And Liberty, Liberty For All

I did a double-take when I got a double view of the Statue of Liberty in Battery Park.

Click on the photo for a larger image; note the cover of the book the sunbather is reading, and see its twin out in the harbor behind him.

His book: Censored 2008: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2006-07

He went away without me

I’m so sad. I dropped in to see an old pal and found that he’d gone on vacation without telling me — or inviting me to come along. My only notification was a small sign he’d left at the door.

OK, actually, the sign is posted in the main branch of the New York Public Library in front of the room that has contained, among other treasures, the original Winnie the Pooh bear (the one that inspired the stories, films, cartoons and toys), his pals Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, and Tigger, and a copy of the Gutenberg Bible.

The room is now closed for renovations and the lovely people at the information desk have assured me that Winnie will soon be back in a new location. When makes his next public appearance, he will be residing in the new children’s division of the library.

Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
Winnie the Pooh at the New York Public Library
Gutenberg Bible at the New York Public Library

Mysteries of Manhattan: Phon Baseb

This sign was displayed on the sidewalk in front of a deli on 14th Street. It seems like the store is selling something called phon baseb. Sounds as though it might be a tasty Vietnamese dish, but … perhaps not. Whatever phon baseb is, it’s a mystery to me.

It’s history. It’s poetry.

I was walking down Broadway when an unusual all-text tattoo caught my eye. I stopped to ask about it and learned that it had been applied only the day before at a strange little tattoo parlor on Manhattan’s Fulton Street.

The tattoo’s wearer (owner?), a Brooklynite from Park Slope, explained that the phrase is a quotation, spoken by the character Mr. Antolini in the classic American novel of disaffected youth, The Catcher in the Rye.

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles.

“You’ll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951

The Catcher in the Rye
Flickr: chiappone.rebecca’s photostream

Richie Havens Comes Home

The final act of this year’s BAM Rhythm & Blues Festival at MetroTech was an appearance by the legendary folk singer Richie Havens, who was the opening act at the Woodstock Festival.

He grew up in Brooklyn, sharing a crowded Bedford-Stuyvesant house with nine siblings (“and one bathroom”), many of whom attended today’s outdoor concert in Downtown Brooklyn.

The 67-year old musician performed old hits (Freedom, Here Comes the Sun) as well as songs from his latest CD, discussed his passions, travels, and family, and frequently paused to say how delighted he was to be back home in Brooklyn.

The crowd erupted in whoops and cheers whenever he mentioned a familiar Brooklyn landmark or street, and he described memories of local street corners and stickball.

He was briefly joined onstage by Marcus Carl Franklin, with whom he appeared in the Todd Haynes film I’m Not There. While Havens played, Franklin sang Tombstone Blues and When the Ship Comes In, the Bob Dylan songs he performed in the film, and topped it off with a spirited buck and wing.

At the end of his set, Havens sat at a picnic table under the trees, happily signing autographs and chatting with throngs of devoted fans. “No pushing!,” cried a security guard. “Don’t push, he’ll be here as long as you need him. He’ll stay to the end.”

Playing his guitar

Laughing onstage

Richie Havens close up

Richie Havens singing

Strumming the guitar

Marcus Carl Franklin

The crowd

Richie Havens signing autographs

Amazon: Richie Havens music
Richie Havens
MySpace: Richie Havens
Wikipedia: Richie Havens
I’m Not There
BAM

Mangoes for Sale

These ripe, juicy mangoes were displayed for sale at a fruit stand on the corner of Greenwich Avenue and Chambers Street.

The sign above the fruit guaranteed its quality, saying “If no good bring back!!!”

Boxes of mangoes

If no good bring back!!!

Return to the Arab-American Heritage Festival

It was a hot, busy day, and by the time I arrived in Prospect Park, this year’s Arab-American Heritage Festival was nearly over. I still had time, though, to hear some rousing music, rummage through the stalls and enjoy some delicious treats.

As the vendors began to pack up their wares, I rushed to buy something I could take home for tomorrow’s dinner, a home made dish of garlicky, cumin-scented chicken, rice and beans prepared by a beaming Egyptian mom.

