An Encore of Sunday Memories When Mothers Are Remembered: What Remains

After a day of beginning the clearing of Jutta's home, we spoke of unexpected remembering.

Originally posted February 1, 2009:

What Remains

It happened in a yoga class.

Clair de Lune by Debussy.

A perfect musical selection to launch resting bodies into an hour of hell which was eventually suppose to lead to improved health.

But for me I was suddenly in a minefield of millions of years wandering around the house as her fingers broke the heart of her piano, this piece swirling through my childhood's silence, and sang her own sorrow and disappointment.

In a class of 40, the only student over the age of twenty-five, preparing to drag my fifty years from child pose toward some recovery, the vision of Florence - the young girl playing as if the piece heralded hope and love when she grew up - crushed me deeper into the mat.




**
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When All Is Said and Done

For Mimi Who Insists Idealism Win: An Encore of When This Was Normal

This is Bernie talking New York to New York about reclaiming America for Americans.  ALL Americans.

This is New York's primary day.



So whoever you are voting for - I DON'T CARE -- WE LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY SO JUST FUCKING VOTE! - GO VOTE!!

Here's why I am voting: 

Originally posted March 13, 2016
**


This was not only or just or always luxury housing.

It is now.  Because something this beautiful is now only afforded by lots of money. 

Nowadays, you don't see this kind of place filled with the people I grew up with. 

But back then, it was where the guys working at the post office lived. My neighbor's dad was the short-order cook at Kozy Korner and then a maintenance worker at one of the buildings (that's the guy who does all the dirty work the super tells him to do).

The two sisters on the other side of the courtyard were secretaries, not administrative assistants. Secretaries did everything too, just got paid less and were called "the girl" more.

My father, Seymour worked his way off the retail floor by getting a Masters in Business at"NY-Jew" night school.  (Back then NYU was one of the few big universities to let Jews in so everyone called it NY-Jew.)

That Masters in Business, like the housing we lived in, was not a luxury item. That Masters was affordable too.  My father did not spend the next 30 to 40 years paying off student loans.  (I only have $25,000 to go!)

This was not an expensive view.

It is now.

But then, it was just my grade school.  Florence would stick her head out the window and yell down to me when to cross Columbia Street.   Depending on who you talk to, that school sucked (friends) or was normal (me).  I was just glad I was taught how to read without switching up everything and that I survived every fist fight I found myself in the middle of.  Honestly, I didn't think it was such a big deal.  It was... just normal.

These days, it's a great school.  It has computers.   I don't think they have fist fights anymore. 

This is now a edgie view.  Meaning that now that this comes with luxury housing, you also get a bit of industrial and street edge too.  On the other side are the city projects.   They are still not luxury housing.

I wonder how many new folks cross to the other side of the bridge and wander up Columbia Street.  Maybe they do. 

This is now a "Real New York!" photograph (as in "wow look at the authentic old man in the authentic law chair - only in New York!").

Didn't use to be.  Used to be just.... normal.  Because this is how everyone sat in the sunshine.

In fact, all the old ladies would drag out their lawn chairs and sit in front of their own buildings, talking about all the old ladies on the other side of the courtyard sitting in their lawn chairs in front of their buildings.  It was like a turf war, only with lawn chairs.

Not sure why my family didn't have lawn chairs.  Maybe because Florence was always practicing and Seymour was always reading.  When I hung out with my friends, we sat on the steps.

Even when the steps were as far as Florence could go, we sat on the steps.

Then it became luxury housing and lawn chairs were banned.

Officially.  Banned.

Six decades of people sitting on the steps of their buildings or in lawn chairs and suddenly it was too low-class to have a lawn chair out in front of the building to enjoy the green grass and the fountain.

At that point Florence sat in a wheelchair.  

Even the maintenance guys made sure no one fucked with us.

I miss sitting on stoops and running past old ladies in lawn chairs.

I miss it being normal for post office guys and secretaries to have beautiful gardens outside their front door and sky outside their windows.   

These days listening to fucking assholes hate hard-working Americans like my parents and my grandparents who were immigrants I really miss my mother.

I miss normal.  O.K. not the fist fights because they really did suck.  But the normal where anyone who needs a good apartment is able to get a good apartment.  I want the American Dream to not be a winning lottery ticket.  I want it to be a great job that pays well, has real health insurance and allows whoever the fuck wants to to be able to go to college and not have to still be paying it off 30 years later.

I want normal back.

So, fuck it all to hell.  I'm voting Bernie.

