Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll meet a new iteration of Rappin’ Max Robot that is bound for Paris, via the Bronx. We’ll also get details on Robert Kennedy Jr.’s testimony in the court case seeking to have him removed from the November ballot in New York.
Rappin’ Max Robot began life as a comic book character only a few inches tall. Now he is a man of steel. He has a skin of steel plates up to an inch thick that covers an I-beam skeleton.
He is on his way to Paris, to take note of breaking’s debut in the Olympics, but he will get there a little late. First he will spend some time in the Bronx, the birthplace of hip-hop.
Today an 18-foot-tall statue of Rappin’ Max Robot that was fabricated in Brooklyn will be hauled to a spot outside the Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx. The museum is not scheduled to open until next year. But Marc Levin, who with his wife, Adina, runs the studio and foundry where the statue took shape, said it would be assembled for a Champagne toast on Saturday, the second day of breaking events at the Olympics.
Hip-hop is a “wondrous and centerless tangle,” The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote last year, so perhaps it is not surprising that the toast will not be the only hip-hop event this weekend. Sunday is the 51st anniversary of the day hip-hop is said to have gotten its start, in the rec room of the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and a group that is not affiliated with the museum is planning a march from that neighborhood to Crotona Park, a couple of miles away.
Lawrence Kris Parker, an organizer of the march who is known as KRS-One, said the march would be “hip-hop’s collective voice saying we’re taking the lead on looking at urban health” and “our need to resolve conflicts without violence.”
As for Rappin’ Max Robot, Levin said the idea began with a chance conversation at a funeral, of all places — a conversation that had little to do with hip-hop. He found himself chatting with an official from the industrial equipment manufacturer ESAB.
“We talked about the need for people to have careers that are outside of just pushing paper,” he said. The conversation touched on how, since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, America had become a “paper-pushing society” as manufacturing jobs went overseas.
Then the conversation turned to apprentice programs. “Of the apprentice programs we’ve ever run, the one consistent, favorite thing to do was to weld,” Levin said. “The minute we put a torch in a kid’s hand, they felt like superheroes.” With thousands of welders aging out of the work force, Levin proposed a training program called Welder Underground — and for its first project, he suggested building a sculpture to send to Paris to commemorate breaking as a sport.
Levin’s studio, Collab, had already done work for the Hip Hop Museum and had met Eric Orr, the artist who had created Rappin’ Max Robot in the 1980s. Orr had printed only 500 copies of the first Rappin’ Max Robot comic book, with help from his friend Keith Haring, but Rappin’ Max Robot’s place in fandom belies that small press run.
“I said, ‘What if we took your character and built him into an 18-foot figure?’” Levin recalled.
The apprentices arrived in April, and after eight weeks of training, began working with Levin to create Rappin’ Max Robot in five separate pieces, “so we could ship it to Paris,” Levin said.
The largest piece was the 10-foot-long boom box. It weighs 3,000 pounds.
Weather
After storms flooded highways and caused power outages, expect another day of possible showers, with temperatures in the mid-70s. At night, temperatures will remain in the low 70s, with a chance of showers and thunderstorms.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Tuesday (Tisha B’Av).
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‘I’m a New Yorker,’ Robert Kennedy Jr. testifies in ballot challenge case
Robert Kennedy Jr. told a court that his wife and birds live in Los Angeles, but it’s not home. “I’m a New Yorker,” he testified.
Kennedy, who is running for president as an independent, is trying to stay on the ballot in New York. The case being heard in Albany involves a challenge from four voters who say he used a false address on his nominating petitions. They want the petitions invalidated because the address — in Katonah, N.Y. — is the home of a friend of his.
If he is knocked off the ballot in New York, Kennedy could face challenges in other states where his campaign used the same address on petitions. My colleague Jesse McKinley writes that such a decision could have an effect on the November election, because Kennedy is considered a potential threat to both major-party candidates in a close race.
Kennedy’s opponents have suggested that he used the New York address because of a constitutional quirk that prevents presidential and vice-presidential candidates who come from the same state from receiving its Electoral College votes. Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, also lives in California, which is the nation’s richest electoral prize, with 54 votes.
But Kennedy denied that the Electoral College had figured in his campaign putting the Katonah address on the petitions.
At times Kennedy’s testimony turned surreal, as when a lawyer for the four voters asked him about the training protocols for wild birds. The lawyer, Keith Corbett, was apparently trying to show that Kennedy spends a lot of time with birds in California, where he has a home with his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines.
Kennedy said that he liked to train ravens to eat out of his hand or do tricks. He acknowledged that raven training was time-consuming, but said that others at the Los Angeles house handled bird duties while he was away campaigning. Corbett tried to show that Kennedy had an active falconry license in California, something that he denied in a sworn affirmation to the court on July 2. On Wednesday, Kennedy said he did not believe that he had an active license there.
Kennedy has been associated with animal-related episodes in the past, and they surfaced again this week after he admitted in a video that he had collected and then deposited a dead baby bear in Central Park in 2014 — a series of actions he dismissed as a prank that he had thought would be “amusing.”
As for his residency, Kennedy testified that he had “every kind of affiliation with this state” and had considered running for New York attorney general in 2006.
He also suggested that he had been offered Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat in 2009. David Paterson, the governor at the time, chose Kirsten Gillibrand. In an online post on Wednesday, Paterson denied making an offer to Kennedy.
“No matter how many times he says it, that’s simply never going to be a true statement,” Paterson wrote on X.
METROPOLITAN diary
Flagged
Dear Diary:
I was riding my bike in the bike lane on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn when a construction worker raised a flag at 16th Street.
I stopped and waited alongside another cyclist as a large truck backed out of 16th Street.
When the coast was clear, the construction worker smiled and lowered his flag.
“On your marks,” he said. “Get set. Go!”
— Lisa Goldstein
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Luke Caramanico, Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post A Hip-Hop Comic Book Star Comes to Life in Steel appeared first on New York Times.