Chicken cooking on grill (not my dinner)

Home made stuffed grape leaves

Vendor at his stall

Jewelry for sale

Decals for sale at a vendor’s stall

Buttons for sale

Kuffiyehs for sale

Artisan applying henna tattoo

Banners hanging from tent

Drummer

Musicians

Home made spinach pie

Home made baklava

Woman with cell phone

2007 Arab American Heritage Festival
Arab American Association of New York
Arab-American Family Support Center
Prospect Park

Snow in Summer

In 1974 her first album, a collection of self-penned folksy, blues-tinged pop and jazz tunes, zoomed up the charts. It earned a Gold Record, put her on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and earned her a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best New Artist.

Overnight, she was one the biggest stars around. And just as suddenly, she disappeared.

At the peak of her success she married a fellow musician, Phil Kearns, and in December 1975, they had a child. Their daughter, Valerie Rose, suffered severe brain trauma during birth and wasn’t expected to survive.

Defying the advice of family and medical experts, who urged her to institutionalize the girl, she decided instead to devote her life to loving and caring for the profoundly disabled child.

That decision cost her nearly everything, including her marriage, her money, her career and her own health.

For more than three decades, she stayed out of sight, paying the bills by singing advertising jingles for General Foods International Coffees (Celebrate the Moments of Your Life) and Stouffer’s Frozen Foods (Nothing Tastes Closer to Home).

Now she’s back. Today, as part of the BAM Rhythm & Blues Festival at MetroTech, Phoebe Snow gave a free lunchtime concert in Downtown Brooklyn.

The outdoor show was a love-fest, filled with devoted fans who have followed her career for 35 years and had brought their children and grandchildren along “to hear what real music sounds like.” While they waited for her to appear, the crowd swapped stories of the first time they’d heard her voice and what her songs meant to them.

After she — seemingly hesitantly — took the stage and shyly mentioned that it was her birthday, knowledgeable audience members rushed forward and handed the astonished singer gifts and flowers.

Her distinctive, soaring voice, as strong as ever, moved the crowd through a set that included R&B (Do Right Woman, Do Right Man), blues (Piece of My Heart), rock (Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu) and her biggest hit, Poetry Man.

A particularly powerful moment occurred when she sang You’re My Girl, a song she originally composed for her mother, which she has rewritten as a tribute to Valerie Rose.

Welcome back, Phoebe Snow.

BAM at MetroTech
Phoebe Snow
Bloomberg: Phoebe Snow Revisits `Poetry Man’
Don Shewey:The Blues of Phoebe Snow
NY Times: Phoebe Snow, Singing Her Way Back to the Top
Roger Friedman: Saying Goodbye to Valerie

Fresh Corn

I know, I know, it is the corniest shot in the world, but I don’t care — I still like it. This is the sun setting behind Lower Manhattan, as viewed from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Pink in the Park

These bright pink flowers, known as echinacea, are growing at the southernmost tip of Manhattan.

I found them thriving — safely away from tourists’ feet — behind an iron fence in a quiet corner of busy Battery Park.

By the way, in case you were wondering … no, these images weren’t Photoshopped (I don’t even own Photoshop). Mother Nature gave the flowers that color, not me.

Echinacea in Battery Park

Echinacea behind iron fence

Echinacea

NYC Department of Parks & Recreation: Battery Park
The Battery Conservancy
Echinacea

Independence Day

Today is America’s Independence Day. July 4th marks the 232nd anniversary of the day this country declared its independence from Great Britain and adopted the document known as the Declaration of Independence.

Written over the course of a few days by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence states the reasons the colony chose to break away the King’s rule and describes the principles the new nation would strive to uphold.

Living by those ideals has proved to be much more difficult than writing them down, of course, and many times our nation has failed in its quest; but I believe that most of us here in the US still fervently wish to see Jefferson’s dream become reality: that this country should be a land of happiness, equality, safety and liberty for all.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

In New York, the holiday is traditionally celebrated with concerts, picnics and displays of fireworks. For the past three decades, Macy’s department store has paid for the city’s fireworks show, and every year it has grown bigger and more spectacular.

For 2008, six barges laden with more than 35,000 shells were anchored in the East River. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered on both sides of the river to watch the show, and despite the rain, most stayed to the end, when the last streaks of yellow and red began to fade from the sky.

