test blog #10

During the pandemic shutdown, there were so many offers of interesting things to do online -- cooking, crafting, indoor exercise, art classes, author readings, and on and on. I didn't do any of it. I began piano lessons with Pianote , read books, took walks, and generally (although somewhat guiltily) enjoyed myself. One online series looked interesting to me, but I kept forgetting to do it. The New York Times posted walking tours of different areas of New York City, hosted by Michael Kimmelman . Kimmelman was formerly the paper's longtime chief art critic, now the architecture critic. Although I miss former architecture critic Paul Goldberger , whose columns taught me how to look at buildings, Kimmelman brings a similar open, inclusive perspective that I enjoy. For each walk, Kimmelman is joined by a historian, architect, or writer who has a connection to the area. I'm off work this week, and as we bite our nails and hold our collective breath waiting for the results of th...

This story in The New York Times made me miss New York City more than anything has in a very long time.  All over the city, artists have created murals protest racism and police abuse. This critic surveys the murals , and compares them to the Neolithic cave art in the caves of France and Spain. We saw cave art in Spain (stories here and here , but no pictures), something that I had longed to do ever since I first knew they existed. It was a peak travel experience for me. I love street art, and I love New York, and I love that someone links these things together.

A piece of New York City died this week. Pete Hamill, a legendary New York journalist and possibly the last of a breed, died yesterday at age 85.  Obituaries describe him as a "tabloid poet" or "tabloid hero". If he hadn't existed, perhaps Raymond Chandler would have invented him.  It seems only fitting to let the Daily News tell his story. Legendary journalist and author Pete Hamill, a tabloid hero and teller of New York tales, dead at 85 Pete Hamill, the Brooklyn-born bard of the five boroughs and eloquent voice of his beloved hometown as both newspaper columnist and best-selling author, died Wednesday morning. Hamill, who worked at five New York newspapers and outlived three, was 85.  Hamill, four days after a Saturday fall that fractured his right hip, died in New York-Presbyterian Hospital Brooklyn Methodist, said his brother and fellow ex-Daily News columnist Denis Hamill. Though Hamill underwent emergency surgery, his heart and kidneys ultimately failed. ...

I was so very sad to hear that the artist Christo has died at the age of 84. I felt so incredibly fortunate to still be living in NYC when The Gates was there. I went through the entire installation multiple times, when very few people were there -- once in the snow, and once when Christo and Jeanne-Claude were walking through. I have tons of photos... but they're all on film and in prints! Of course Christo and Jeanne-Claude were much more than The Gates! But that is where my life intersected with their art, and I'm very grateful for it. Christo was such a giving and expansive artist. There will never be another. Our autographed poster from The Gates

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers may be the most shocking  disturbing of any I've been aware of for a very long time, possibly since the murder of Amadou Diallo , way back in 1999. Police murders of unarmed, and often completely subdued, African Americans have lost all power to shock, piling up at such a fast rate we can barely track them all. When I saw the hashtag #RememberThemAll, I thought, we can't. No human can. The original  New York Times  story said George Floyd "died after being taken into police custody". There is  no excuse  for that headline. Watch the video of George Floyd being slowly murdered by a police officer, while other officers look on and do nothing, while Floyd and bystanders plead for his life. Now imagine the two roles reversed, white cop on the ground, black man with foot on his neck. Murder? As of the time of this post, no charges have been brought against the murderers. They hold the universal get-out-of-jail...

We activists like to paraphrase the legendary labour activist Joe Hill  by saying "First mourn, then organize". Larry Kramer, who died yesterday at the age of 84, defined the phrase. He taught a generation -- he taught an entire culture -- how to use grief as fuel, how to channel anger into action. How to use a nearly constant state of mourning to propel an entire movement into the next phase of liberation. As if that wasn't enough, Kramer was a talented and powerful writer. Kramer's play "The Normal Heart" broke new ground in the New York theatre landscape. He also wrote the film adaptation . If you haven't seen it, you should: it's great . The obituaries will tell you Kramer was a provocateur, that he understood how to use shock power to gain attention for his cause. That is true. But his cause was always the greater good -- health, justice, love, liberation. He understood those as necessary and inextricable. The obituaries will also tell you how p...

