Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - Encores of Early Posts

SUNDAY, MARCH 30, 2008

Sunday Memories: In three acts G dies in Manhattan in 1993

I

He’s at Cabrini on 19th Street.

The nurse who loves him the most is six feet tall and has just finished becoming a woman.

She could pick Frazier up when he was bigger and now, as he dwindles into the bed, she still swoops him up into her arms and we can all see how much he has left from how small he is in her arms.

His family comes in from Queens to visit. Four of his six brothers are wearing his suits. They are either too tall or too short, too thin or too fat for the suits. Looking at them in Frazier’s clothes is like looking at Frazier in funhouse mirrors.

When they leave, Frazier turns to Michael.  “Couldn’t they have just waited until I died?,” he asks.

II

I turn the corner onto 14th Street to go to the wake at the funeral home and see the big straight brother who hates gay people beating the shit out of the thin delicate gay brother who in his own words is “a screaming queen”.

Somebody calls the cops.

The gay brother’s suit, formerly Frazier’s, is ripped in many places.

III

It’s the day of the funeral. I turn onto 14th Street to go to the church across the street from the funeral home.

Cop cars line the street. My heart sinks. It’s only 10 in the morning.  More trouble already?

When I get to the steps of the church I find out it’s just Law and Order setting up for a shoot later on in the day.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - Encores of Early Posts

Encore posting from the early days show the more things change, the more things...


Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Why I Miss The 70's


Like Brittany Spear's vulva, her wallet stuck out and begged to be taken.

I leaned over and said, "Miss, your wallet is going to be stolen."

She gave me that arrogant thank-fuck you of all those who moved here more than six years ago, but not before it was safe enough to walk down the street without getting your ass kicked in. 1996? 97?

I sat there and rued the day Florence caught me stealing, had me return the penny gum to the newspaper-candy store on Delancey, apologize to the owner and then made me promise never to steal again.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - Encores of Early Posts

Encore posting from the early days show the more things change, the more things...

Thursday, April 24, 2008

He Could Say It In Four Languages If He Wanted To


Rush hour, everybody rushing home.

Except for the nicely dressed lady lying on the ground by Greeley Square.  Between the serious men's clothing store and the Dunkin Donut.

There are a lot of people over her making sure her shopping bags and her purse are O.K. There is a cup of something by her and the security guy or police chief or whatever he is is talking into a walkie-talkie.

Me and two guys hang out on the curb by the flower pots and watch a skinny homeless guy shout at the crowd. He looks like the guy who kicked me in the ass when I bumped into him on a rainy day. Wouldn't be surprised if it were. This is his neighborhood.

The two guys said that she began to fall and the homeless guy caught her and was shouting GET HELP GET HELP and once non-homeless guys showed up and shooed him away he got upset. After all, he was there first and just because he was homeless didn't mean he was less of a hero.

The daily convoy of twenty-five blaring police cars roar up Sixth Avenue. None stop.

"She fell. Her heart, her blood pressure or diabetic. They give her an orange juice with some sugar. Look, she is fine."

A third man joins us. His patter sounds like poems made of rain on a roof. When I ask if it is Arabic, his friend nods. "I speak Danish too. And Spanish and English and Arabic."

We look across the street at the woman again. Two ambulances come as she sits up and talks on her cell phone.

One of the guys says to me, "We are nothing. A heart or something and we fall... we are nothing."

Sunday Memories: When We Were Young

The family was still in Bushwick...



...before the money really ran out, before the beatings got worse and more frequent, before they had to move to Henry Street on the Lower East Side...



...where the rats were bigger than Mitzi the dog.



In those Brooklyn days being left handed was not allowed. He was sent home for not knowing how to write with his right hand.

And of course on the first day of school, his name, a Hebrew one, was changed to an English one.

The Fountain of Youth

There was no such thing as bottled water. Just bottled cola. And maybe juice.

And these were the perfect height if you were little but now you have to do yoga to get closer to getting a drink. Which is still just as warm as it was then.