Independence Day
Declaration of Independence
Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks

A Tribute to Nuala O’Faolain

Four years ago I was fortunate enough to travel to Ireland. Unlike many foreigners who visit the Emerald Isle, I wasn’t there to conduct business, meet up with long-lost relatives or search for my “Irish roots.”

The trip was almost a last-minute decision; it was 2004, the year the Republican Party decided to hold their national convention in New York City. As local authorities issued dire predictions about the chaos and congestion that would accompany the event, I opted to leave town and skip the whole mess. Tickets to Dublin were cheap and available, so I flew there shortly before the convention began and didn’t return to New York until it was over and the protesters and politicos had all gone home.

While I was in Dublin, I met a woman who gave me a copy of a book entitled Are You Somebody? and urged me to read it. That was my introduction to Irish author Nuala O’Faolain (pronounced new-lah oh-fway-lawn), who died a few weeks ago. Tonight I attended a tribute to the famously brilliant and cantankerous author at the main branch of the New York Public Library.

The room was packed with friends, colleagues and admirers who came from as far away as Ireland to honor the woman who said, in one of her last interviews, “I’m not nice or anything — I’m not getting nicer. I’m sour and difficult you know….I think look how comfortably I am dying, I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money, there is nothing much wrong with me except dying….I kinda hoped there was some kind of way of fading away, that you lay on your bed and you were really a nice person and everyone came and said goodbye and wept and you wept and you meant it.”

A Tribute To Nuala O’Faolain

Tue Jun-24 at 7:00PM

The New York Public Library
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
NY, NY 10018
(Enter on 42nd St)

Friends and fellow Irish writers of Nuala O’Faolain, who died in Dublin on May 9, will gather to pay tribute to one of Ireland’s best-loved writers.

Internationally known for her searing memoir, Are You Somebody, as well as her acclaimed first novel, My Dream of You, O’Faolain was widely respected in Ireland as an award-winning television producer, journalist, and columnist for The Irish Times before her memoir caused a sensation on its publication in 1999. Her unblinking, unsentimental description of an impoverished Irish childhood that struck a cord with readers world-wide became a New York Times bestseller.

Frank McCourt, Paul Muldoon, Fintan O’Toole, Polly Devlin, Julie Grau, Sheridan Hay, John Low-Beer, and others will honor Nuala O’Faolain’s life with reminiscence, traditional music, and readings from her work.

Special live musical performance by vocalist Susan McKeown, guitarist Eamon O’Leary, fiddler Dana Lyn, and piper Ivan Goff. During March 2005, McKeown appeared with O’Faolain at LIVE from the NYPL.

About Nuala O’Faolain
Nuala O’Faolain is the author of Are You Somebody, My Dream of You, Almost There, and The Story of Chicago May. Her first memoir is often seen as a feminine, and feminist, counterpart to Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. “A lot of us suffered in the Ireland of my day,” she later said. “We came out of a culture where women were utterly powerless and children had no value. If you were hit at school you were hit at home for being hit at school. The only education a lot of us got was in neglect and being unloved.”

And yet, O’Faolain’s humanity softened her observations and her humor was irresistible. Despite being a well-known opinion columnist, a television and radio commentator, and bona fide celebrity, her work often chronicled her own sense of personal failure. She turned her vulnerability into a strength that enabled her to empathize with ordinary people’s fears and hopes. Her opinion column developed from a broadly feminist commentary to a narrative that spanned all aspects of the human condition. Her memoirs touched many readers, who responded by sending her hundreds of letters with their own tales of unhappiness and failed family life.

A resident of Manhattan for the past seven years, O’Faolain ascribed her affinity for the city to her experience growing up one of nine children. “When you live in the middle of mayhem for so long, you grow to need mayhem to construct peace within it.” As Maura Casey wrote in an Appreciation in the New York Times: “Although her mortal life has ended, her words, her sympathy and insights, are here. Her writing helped her legions of readers believe in her and in the validity of their own experiences.”

