle at the age of 12. “It was a different world [then],” he exclaimed.

While gun laws in New York have no doubt changed and become stricter since the years of Gary’s youth, the principles of gun ownership remain the same, according to Gary.

Being a gun enthusiast in the dawn of the 21st century is no easy task, and Gary is aware of the usual stereotypes associated with gun advocacy and ownership.

He just smiles, shrugs and says, “It’s a matter of education with most people. I know a lot of people think of us as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, but I know more firearm owners who have masters and doctoral degrees than I know who don’t.”

No one said that liking guns in today’s society would be easy, but for Gary and others like him, the stigma associated with gun use is of little or no concern.

They’d much rather enjoy the thrill of pulling the trigger.

O El Amor: Artist Profile

Posted on by chrismellides

O El Amor

The Band with the Broken Hearts

It was a breezy night in early March and the dark clouds looming in the sky above suggested that rain was in the forecast.

Outside a seedy pub in Bethpage called Mr. Beery’s, a crowd of people dressed in ‘80s throwback garb sucked on cheap cigarettes to compliment the drunk high they worked up from sipping on chilled alcohol. Women adjusted their mini-skirts and men argued about the outcome of the night’s football game.

It was 8:30 p.m. when five masked musicians took to the stage and began adjusting the sound on their amplifiers.

A man of medium height and stature approached the stage microphone with a frothy beer in hand, and just as some nervous laughter erupted from the side of the bar he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the best goddamn band this bar’s ever seen here. We’re back again, we’re O El Amor. Let’s have some fun with us.”

The singer was Mark “Disco Goya” Dicarlo and at his cue, the rest of his band began playing Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Cuando, Cuando,” much to the amazement of the onlookers scattered alongside the edge of the stage.

O El Amor performed roughly 12 cover songs that night, all of which were love songs made popular by bands of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The night was filled with warm pop melodies and the female bartenders did what they could to stop themselves from getting too distracted as they sung along and poured beer for their patrons.

Offstage the members of O El Amor were surprisingly subdued and less lively. The love ballads they played just moments before had made many people smile that night, but you could sense that beneath the masks wrapped around their sweaty faces, the band hid tears of sadness.

After they began packing up their equipment, Dicarlo and guitarist Rob “Jesus Mana Cerveza Jr.”  Manaseri, stumbled down to the basement of the bar with ice-cold Budweiser’s in hand.

“We started playing together as a band back in 1999,” said Dicarlo. “We all share the same love for love songs and we play these love songs to hide the pain. We wear the masks to hide the shame that we feel and we drink as much alcohol as possible.”

The depressed O El Amor frontman said this while he stared at some cigarette butts littering the concrete floor beneath his feet.

Manaseri soon chimed in. “We try to spread the love and we all come from similar backgrounds, we all have broken hearts,” he said. “And, uh. Every time a member moves on or passes away, we come back together and start the love-making again.”

Manaseri took some time to speak about a personal tale of heartbreak. According to the guitarist, whenever the band plays a particular song live on stage he feels distraught, but continues to perform it in concert to preserve the memory of his ex-girlfriend.

“’Cuando’ is a very special song for me,” began Manaseri. “It is a song that I shared with Rosie Perez. God Rosie, I really miss you,” he cried.

Manaseri began choking back tears as he spoke and had to be escorted outside the venue where a car was waiting for him.

In an instant, O El Amor was gone. Leaving behind them a trail of unanswered questions and beer-soaked footsteps.

While no one can quite understands the band and attempts have been made to keep their identities a secret, it has been said that if you can get close enough to the stage, sometimes, just sometimes, you might see a tear or two beneath their masks.

Long Island Punk

Posted on by chrismellides

Punk’s Not Dead

The Long Island Punk Rock Experience 

The live music circuit on Long Island is an odd one. You can’t walk into a seedy pub or large venue nowadays without hearing people spin yarn about the “old days.” When suburban towns resonated with raw energy and the independent music scene thrived with bands of varying genres playing on the same bill, sharing beers and chasing girls. The current scene lacks that sense of camaraderie among local acts that are now scattered and part of a very segmented community.

“There’s a lot more segmentation now than there was then,” said Brian White, a 22-year-old show promoter from Medford. “I used to see and book shows that were extremely diverse, but if I tried to book those shows these days, no way could I do it without there being problems and fistfights.”

Punk rock existed back then, as it does now, and is still regarded as the bastard stepchild of rock ‘n’ roll. The punk rock scene on Long Island first began to gain prominence during the late 1970s. Local bands like the Nihilistics, Dead Virgins and Sea Monster spearheaded the suburban punk movement, while bigger acts like the New York Dolls and the Ramones killed the ears of audiences in New York City.

“There’s no question that the punk scene has changed, in both its message and direction,” said Howie Powe a 38-year-old show booker from Shirley. “You can’t talk about some of the newer stuff coming out now without acknowledging those older bands. Some may call today’s scene ‘watered down’ but its vitality tends to be very cyclical, I think.”

While there’s no doubt that the punk scene on Long Island has transformed from what it was some 30 years ago, it’s still a haven for young people who feel different and have no other means to channel their frustrations.

“People always said, that I suck or that what I do and say is stupid,” said Derek Eppers a 20-year-old showgoer from Centereach. “But that’s what I like about punk rock is that you can listen to the music and go to shows with people that think like you do, it’s like family.”

The direction that the Long Island music community might take in the future and what it might mean for showgoers is uncertain. As for the punk scene, it’s a bit of a fickle thing, as White puts it.

“When it’s good, it’s good, but when it’s bad—people either bitch about it when it was good, or complain that those people don’t know what they’re talking about and that it’s still good,” said White.  “So really, I think we’re at a point where we can really take it to a new level for this current generation of bands and showgoers, if everyone does their part.”