Letters to the Editor: Plaudits for Paolo

Cutchogue

Plaudits for Paolo

Ten years ago, Paolo Bartolani started the Rites of Spring Music Festival. Over these years, he brought world-class musicians to historic North Fork sites, such as the Jamesport Meeting House and Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island. 

Mr. Bartolani’s gift was marrying spectacular music to venues with great historical meaning that are also rich with local flavor. Sylvester Manor is a haunted landscape that encapsulates the history of the enslaved people who worked the land, as well as the Indigenous population that lived here for thousands of years before being pushed aside by English colonists.

For all he accomplished, the Times Review Media Group awarded Mr. Bartolani 2023’s Northforker of the Year community award. This summer, he upped his contribution to our community enormously with his creation of Piano Rites, a three-event “transformative piano journey” held at the brand-new Unitarian Universalists Church in Southold.

On Aug. 9, pianist Inna Faliks started off the new festival with a dazzling performance on an Italian-made Fazioli grand piano brought to the church from Manhattan just for this event. On Aug. 15, Fei-Fei Dong sat at the keyboard and performed an intense and emotional selection of four compositions. And on Aug.17, Vladimir Petrov stunned the audience with four challenging selections. As with the other two, Mr. Petrov — he’s all of 24 years old — received multiple standing ovations.

Mr. Bartolani deserves an enormous thanks for his gift to our community of the Rites of Spring Music Festival and now his new creation, Piano Rites. Those who witnessed the three extraordinarily gifted pianists will not soon forget them.

Steve Wick

Laurel

Learn the rules

It has become very dangerous to drive on Peconic Bay Boulevard and Laurel Lane because of walkers and bicyclists who either don’t know the rules of the road or are choosing to flagrantly disregard the law.

Bicyclists are riding two, three and four abreast, taking up the entire travel lane and forcing cars into oncoming traffic. Attempts to engage verbally with them that single file is the rule have been met with obscene words and gestures, often in front of children. Other cyclists are riding against traffic in double file. 

Walkers seem to be less strident and coarse, but they don’t know seem to know it’s single file and pedestrian travel is against traffic. 

I’m happy to share the road, but it’s really getting ridiculous as rude people who are in the wrong seem to revel in their ignorance. Someone is going to get hurt. 

Perhaps signage that mirrors that in Riverhead Town, instructing bikes to ride single file, would help. Maybe rental property owners and hotels can advise their guests of the rules. A primer in civility is definitely in order. Either way, this is a problem that seems destined to end badly, especially as fall tourist traffic is far less tolerant.

Tracy Burgess 

Southold

On ICE 

I want to commend you for your editorial decrying the careless and mean-spirited activities of ICE on the East End (“What the record will show,” Aug. 14). It was a frank statement of the events, and your persistent coverage (a reporter who was followed!) was bold. I read five national papers/news magazines, and this was the most fearless coverage of this type of harassment by our national government. Keep up the good work. As a homeowner in Southold of 56 years, I am proud to have a newspaper such as The Suffolk Times.

Patty Mutkoski 

Southold

Root causes

Our egregiously gullible (or compromised?) president still seems to swallow former KGB head Putin’s explanation for his criminal assault on Ukraine. Putin’s “root causes” excuse is his stated conviction that Ukraine is not a country and that Russia should own it because it once did. 

Would Trump smile as broadly at such an outrageous rationale if the United States was invaded and told that we must give all of our territory back to England, Spain and Russia because they once owned it? 

International agreements were made after World War II to assure that “might makes right” does not rule the world. Instead, an international order was agreed to so that illegal aggression would be kept at bay. We cannot let President Trump destroy that order to keep making Putin happy and children die.

Patricia Lloyd 

Jamesport

More on marijuana

I saw Mr. Park’s letter in the Aug. 14 issue (“Enough marijuana already”), and I agree with him regarding going to the indigenous people’s “smoke” stores. However, the Poospatuck Reservation in Mastic is closer to here and may prove to be a better choice for individuals choosing that option. 

Vincent Spampinato 

Southold

Gerrymandering

“Exhausting” is the word that comes to mind when contemplating how this country is approaching almost everything. Right now, what’s keeping me awake at night is redistricting in both red and blue states. In my ideal world, each vote would matter. Politicians would not work tirelessly to stack the deck in their favor by drawing insane districts. My vote would count. Texas and California’s votes would as well. That’s gone the way of the dodo bird. 

What strikes me is that schools elect leaders fairly, and here in Southold, we elect a supervisor simply. My vote on Main Bayview Road is no less counted than a vote from any other street in Southold. I could go on and on, but no. The 19th-century historian John Acton coined the incredibly precise phrase, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We have 535 members of Congress and a president who prove this.

Rosellen Storm 

Cutchogue

The cost of a bully

It’s only taken 104 years for people of goodwill to see their government recruit a force designed to terrorize a population.

In 1921, Hitler formed the paramilitary Brownshirts to do just that. Among the requirements to join were an ideological alignment with Nazism and a willingness to use violence.

Fast-forward to 2025 in the U.S. Our government is now offering a $50,000 signing bonus to people willing to join ICE, wear masks to hide their faces and engage in violence by picking up suspected undocumented people who will be thrown in cages. Forget that they might be here legally, might be children or might have families they’ll be separated from. There’s a price on their heads and now an inducement to recruit their tormentors.

Recognizing Most Americans’ moral resistance to and disgust with separating innocent parents from their children, our government is still offering money to join this violent ICE bunch to pick up and jail people who just look like they might not belong here.

And to whom is the offer being made? How about 18-year-olds with no college education? Impressionable people who take these jobs for the money because other people of good conscience won’t. And we’ll have a new generation of persecutors who, when finally brought to justice, will claim, “I was only following orders.”

That’s the new America, only a century after the world should have learned how human beings are supposed to treat one another. And what do we hear about it from Congressman, Nick LaLota, who should be objecting to the grooming of teenagers as oppressors? Nothing. Dead silence. 

Michael Levy