About Polly Devlin
Polly Devlin is an author, journalist, broadcaster, filmmaker, and conservationist. In 1994 she was awarded an OBE for services to literature. She has been a columnist for the New Statesman, features editor for Vogue, and had her own page in the Evening Standard. She has published eight books, including a memoir. All of Us There, a novel, Dora, a guidebook to Dublin, and, most recently, A Year in the Life of an English Meadow.

About Julie Grau
Julie Grau is Senior Vice President and Publisher of Speigel & Grau, a division of Random House. Previously she was Vice President and Publisher of Riverhead Books, where she edited Nuala O’Faolain’s novel, My Dream of You, her memoir, Almost There, and her work of biography, The Story of Chicago May.

About Sheridan Hay
Sheridan Hay is a novelist, editor, and teacher. She met Nuala O’Faolain in 1999 and remained a close friend until her death.

About John Low-Beer
John Low-Beer and Nuala O’Faolain met in 2002 and registered as domestic partners a year later. An attorney for the City of New York and a former professor of sociology, Low-Beer lives in Brooklyn with his daughter, Anna.

About Frank McCourt
Frank McCourt received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for his memoir Angela’s Ashes. He is also the author of ‘Tis and Teacher Man, both international bestsellers. McCourt appeared with O’Faolain and others for “Silence, Exile and Cunning: What’s So Irish About That Anyway” on March 15, 2005, at LIVE from the NYPL.

About Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon teaches at Princeton University and is an Honorary Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. He held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University five years and he is an Honorary Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford University. In 2003 he won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and in 2007, he became poetry editor of The New Yorker.

About Fintan O’Toole
Fintan O’Toole is a literary critic, historical writer, and political commentator. He is known for his commentary on a remarkably wide-ranging number of subjects—cultural, historical, political, social and economic. O’Toole has written for the Irish Times since 1988 and was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001. He is the author of more than ten books.

Frank McCourt after the tribute (taken with borrowed camera)

Frank McCourt inside the NYPL (taken with borrowed camera)

Are You Somebody?
My Dreams of You
Independent.ie: Nuala O’ Faolain interview: ‘I don’t want more time.”
New York Times: Nuala O’Faolain, 68, Irish Memoirist, Is Dead
Eircom.net: Poets, writers and musicians in Stateside tribute to much-loved figure
Huffington Post: A Tribute to Irish Writer Nuala O’Faolain

Amazing Things Are Happening Here

More from the archives.

This enormous translucent banner hangs across three glass and steel pedestrian bridges at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on Fort Washington Avenue. The bridges allow people (and materials) to move from one building to another without going outside.

Click on the photo for a larger view and you’ll see visitors, students and employees using the glassed-in walkways at this massive teaching hospital in Upper Manhattan.

Amazing Things Are Happening Here

New York-Presbyterian Hospital

Rector Gate

More from the archive.

Several large pieces of public art are installed along the Esplanade in Battery Park City, where they stand under the watchful eyes of the doormen at the surrounding luxury apartment buildings. If you go to see the installations, you should expect the uniformed men to scrutinize you carefully, as they consider the art to be “theirs.”

This one, Rector Gate, forms a 50 foot high archway at the intersection of Rector Place and the Esplanade. Built by R.M. Fischer in 1989, Rector Gate is made of stainless steel, bronze, and granite and is illuminated at night. The artist is said to have drawn his inspiration from the past and future and included elements from skyscrapers and science fiction.

The gate

The sides look like enormous cheese graters

From here, you can see across the Hudson River

The top seems to be a combination radio tower, weather vane & weapon

Looking through the gate to New Jersey

Top of the sculpture

Looking up

Birds have built nests in the light fixture

Battery Park City
Rector Gate
Sandra Gering Gallery: R.M. Fisher
Culture Now: Battery Park City Map

Pink Blossoms

More from the archives.

These delicate pink flowers were blooming on a shrub in front of an undistinguished brick apartment building on Brooklyn Bridge Boulevard.

Branch with blossoms

Close up of flowers

Blossom and buds

Excuse Me, Miss, There’s Something on Your Shoulder …

More from the archives.

This young tourist, spotted outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, happily shows off the colorful tattoos that peep out above her tank top.

Her shoulder and upper arm are covered with hibiscus blossoms. On her back, the red-clad figure on the left is 1950s porn icon Bettie Page. On the right, in green, is a demure Marilyn Monroe.

