Poor Kid

In the New York Times this Sunday:

The Goat That Got Away

By MATTHEW FISHBANE

A FEW Sundays ago, between 2:53 and 2:56 a.m., a young man was seen loitering outside Cabrito, a Mexican bar and restaurant on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village.

Security video showed the man walking, looking around and then climbing a railing. Soon after, a night watchman noticed that the restaurant’s signature sign, which had hung above the railing, was gone. Whether the man in the video took it is not clear — he disappears from the video frame after he climbs the railing — but someone surely did.

“It stuck out like a pink goat,” David Schuttenberg, the restaurant’s chef, said jokingly the other day. “It was begging to be stolen.”

Read the rest here.

Photo page update

I've updated my photo page. Please give it a visit.

Yes, it is too bad, really.

SONIA. You love no one?

ASTROFF. Not a soul. I only feel a sort of tenderness for your old nurse
for old-times' sake. The peasants are all alike; they are stupid and
live in dirt, and the educated people are hard to get along with. One
gets tired of them. All our good friends are petty and shallow and see
no farther than their own noses; in one word, they are dull. Those that
have brains are hysterical, devoured with a mania for self-analysis.
They whine, they hate, they pick faults everywhere with unhealthy
sharpness. They sneak up to me sideways, look at me out of a corner of
the eye, and say: "That man is a lunatic," "That man is a wind-bag." Or,
if they don't know what else to label me with, they say I am strange. I
like the woods; that is strange. I don't eat meat; that is strange, too.
Simple, natural relations between man and man or man and nature do not
exist.

Austin Pendleton, your theater license is revoked. Keep your grubby paws off of Chekhov. Man is forgetful, but God remembers... a really badly-directed play.

There's ya problem right the-ah

New Jersey Turnpike. Going 65. Snowing. Someone cut me off. I took evasive action. Lost control. Rammed into the rail. Spun around. Hit a guy in the next lane. Sat trembling for a while, out of cold and out of fear. Cops came, wearing baby blue. Asked me if I'd fallen asleep. "No," I said. "I lost control." Got a summons for careless driving. Tow truck arrived. Hauled me and my car off the Turnpike. Said he'd had another dead guy just yesterday. Uncle came to pick me up. Took a bath. Popped a vicodin. Pled not guilty. Rode in to the city for the title. Rode back out. Signed the title over to the wrecker. Checked the box saying "has been wrecked." Took the plates and one last look. And walked away.

how to fit a 20 piece band on a 10 foot stage

The Winter Jazzfest, January 2009

(Thanks, memend, for the happy new gear.)

Jasper the friendly ghost

NYC, December 2008

Jacob's Ladder NYC

Jacob's Ladder, NYC

Wherein I join Mr. Beller's Neighborhood

Wat Bronx (my photo)

At the northern tip of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is what passes for New York's Little Cambodia.

Find out Wat is the Wat.

Capturing movement

That's the way things are these days. You have an idea, you go with it. This is what happened with Maria Gomez, a Colombian anthropologist working as an enthnographer at CUNY.

As part of my fieldwork, I was interviewing "latino immigrants" in the Bronx, and I thought it would be interesting to show life stories as opposed to statistics, and to create an experimental project that involved my own personal experience as an immigrant and that showed my particular reality.

The result: the Colombian Migration Project, a blog posting her collection of video interviews with Colombians living in New York. (All Spanish is subtitled to English, and notes are written in both languages.) The second half of the project, she says, now involves talking to people with overseas experience living in Colombia, and the first of these are starting to go up.

Gomez explains in an update from January:

The project was always meant to be non-spectacular, kind of the opposite of the stuff you hear about on the news around migration. We’re not looking for the drama, we’re just trying to show the experiences of regular people who go and live in another country. It’s not a scientific sample, the people we interview are mostly middle-class, well educated. We’re just trying to show a slice of the immigration experience, what it’s really like. Most of what you see about immigrants always shows the same story, the poor farmer who goes to work in a kitchen in New York or on a farm in California, and a lot of people do live that experience, but the people we know and the experiences we lived were very different from that, which is why we decided to show that side of the story too.

And non-spectacular it is, which is not to say uninteresting.

For a taste, I recommend Vanessa, who talks about her arrival 20 years ago as a child, setting up her beauty salon in Queens, and missing the grandmother who raised her back home:

I was talking about what you lose, the little things you lose... I would have liked not have moved here when my grandma was still alive.

Gomez says she's not sure what will come of it. "For now," she says, "the idea is to put the edited interviews on line so other people can see them." As one comment says, "sometimes you just can’t get home out of your system. you always go back!"