**
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In Memory of Cindy: The Land of the Quartchyard

Sunday Memories: Matthew 26:52

Busy Times=More Encores: The Bridge to New Lands

As new lands appear in the horizon, so does a bridge to walk there.

Originally posted September 10, 2009

 

This is the Williamsburg Bridge.

When she was a teenager, Florence would walk across it to mail a letter in Brooklyn. It cost 2 cents to mail a letter in Manhattan, but only 1 cent from Brooklyn.

There was a bathhouse underneath it on Cannon Street and everyone in the neighborhood went to it.

We grew up across the street from it in one of the first buildings in the neighborhood to have elevators and bathrooms not in the halls. We would walk across it but never get off in Brooklyn. It had a concrete walkway with low railings and lots of broken things. Florence would panic if we leaned over too far.

During Christmas time, I'd look across it to the housing projects on the other side and count the holiday lights blinking in the windows. They were exotic promises of another kind of life. One definitely with more candy and presents.

It fell apart during the Koch administration.

They rebuilt it after to be prettier and stronger.

Adrian walked across it all the time.

I walked across it with Adrian and it was different from when I remembered - it was nice and pleasant, not the barren concrete but the comfort of a pedestrian walk welcoming strolls and bicycles. I don't think people even got mugged on it that often. Walking across this time, Adrian and I got off in Brooklyn and had a burger. Then we walked back.

And just the other day Dana insisted I go out on her balcony and take a picture of it and the moon. And I stood there wondering about all the bridges we have to cross to new lands and other points of view.

 **
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Sunday Memories' Encore: The Intimacy of Men

A busy week and wonderful comments from readers from Tunisia caused a bit of a delay... So behold the encore of what happens when hair gets cut.

Originally posted April 13, 2013

***

I've only seen this twice in the last year.  The barber shops on 14th Street devoid of the twirling candy cane, I had glimpsed one a couple of months ago as the M15, going too fast to get a picture, barreled  down Madison Street. 

Then of all places, there was this one, in a mall on Staten Island.  Mounted between two doors of a huge room divided by a wall, the men's barbers on one side, the women's hairdressers on the other.

I only peeked into the women's side as I followed the Mariner to his usual guy.  There were a lot of heads wearing ferocious colors demanding their youth back.

The men's side was quieter, both in color and resignation.  There were careful cuts and subtle bracelets.  One or two rings that stated pride and virility, and chains that maintained devotion and prayer.   Even the guy with the blondish pompadour napping in his chair seemed perfectly understated in his style.  

The men's side had their version of a radio playing familiar music - Roy Rogers on the TV.  A man, maybe facing 60, with thinning dark hair and a proud, impeccably groomed 1980's mustache stood transfixed.  For a second he looked like a six year old but with serious facial hair. 

The Mariner had been going to his barber for almost twenty years.  One day, he needed a haircut, the chair was free, his hair looked neat after and that was that.  Every couple of weeks for twenty years.  He was very glad his barber was a Met fan.

Today, as hair got trimmed and cut and buzzed, between murmurs of the season beginning and the dreaded roller coaster the Mets took everyone on, the merits of Staten Island were considered.

Maybe it was the cocoon men step into when they sit down in a barber's chair.  Or perhaps it was the space and privacy of their own vanity that was allowed to unfold.   Or maybe because today a woman was there, one not sweeping up small mountains of hair.  But unexpectedly, the Mariner's guy said almost too softly that he didn't care for Staten Island.

He grew up, he lived, he loved in Brooklyn.  But after the wife's funeral, the memories were too painful.  He had to move.  No memories in Staten Island.  But he still didn't like it.

Later, the Mariner said he never knew that.  Twenty years of every couple of weeks, he never knew that about the man who cut his hair.

I wondered about my father.  His face brutalized by adolescent acne, he had gone frequently to the barber on Grand Street to have his face steamed and his pimples attacked.  I wondered what quiet secrets he might have heard, what wishes he might have risked.

 **
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The day had been spent sharing memories and wonderful food.  We cried and my old friend, Jutta's son made me laugh really, really hard about one of the worst moments.

Jutta's paintings were ready to be hung back up on spiffed-up walls.  The cats paid their respects.  Then we got to work.

**
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Restoring Story and Living Out Loud

Almost 15 years had passed since those boxes had been opened.  During that time everything had changed and what used to be normal was now obsolete. 

Not just the mom-and-pops and laundrymats and shoemakers...but also like three-quarter inch tape and mini-dvs, and high 8s...