On 5th Avenue in front of the Met

Hibiscus flowers on her shoulder

Bettie and Marilyn in the back

A Brooklyn Safari

The tale of their origins begins in the late 1960s when a crate, in transit from South America to points unknown, was opened at JFK airport. Depending on the person telling the story, you might hear that the crate was damaged in an unexplained, unspecified accident, or that a ring of thieves, working inside the airport, forced it open. Either way, the story ends on a dramatic note, with the cargo of little green parrots escaping and rapidly flying away.

The fact is, though, the fugitive flock didn’t get very far. As they soared in the skies above Brooklyn, the birds known as Quaker parrots (or monk parrots) looked down, liked what they saw, and landed. With easy access to food, shelter, and water, the feathered immigrants found a new home and flourished.

Today, the birds have set up small colonies in other parts of the Northeast, but live primarily in two locations near the center of the borough: Brooklyn College and Green-Wood Cemetery, where their nests safely rest atop the enormous, Gothic gate.

If you’d like to visit them, join Brooklyn parrot expert Steve Baldwin on one of his Brooklyn Wild Parrot Safaris.

Hanging with other Brooklyn “boids”

On the sidewalk near Brooklyn College

Perched on a fence at Brooklyn College

The birds blend in with the leaves

The neighbors have a great view

On the fence around Brooklyn College

Nests on the gate at Green-Wood Cemetery

Birds at Green-Wood Cemetery

Atop the gate at Green-Wood Cemetery

Pretty bird!

BrooklynParrots.com: A Web Site About the Wild Parrots of Brooklyn
Gowanus Lounge: Brooklyn Parrot Poaching
Monk Parakeets
at Brooklyn College: Invaders from the South?

Smoking and Smiling

More from the archives.

Two summers ago, I saw this woman taking a cigarette break on the boardwalk at Coney Island. When she saw the camera pointed in her direction, she struck a classically coquettish pose.

Smoking

Smiling

Post-Bang with Lynda Barry

Author, teacher, humorist, cartoonist, muse, Lynda Barry is an American original. She is brilliant, creative, dedicated and inspirational, yet somehow the fame and fortune (especially the fortune) she deserves have managed to elude her.

Instead of being a household name, she is more of a cult figure. While a devoted fanbase worships her every jot and scribble, she still struggles to have her work published and derives most of her income by selling sketches on eBay.

Tonight, Lynda spoke as part of Post Bang: Comics Ten Minutes After the Big Bang!, a symposium on the growing cultural significance of comics sponsored by New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU with the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA). This was a serious academic event which described Lynda’s appearance thusly: “Harvard scholar Hillary Chute in conversation with one of the country’s foremost alternative cartoonists, LYNDA BARRY (Ernie Pook’s Comeek, The Good Times are Killing Me, What It Is).”

I’ll never understand why Americans think nothing of paying $5 for a fancy cup of coffee that lasts only a few minutes, or $100 for a pair of sneakers that will wear out in a few months, yet balk at paying $20 for a book that is sheer genius and will last a lifetime. C’mon, give the red-headed lady some respect.

If you have any interest at all in creativity, writing, conquering the internal demons that prevent you from telling your stories or learning how to be your own muse, please buy (or at least read) What it Is.

What it Is

Lynda Barry

What It Is
Lynda Barry’s shop on eBay
Marlys Magazine
Post Bang: Comics Ten Minutes After the Big Bang!
Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA)
Drawn and Quarterly publishers
NY Times: How to Think Like a Surreal Cartoonist
My Shrine to Lynda Barry
National Public Radio (NPR): Lynda Barry on What it Is
Salon: Lynda Barry, Barefoot on the Shag

Radio 53 AM

More from the archives.

This sign was posted on a traffic signal control box near Union Square. As always, you can click on the image for a larger view.

You must listen to Christ Radio 53 AM Radio on 24 hours or the Devil will take you and your family and make bats out of all of you.

Christ will protect you. Devil is Boogie Man. Beautiful gorgeous Mary and Christ will hug and kiss you forever in Heaven. For keeping the ten commandments.

It’s so easy to keep the ten commandments. Teen ages and people in Hell are suffering terrible.