School's Out For Summer

Stairwells were the subways to our classes, filled with pushing and shoving, the dreaded chance collision with the boy everyone had a crush on, the bully everyone feared, or news of the big people's world like the older brother who came back from Woodstock covered with mud (we were all really interested in the mud part).

It was on that last day, everything draining out from the school these old walls and stair emerged into view.

Sunday Memories: Part Three: Home Where My Love Lies Sleeping

The last in a series to visit when on the road which is where I have been for a week or so.



Happy Memorial Day, a day where we honor fallen soldiers of many wars, some that happened between apartment walls, others inside a hidden broken heart.

Part Two: Home Where My Love Lies Sleeping

A series to visit when on the road....


...which is where I am for the next week or so.

Part One: Home Where My Love Lies Sleeping

A series to visit when on the road....


...which is where I am for the next week or so.

Sunday Memories: Part Six: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Me. 1976.



How did I know I needed this corner? I didn't know what it was I was supposed to be doing in that corner. I wasn't anything but a kid who didn't know I was a kid, paying rent, going to a deadend job and only allowing myself to dream of a future when everyone else was asleep.

But something deeper and smarter than myself pushed me one night in those early days to borrow an old drill, get brackets and, while listening to Jean-Luc Ponty and aching from loneliness from a recently departed stab at love, put up shelves and start to fill them to stuff to remind me I was actually going to use that corner in all its incarnations for the rest of my life.

Part Five: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.



Kosky

For fifteen years he has walked the gaunlet of competing lights from two Indian restaurants to get to his front door and to a room that on its own might be generous but stuffed with the important elements of an apartment - a kitchen, a bathroom, a small alcove pretending to be a bedroom but barely able to accomodate a bed - it is small. Quiet, filled with gentle curry smells, but small.

In the early days of internet, his dial-up would hog the phone line. So while the file was uploading or downloading, he'd run downstairs to one of the two payphones to discuss what was being sent and then run upstairs to check on the progress and then back downstairs to the payphone to continue discussing and then back upstairs...

Now the payphones are gone, internet whizzes through the air, and he uses a cell. And now looking around he yearns for just one separate room. Just one. A room where he can't see every corner of the apartment, or where, when he reaches his arms out wide, he doesn't bump into the kitchen.

Part Four: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Victoria



It had originally been one of only a couple of rooms in an apartment in a building filled with squatters on a block with lots of drug dealers and she was a single woman.

But then the neighborhood changed, and she got a union day job and then a husband and then a baby and then another baby and then another apartment below and then one day twenty or so years later each one had a room of their own. And this room was hers.

And when she steps into this room to paint, either during brief weekend afternoons or on the night shift, fear of failure stays outside and she can go face a painting that is pissing her off.

There is nothing in this room she can do wrong.

The Night Shift

Sunday Memories: Part Three: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Florence


This was the only place in the apartment she ever looked like she could breathe.

She started practicing between 9 and 10am. When I was little and on rare occasions came home for lunch, she would quickly make french toast and returned to practicing. When I got bigger and wasn't in risk of setting the house on fire, on those rare days, I made my own french toast.

After school it was my turn in that room and I practiced the piano (until one rare day I refused to) and the violin (which was the price I paid to not practice the piano anymore).

And when all that was done and some dinner put in front of me or my sister or both, Florence returned back to practicing until it got dark enough for neighbors to complain.

No one ever did.

Part Two: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Adrian

I’ve made things ever since I can remember. By the age of 5, I was happily drawing perfect horses on demand for family members. In those days, crowded into a home with 7 other people, I drew anywhere and on anything I could get my hands on. Even then, drawing was an essential part of who I was

My first studio, the first space I could physically walk into, close the door and focus on only creating work was in New York 25 years later. Having cleared my world of many of the obstacles that repressed my art-making, it was here in this studio that I set forth to clear the mental obstacles that remained. More important than the drawings, videos, curtains and dresses that I made in that space is the personal growth the space allowed.