Lots of places had transferring services, but uptown or Brooklyn or midtown or... What the heck - Maybe J&D Video Labs up the street was still in business and could do transfers from now ancient materials into present day discs.

"Do we still do...???  Do we still...??? " 

I guess with so much disappearing I hadn't expected to hear a live voice at the end of the phone.  Especially one with that familiar Brooklyn accent.

The building had the same tiny entrance and the same tinier elevator.  And on the fourth floor, the  same old floor - a normal floor I now only saw in brief glimpses every other year.

And walking into J&D... well... it felt like the same, even after 15 years. 

That business had been in business since 1966.  Joe had started it with his dad.  Now his son was there.  Every New York filmmaker had graced their door.   Many still did.

"Come on back, lemme show you what we have..."

And there in the back was a long and high wall of old machines so many of us had learned on... half inch... three-quarter... high 8...  we were like bartenders making cocktails, shifting from tape to tape all the pieces of video we needed to build a story.

Long nights in a tiny dark room whirling a knob back and forth and clicking into each frame an image and an idea of a story that made all the stories inside burst out into the world and paint a vast fairy tale picture...

Those old familiar blue and gray plastic boxes stacked up, each a word, a chapter, an attempt to live out loud...

"I'm trying to find who belongs to these tapes," Joe said.  "I don't want to throw anything away."

And this?

"From the 1930's," he proudly said.  Wanted to fix it up with a strip of 35mm film that would loop "WELCOME TO J&D!"

I got a lot of tapes, I told Joe.

"Bring them in! I love doing this."

And so I will. And so I will.

J&D Video Lab
27 East 21st Street
4th Floor
New York, New York
212.982.3330

Sunday Memories of a Home Called Jutta's Kitchen

When I was a kid, I swore I could see the bits and pieces of air.  It just made sense that I would be able to recognize something that whirled around me and kept me alive.

Jutta's kitchen was no different than the air I breathed.  For there, too, I recognized the bits and pieces that kept me alive.

**

The last in a series honoring Jutta Filippelli (1916-2016)

Originally posted March 5, 2013

Jutta's Kitchen 

Still Fighting Strong, 

Still Kicking Butt

**

An glimpse into Jutta's life which she paints with fire and with soul.

When we leave, I ask myself again.   You, you with all your dreams and passions.  Did you do enough today?

**
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Jutta's Kitchen Revisited

Jutta's Kitchen Blooms

Jutta's Kitchen Meets The Internet

At the End There Is Nothing Left Except Love

A Mother's Love Travels to No End

In a search for that second room and the need to have some company while dredging up unwilling stories, Kosky and I found a cafe off the beaten path but with a full view of the passing world.

The morning deliveries to the bodega next door, the pizza guys coming in for good coffee, travelers dragging their suitcases, the regulars wanting a better-priced smoothie than the silly expensive place up the block...

Day in, day out sometimes interrupted with an occasional glimpse of a star ducking into the corner to make a call or a heroin addict nodding out as he dragged his shopping cart to his next stop.

Time passed uneventfully and storytelling got done.

But today was different.

A journalist from Tunisia with a camera guy lugging a big professional Sony suddenly appeared, ushering in a small woman with a soft face.  The owner and the manager and the cook all waved them in, embracing, welcoming, bringing coffee, offering salutations of care and love and....

"He is a big journalist from Tunis," the owner told us.

Hello, hello welcome to New York, we said.

"He is here because she is going to see her daughter for the first time in many years.  That is why she is crying."

The woman held up five fingers.

"Do you want to say anything?" the camera guy zoomed in.

What could be said of that kind of love?  What well wishes could possibly honor the millions of minutes she had waited to see her child, always her child, no matter how old that child might be?

We wished her all the love we saw in her face to fill her reunion.

 **
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At the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, PA

Sunday Memories: Jutta's Hands And the Life They Traveled

Several weeks ago, at the 6th Annual Queens World Film Festival I dove into a sea of dazzling works by many young and sometimes not so young women filmmakers daring the world to look them in the eye through their stories.  The world is a wonderfully different place now, women of all ages stepping forward insisting the colors and shapes and shadows that sculpt their tales be seen and noted.  

So long ago, I only had Jutta and Lina Wertmuller.  And now matter how much I watched men and women delve into sex in German, it was Jutta where a more important and quieter discussion took place.


**
Originally Posted December 24, 2014

Sunday Memories Of Jutta's Kitchen: 

This Is What The Journey Looks Like

 Oh, let me take a picture of your hands, I beg Jutta.