Fans of Robert Caro rejoiced when we learned that Caro, author of nonfiction histories, was writing a book about his writing process. When the book was published, I'm sure I wasn't the only one surprised by its brevity. At a slim 207 pages, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing is the equivalent of a post-it note for Caro, whose books are often described as tomes . I read Working over the course of a weekend, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Not only is the subject fascinating, but Caro's warm and genuine voice is truly a joy. If you read nonfiction and you enjoy history, and you haven't read Robert Caro , you must correct this terrible oversight. Caro's first book, The Power Broker , is considered one of the best nonfiction books of the 20th Century. It is a biography of Robert Moses , who was the most powerful man in the most powerful US city -- a man who was never elected to office and who many people, even many New Yorkers, may never have heard of. Mor...

This is one of those posts I write only for myself. This blog functions as my travel diary, and I like that diary to be complete. So here I am. Feel free to ignore. Which of course you always are, and you don't need me to tell you that. I was supposed to go to New York by myself to see Springsteen on Broadway . (Review to follow in separate post.) I had been trying to get a ticket since they first went on sale more than a year ago, and somehow Allan managed to get me one. And not just a ticket -- an affordable ticket! Factoring in air fare and hotel, I couldn't spend a huge amount on a ticket, and Allan snagged one for $75. Amazing! When some of my NYC plans got cancelled, I persuaded Allan to come with me. He wasn't interested in the Springsteen show, but why pass up two days in New York? Day one: sweat, lunch, pod, bistro We flew down on Porter, and it's super easy to take NJ Transit into the city and hop on a subway. However, it was 45 degrees on the street with swam...

We are here ! Staying here . Going to this !  Also here , scene of many past celebrations. Ah, New York. And Bruce!! That is all.

Everyone who cares about cities, about privatization, and frankly, about humans  and our ability to live on our planet, should make time to read the July cover story in Harper's  magazine. New York writer Kevin Baker unpacks " The Death of a Once Great City -- The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence ". As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring. This is not some new phenomenon but a cancer that’s been metastasizing on the city for decades now. And what’s happening to New York now—what’s already happened to most of Manhattan, its core—is happening in every affluent American city. San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapi...

The theme of this year's TD Summer Reading Club -- a national program (developed by Toronto Public Library) that more than 2,000 Canadian libraries participate in -- is Feed Your Passions, or as some are calling it, geeking out. Allan and I are going to join the fun with our own tremendously geeky reading, although it will take us considerably more than one summer. For eons, we have had on our bookshelf Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, a massive 1,424 pages in very small print. I've always wanted to read it, but it's a bit intimidating! And it's not like you can throw it in your backpack to read on the bus. Then for my birthday this year, included among Allan's gifts and cards and general Celebration of Laura, was Wallace's follow-up: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 . This volume -- all 1200 pages of it -- has got to be fascinating, but we can't read the second book without readin...

Is there a New Yorker alive who hasn't spend time in The Strand? A New York City tourist who didn't thrill to their first visit to The Strand? The man who gave NYC this unique gift died recently at the age of 89. Although his father founded the store, Fred Bass made it the book-lovers' mecca that it came to be. Here you can see the ever-present he outdoor shelves. I won't recount my memories of the hours I've spent in The Strand, because I'm sure they're no different than anyone else's. After we moved to Canada, a wmtc reader told me the store had been ruined. I returned to find an elevator had been installed, and the public washrooms changed from nauseatingly dirty to liveable. There was a cafe, better lighting, and new books, at a discount. Not ruined. Just a bit modernized. The Strand was always  expanding. It was like the expanding universe of books. You might think The Strand contained every homeless book the store took in -- but you'd be wrong....

I finished City on Fire , Garth Risk Hallberg's astonishing debut novel, a few days ago, but stories from the book are still playing in mind. I initially didn't want to commit to reading a 900-page tome, but as I savoured the last scene, I was sorry to put it down. City on Fire  brings you to 1976-77 New York City, the summer of The Blackout, when the City famously went dark and infamously gave way to rioting and looting. It's the New York City of graffiti-covered subway cars, of brutal service cuts, unemployment, and street crime. It's also the New York City of the punk rock revolution, the birth of hip-hop, an exploding social scene of sex, drugs, and disco, of early gay liberation, of artistic flourishing. It's the New York City that lured young people who didn't conform to their small town's small-minded standards to stuff their belongings in a duffel bag and buy a one-way ticket on Greyhound. And it is -- as it always has been and always will be -- the ...

When I first heard the incarceration of African Americans in the United States referred to as a "new Jim Crow," I thought it must be hyperbole. So did Michelle Alexander, a fact she discloses in the introduction to her book. As Alexander researched the concept, the more she learned, the more she changed her mind. She changed my mind, too. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness , Alexander builds an unassailable case that mass incarceration through the (so-called) War on Drugs is the third large-scale caste system that holds Black Americans in a second-class status. This is true even in a society that includes Oprah Winfrey, Clarence Thomas, and, of course, Barack Obama. The first caste system was slavery. The second was the laws and customs of segregation, discrimination, and terror known as Jim Crow. The third and current system is mass incarceration. This includes rules governing local policing, key court rulings, the court system itself, the p...

