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In: This is my life?
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Jack Bilander and I have a parasocial relationship. I stalk him on the internet like a cast-off lover seeking any possible shred of information about who he’s romancing. I suffer from bouts of borderline personality disorder, speculating about his thoughts and yearnings. Time and again, I look at a particular photo of him, and think back on the brief period that I knew him personally. He was incomprehensible then, like the many other adult treasures in that period of my life. Jack was a flirt. People who’ve sold me his etchings and who knew him from the neighborhood describe his charm. I witnessed this truthRead More →

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In: Generational Divide, Technoculture
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I’m a paper pile person, and although I have an abiding obsession with time management systems, I always felt inspired to let the paper dragon frolic. Now I’m drowning in data and trapped in its undertow. As people around me sign up for various cults of productivity apps, I find myself overwhelmed by choosing which cult to join. The whole thing makes me throw my hands up in the air, which defeats the purpose of organization systems in the first place. After letting the elephant of Evernote, the blue box of Dropbox, and every other eye-candy logo capture my attention, I’ve opted for the simplestRead More →

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Many years ago, as a child, I played in Chelsea Park, Manhattan, NYC. In those days, it was concrete with a little bit of green. Today, it’s green with a little bit of concrete. Somewhere in the middle, it was just sand, like a big cat litter box. I’m sure Chelsea Park could be a metaphor for life – from concrete jungle to cat dung to green space – but that is probably over-reading. My country and I have made it through Vietnam, the cold war, and into the next millennium. My country and I have have seen the World Trade Center fall and aRead More →

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In: Generational Divide, Politics, This is my life?
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My grandmother was a grassroots politician, not a legislator. To me that distinction is essential. It gave her a clarity of vision that made things simple; she moved through a world in which the work was hard but the logic was unquestionable. Where she moved, people followed. Yesterday at RootsCamp I heard some of her clarity. The keynote speaker was Frank Curiel, a labor organizer of forty years’ experience, who talked about what grassroots work means. You go to the hall, you see the people there, you talk to them, and you listen. The backdrop of listening, in his case, was the farm and fieldRead More →

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I bought several Jack Bilander etchings. Bilander was an artist in Chelsea, my neighborhood growing up in New York City. Lately I’ve had this urge to go there. I’ve built up an obsession, really, to return to my Grandmother’s apartment, to be in her space, to see the cheap 1960s parquet floors of Penn South, smell the esoteric scent of Jewish working class intelligentsia, and view a wall full of images still strikingly memorable forty years later. When I found a suite of Bilander’s pictures on Picasa, I sighed audibly, repeatedly, at how many of them summoned a vivid memory. So indelible and powerful. SomethingRead More →

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In: Fun Facts, Technoculture, This is my life?
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When I was growing up in Manhattan, my very first phone number was LO4-4327. It’s funny to me that I still remember it after all these years. I wonder how many people remember their first phone number. I haven’t used it since I was 9 or 10. But, there it is, still in my head. Erica Jong’s recent column on HuffPo is about nostalgia and New York telephone exchanges. Thus my ponderings on LO4 and Manhattan. Many years after I left New York, I figured out that the first two letters of my number represented where I lived. Watching some old black and white movieRead More →

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In cleaning out my office today, I discovered a pair of old black and white photos from my childhood. I was probably a year old in the arms of Aaron Henry, a famous civil rights leader. My grandmother, who hosted Henry in her home, who was a district-level politician in Chelsea in New York City at the height of the 60s.  She was progress, well-known, and well-respected. Yes, being radical is in my genetic code. Here is the text of the note my mother sent me with the pictures: The occasion of the photographs was a trip Aaron Henry made to NYC to seek supportRead More →