No!  They're so... Look at them, she says.

They're incredible.  They're beautiful, I tell her.  I've always loved taking pictures of them.  They are the genesis, the beginning of everything...

Oh, well then, she says, giving the best girlish giggle in the world, they got this way from painting.

**
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Jutta's Kitchen Meets The Internet

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Food Is Love

Times was flying by like the insides of a dryer on turbo speed - kerbumpikty-kerbumpikty-kerbumpikty-kerbumpikty...

So my favorite Poem and I took a break and strolled the long way into downtown, along the way nibbling Onigiri from a bakery and Fun with pork skins from a cart on the corner and finally a pile of fried dumplings for $1.

Then we went around the corner and got a lot of candy we grew up with but couldn't find at the local newspaper stand, like bitter licorice and dried sour lemons.

We wandered old streets we knew for as long as we knew our city.  Time stopped being kerbumpikty-kerbumpikty-kerbumpikty-kerbumpikty...

And we remembered how much we loved and how much we were loved.

**
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Flying back and forth on the R train to Queens all week, sometimes Astoria, mostly Jackson Heights, the trips felt like a  soothing cocoon.

As the world whizzed by, for a second Gramma and Florence were almost next to me in that urgent rocking.

Some people talk about the whiff of their mother's perfume reminding them of her or the smell of a dish their grandmother made that helps them feel the loss a bit less.

Florence and Gramma were terrible cooks and indifferent perfume wearers.   But it was the billions of trips I took with them on the subway, when we couldn't walk to where we were going, that held those intimate moments, not much said, all of us drifting in and out of next stop and closing doors - a brief reprieve from where ever it was we did not want to return to or arrive at.

The subway had been our home and during this week I miss them a little bit less.

**
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This week the 6th Annual Queens World Film Festival was filled with dazzling works by many young and sometimes not so young women filmmakers daring the world to look them in the eye through their stories.  The world is a wonderfully different place now, women of all ages stepping forward insisting the colors and shapes and shadows that sculpt their tales be seen and noted.  

So long ago, I only had Jutta and Lina Wertmuller.  And now matter how much I watched men and women delve into sex in German, it was Jutta where a more important and quieter discussion took place.

**

Originally posted December 23, 2014

Painting From the Inside

A rare dinner at Jutta's.  Fay joins us.

The kitchen table pulled into the living room and the canvases carefully tucked away so that the Chinese food doesn't spill on them.  Her son, sick with the flu, has left two good bottles of wine, one of which we drink.

The hearing aid, being what it is, doesn't always direct her to who is speaking.  It has no subtlety.   She has to ask at times, "Which one of you is speaking?"

But, in the long run, it doesn't matter.  The ideas do.

And they don't flow out.   They don't explode out.  Its more like they burst out, like a ton of Christmas lights bursting out in the dark.

It gets later and later and soon it is just me, the Mariner and Jutta.  The food is put away, the table returned to the kitchen, the chairs back in their spots so she doesn't bump into anything.

The long weeks have caught up with everyone and home beckons.

But wait, I say.  We have to look at your paintings.

Suddenly, it is as if we had just arrived minutes ago.

Curiosity does that.  Because we are all bouncing like baby goats, as Jutta starts pulling out canvases.

"This painting is just beginning," Jutta says. 

She doesn't know what it is and where it is going, but she is following something here.

It's what writers are going through, what artists are going through, this return, she explains.  Getting in touch with that root self, that primitive being within, that "caveman".

With sight now relegated to a corner of her right eye, she is no longer looking at a landscape outside her window or a still life on her table.

She is returning her gaze to  her soul, that universe moving beyond the speed of light that was in her from the moment she emerged into the world.

 And when she does, she sees everything


**
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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: FUCKING HIM SCREENING TONIGHT!

IT'S THE QUEENS WORLD FILM FESTIVAL 

MIDNIGHT SCREENING:

EXPLICITLY OBSESSIVE!!

AT

THE SECRET THEATER

44-02 23rd St
Long Island City
NYC 11101

Buy Tickets HERE

Also screening: UNHAPPY ENDINGS and DESIRE IN NEW YORK

**
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The Incredible Jutta Continues to Inspire

Jutta always painted and always amazed.

 In memory of this beloved artist, so missed and so loved, an encore post heralding the coming solstice and her art that always emerge from an internal spring. 

**

Originally post February 21, 2012.

Sunday Memories Of Jutta's Kitchen 

That Stops For Nothing

And Other Solstice Miracles

Even after getting hit by a car, even after years of litigation, even after failed cataract surgery...