When this came out, I hung the cover on my bedroom wall.   Sharing memories of David Bowie, as so many of us were after his too-early death this week, led me to think a lot about the world I lived in when I was a big Bowie fan. My world then I saw Bowie in concert in 1976, after the " Station to Station " album came out. I was a few months shy of my 15th birthday. I had a picture of him on my wall, a magazine cover with a green background. I had assumed it was the cover of Time , but a Google image search quickly revealed it was People . No one in my family read People , which means I bought the magazine for the Bowie story and photos. Although I can't remember anything specific, I know I would have cut out, read, and saved anything about the new album and the tour from Rolling Stone  (still an actual rock music magazine), The New York Times , and Time , because I subscribed to RS and my parents subscribed to the others. In those days, we searched for images and stories a...

My desire is to get the reader, well, first of all to read it. That story [“The Bottom of the Harbor”] was hard to write because I had to wonder how long can I keep developing it before the reader’s going to get tired of this. Here and there, as I think a fiction writer would, I put things that I know—even the remark the tugboat men make, that you could bottle this water and sell it for poison—that are going to keep the reader going. I can lure him or her into the story I want to tell. I can’t tell the story I want to tell until I’ve got you into the pasture and down where the sheep are. Where the shepherd is. He’s going to tell the story, but I’ve got to get you past the ditch and through these bushes. Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gi...

This week I received email from my friend Alan, formerly known in this blog as Alan with one L, or AW1L. Subject line: Re: 34th Street/Penn Station Just Now Out-of-Towner [leaning into packed Uptown Express [2 or 3] train]: "Does anybody know if this goes to Times Square?" About 10 Passengers [as one--all with exactly the same *annoyed* tone]: "Yes!" It was *excellent*! [I *love* this town!!] I loved this little story! I loved that AW1L thought of me when this happened. It also made me feel homesick and wistful for my old hometown. I replied, in part, "Sometimes I miss my old life. No one I know now would even understand what's so great about this!" I don't know if that's true, but sometimes I'm astonished by how much my life has changed since moving to Canada. Now I'll use this email and those wistful feelings as an excuse to post these NYC items. One has been sitting in Blogger drafts for five years! From 2010: A History of New York i...

Back-to-back obituaries again. Obits are taking up a large percentage of wmtc real estate these days, yet another indication of how little I'm writing. The passing of Thomas Erdelyi this week, better known as Tommy Ramone, brings an uncomfortable reminder of mortality for people my age and younger: the last surviving original Ramone. Like a lot of people, I discovered the Ramones in a kind of backwards fashion, through the Clash and other great British punk and new wave bands. No matter how many times I've read and heard that these guys from Queens were a heavy influence on British punk, to me it always seemed the other way around. The Ramones, perhaps more than any other band, embodied the true spirit of punk. So strange that they are gone. Tommy Ramone, 1949-2014

Ruby Dee was a towering figure in the American theatre. She was a great actor, a poet, playwright, and screenwriter, and a steadfast voice for equality. Along with the actor Ossie Davis, her husband of nearly 60 years, Dee never stopped campaigning for full civil rights for all people. Dee and Davis' marriage was something to marvel at and to emulate, a partnership, as the New York Times obit puts it, that was "romantic, familial, professional, artistic and political". Dee grew up in Harlem, performed in many Broadway plays, and was a quintessential New Yorker. On Friday, the marquee lights on Broadway theatres were darkened for one minute in her honour.

Dear suburban GTA resident flying on Porter Airlines from Newark to Toronto: Since you were not talking to me, I was unable to respond to your erroneous statements. But since you were speaking loud enough for the entire plane to hear, I was easily able to determine that you have no idea what you are talking about. Here are some facts of which you clearly are not aware. 1. I'm glad you enjoyed your stay near the airport in Elizabeth, New Jersey. However, since you did not venture into New York City, you have no idea how the area near your hotel compares to any part of New York City. Elizabeth, NJ is Elizabeth, NJ. New York is New York. Proximity does not imply similarity. 2. Park Slope, where your friend lives, is not "a suburb of Manhattan". It is a neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Brooklyn and Manhattan have been part of the same city since 1898 . 3. Park Slope is not a "typical suburb". It is not a suburb at all. It is an affluent urban neighbourhood, served by mul...