This is what my office space looked like in Brooklyn, NY, 2007.


This is what the space looks like in my head.


superadriancito

Part One: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.



Goggla
(that's her on the computer screen)

So...I used to be a painter. That was back when I had a big apartment with room for a table, easel and natural light. Circumstances forced me to move into this smaller space, which was supposed to be for only two months. Those two months have stretched on for almost ten years.

Being in such a small space meant no room for setting up a work space for painting, so I started playing with my camera instead, which took up much less space, but still fulfilled my need to be artistic. These days, I'm 99% digital, but in the beginning, I used the bathroom for loading and exposing film.

This is a shared space, used by my partner during the day and me at night. There's only room for one person's project at a time, so when I need to print, cut mats or assemble pieces, he needs to go elsewhere. As there's not enough space to spread out, I work on one photo at a time. The real problem is storage, so I need to sell anything I make or there is not enough room to make more. The laundry cart functions as the mode of transport to the street or fairs, where I sell my work.

A few years ago, I began investigating the history of the building and that's when I grew very attached to the place - not because it has any significant past, but because it took me on a journey through the evolution of the city. With each new bit of history uncovered, I'd take my camera out to document my findings with the hopes of weaving together a visual story. Working out of the studio gives me a romantic connection to the roots of the Lower East Side where so many businesses were run out of tenements stuffed with families.

I grew up on the spacious west coast, truly believing the notion that NYC was the one place in the world where a young artist could come and make something out of nothing. I've lived in bigger and nicer apartments, but this is the one that connects me to the neighborhood and everything about it that I love; its history of entrepreneurship, activism, creativity and self-expression is what inspires me to get out of bed each morning. That, and the yowling of a hungry cat...

Sunday Memories: The Look of Love

Judith

She escaped from Hungary to England as the Nazis began to round up the Jews. In 1950, she sailed on the Queen Elizabeth into the New York Harbor.

It was morning and the crescent moon glimmered on the water.

The Lady beckoned.

The boat horns blew welcome.

Then the city unfolded before her eyes.

It was love at first sight.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: When It's His Birthday All The Angels Sing

And the world becomes even better than before.

The Look Of Love: Part Two

You can't really see them. But even in the gloom of a jazz club, I couldn't take my eyes off of them.

They matched from head to toe.

Shocking white hair and tanned skin that made them look like vibrant 70 year-olds in a vitamen commercial. Matching white shirts and jeans pretending to be dress pants and pretty shoes disguising their comfort function but not doing such a good job at it.

She looked like a nice girl, a good wife, a perfect helpmate, from a nice life, a safe neighborhod, a coordinated decorated home. He looked dashing and he looked like he knew it. The collar was jauntily turned up and I thought, oh this is a man who is fucking his secretary.

Then Beat Kaestli began to sing a song about a desert island, one made of touch and taste and moans and sighs and when Beat sang about kisses that could only happen on such a desert island I saw the dashing man send a glance to his matching wife that could only be saying how much he lived every word of that song with her.

The Look of Love: Part One

She wears the same soft outdoorsy clothes he does and their shoes are sturdy and hardy and probably very very comfortable and only the colors signify if they are sturdy-hardy-comfy girl shoes or sturdy-hardy-comfy boy shoes.

She strides ahead to the corner to wait for the light to change and he comes up behind her and gently nudges her elbow. Hello, his nudge says, I've caught up with you.

And she turns and smiles and he grins back at her and I see billions of seconds and minutes and moments shared and traveled through and that no matter where they are they get to turn and see that the other one has caught up and now together they can patiently wait for change.

Nobody notices them because they are too old to look like TV love. Love on TV only happens between the ages of of 15 and 22. Sometimes thirty. Occasionally forty. Never eighty.

I follow them for blocks because I need to see what real love looks like.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Thank You All For The Kitchen Series

Who knew how much of our hearts and souls spoke through a kitchen window?

Thank you all to the brave writers who sent in their pictures and words about such an intimate space and moment.