...even after finding herself legally blind, even after her hearing got worse and worse and worse, even after....


... Jutta still paints.

And you, with your dreams and your passions, what did you do today?

***

Jutta's Kitchen: Part One

Jutta's Kitchen: Part Two

Jutta's Kitchen: Part Three

Jutta's Kitchen Revisited

Jutta's Kitchen Blooms

Jutta's Kitchen Meets The Internet

Sunday Memories of When Normal Wasn't A Luxury

This was not only or just or always luxury housing.

It is now.  Because something this beautiful is now only afforded by lots of money. 

Nowadays, you don't see this kind of place filled with the people I grew up with. 

But back then, it was where the guys working at the post office lived. My neighbor's dad was the short-order cook at Kozy Korner and then a maintenance worker at one of the buildings (that's the guy who does all the dirty work the super tells him to do).

The two sisters on the other side of the courtyard were secretaries, not administrative assistants. Secretaries did everything too, just got paid less and were called "the girl" more.

My father, Seymour worked his way off the retail floor by getting a Masters in Business at"NY-Jew" night school.  (Back then NYU was one of the few big universities to let Jews in so everyone called it NY-Jew.)

That Masters in Business, like the housing we lived in, was not a luxury item. That Masters was affordable too.  My father did not spend the next 30 to 40 years paying off student loans.  (I only have $25,000 to go!)

This was not an expensive view.

It is now.

But then, it was just my grade school.  Florence would stick her head out the window and yell down to me when to cross Columbia Street.   Depending on who you talk to, that school sucked (friends) or was normal (me).  I was just glad I was taught how to read without switching up everything and that I survived every fist fight I found myself in the middle of.  Honestly, I didn't think it was such a big deal.  It was... just normal.

These days, it's a great school.  It has computers.   I don't think they have fist fights anymore. 

This is now a edgie view.  Meaning that now that this comes with luxury housing, you also get a bit of industrial and street edge too.  On the other side are the city projects.   They are still not luxury housing.

I wonder how many new folks cross to the other side of the bridge and wander up Columbia Street.  Maybe they do. 

This is now a "Real New York!" photograph (as in "wow look at the authentic old man in the authentic law chair - only in New York!").

Didn't use to be.  Used to be just.... normal.  Because this is how everyone sat in the sunshine.

In fact, all the old ladies would drag out their lawn chairs and sit in front of their own buildings, talking about all the old ladies on the other side of the courtyard sitting in their lawn chairs in front of their buildings.  It was like a turf war, only with lawn chairs.

Not sure why my family didn't have lawn chairs.  Maybe because Florence was always practicing and Seymour was always reading.  When I hung out with my friends, we sat on the steps.

Even when the steps were as far as Florence could go, we sat on the steps.

Then it became luxury housing and lawn chairs were banned.

Officially.  Banned.

Six decades of people sitting on the steps of their buildings or in lawn chairs and suddenly it was too low-class to have a lawn chair out in front of the building to enjoy the green grass and the fountain.

At that point Florence sat in a wheelchair.  

Even the maintenance guys made sure no one fucked with us.

I miss sitting on stoops and running past old ladies in lawn chairs.

I miss it being normal for post office guys and secretaries to have beautiful gardens outside their front door and sky outside their windows.   

These days listening to fucking assholes hate hard-working Americans like my parents and my grandparents who were immigrants I really miss my mother.

I miss normal.  O.K. not the fist fights because they really did suck.  But the normal where anyone who needs a good apartment is able to get a good apartment.  I want the American Dream to not be a winning lottery ticket.  I want it to be a great job that pays well, has real health insurance and allows whoever the fuck wants to to be able to go to college and not have to still be paying it off 30 years later.

I want normal back.

So, fuck it all to hell.  I'm voting Bernie.

**
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Memories of Sundays Spent in Jutta's Kitchen

Jutta on the move in her kitchen

It just felt normal to return to Jutta's kitchen.  Only with decades of hindsight do I understand how lucky I was.

Another in the series honoring Jutta Filippelli (1926-2016)

**

Originally posted February 10, 2009

Jutta's Kitchen Revisited

The elevator I rode since I was 13. Sometimes to her son...

...sometimes to dinner...

...sometimes to be painted....

...sometimes just to sit and talk...

...and sometimes to look and wonder and peer at light and shapes and paintings and sketches and wonder about the narrative that might interweave throughout our work.

**
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At the End There Is Nothing Left Except Love