About
Irving Penn, Photographer 1917-2009
October 7, 2009
Tiny Losses
October 4, 2009
Blame it on yoga. Walking north on Third Avenue Saturday, I felt the smug contentment of someone who’d deep-breathed himself into nirvana after a session of asanas. Beware of self-satisfaction: the sweaty inner peace I’d hoped would see me through a bout of shopping before dinner in Chelsea got shattered as I glanced down Stuyvesant…
Continue readingThe Super with the Toy Face
September 30, 2009
Note: an earlier version of this piece was published in the literary journal Ganymede Fall 2008 and on the website Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the ancient, antic super of 515 Edgecombe Avenue, an immense, pre-war slab of yellowed bricks and mortar at the corner of 158th Street. His complexion, shaded always…
Continue readingFall for Traffic
September 27, 2009
Rousing myself from my sofa scraped and bruised a day after I was car-doored on Park Avenue on the way to a yoga class.Traffic on Fifth Avenue was closed Saturday, which necessitated a detour onto one of the worst avenues for a biker.Maybe it was my preoccupation with the potholes, the lights (less of a…
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William Safire, Duke of Words 1929-2009
September 27, 2009
Safire receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the last Bush…the Sunday magazine of the NYT will feel empty without the man who kept us grammatically honest. RIP.
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Patrick Swayze 1952-2009
September 15, 2009
Swayze, left, top row, in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders (1983)
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Jim Carroll, Poet 1950-2009
September 14, 2009
Genius is not a generous thing In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover And it resents fame With bitter vengeance Pills and powdres only placate it awhile Then it puts you in a place where the planet’s poles reverse Where the currents of electricity shift Your Body becomes…
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“No, this way…Aaaaaaargh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
September 13, 2009
Me and J just finished the last episode of Harper’s Island, CBS’s now defunct 13-episode tale of revenge in which each member of a wedding party–trapped on an island–meet their grisly end “one by one,” as a child’s voiceover reminds us frequently, ominously. It’s basically Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians updated. I was hooked from the…
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Another door
September 11, 2009
Where are those sons of summer now? The winter has come And you don’t know how to turn your Dreams into coal Your books won’t hold you Carly Simon, Sons of Summer I feel overwhelmed by those markers indicating summers’ end. There’s today’s weather, whipping to a head after months of unseasonable coolness as…
Continue readingShort Cuts: Books On My Nightstand/September 2009
September 8, 2009
The Story of a Marriage, Andrew Sean Greer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). An African American woman wrestles with her husband’s mysterious past when a white man shows up on her doorstep—and reveals that he was once the husband’s lover. Set in 1950’s San Francisco, Greer’s novel is a kind of Sophie’s Choice filtered through the…
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