It ain't all pizzas and cream

Anything you can name...

...is like a gem turning in the sun. How you perceive it, depends on what aspect makes the greatest impression on you. The angle of the light, the brightness, the richness of the color, the motion, etc.

It's the same for almost anything you can name. Our opinions of things depend greatly on our first impressions. On what facet first caught our eye.

When I was a kid, my dad did two things a lot: smoke and travel. When he returned from a business trip, I remember hearing him come down the apartment hall from the elevators, and rushing to meet him, burying my face in the tobacco-smelling folds of his topcoat. So the smell of cigarette smoke will always equate with dad, home, love. The Surgeon General be damned.

The city I knew...

is slowly disappearing.

(Divine Lorraine Hotel 701 N. Broad St.)

Zydeco Twostep and some Detroit Iron

Visited the Roxborough section of Philly for music and a peek at a few classic cars...

 

Thx to Punkymama for the tip on the cruise night.

More Remembrances of Summer: 1975

Mom at the wheel, dad perusing The New Yorker, we clear the summit of Harmony Hill and from a distance the trees in the valley are inviting as feather pillows.  It is July and the colors are shouting at the sky: flowers for sale, stands of fresh fruit. In a few moments we’ll pass beneath the culvert, park the car, and cut the engine. Our faces will feel the brush of the hot breeze, our ears fill with the song of cicadas. Nan’s prepared a picnic lunch, with fresh tomatoes from her garden. There are sandwiches and iced tea and pie. We’ll fill our bellies, as the motorboats buzz thru the honeyed light.

(Summer 1975)

In Remembrance of Summer: 1965

There’s a kind of hot you only find in Brooklyn: a mix of exhaust, tar, trash, pizza, and perfume carried by the salty bay breeze. Every day we make our way to Owl’s Head Park, and sit in the shadow of the Verrazano Bridge, which looms overhead like a parade balloon.  From my stroller I watch the freighters and barges slide across the water, implausible as bricks on ice. My mother remains silent, except to offer some animal crackers. At 4 p.m., the orange tour boat will pass and blow its horn, as it does every day, and we will begin up the hill, the bay breeze pushing us home.

(Summer 1965)

In remembrance of summer

1.

It's hot along the riverbank, dragonflies skimming the water like choppers in search of lost swimmers, the rows of aluminum trailer homes gleaming in the sun. The King is dead. My pocket transistor radio has been playing his music all day. I peel the bark from a small twig with my thumbnail, and wait for the Mystery Train.

(Summer 1977)

 

2.

Half drunk from the prior night, half scooped out and gutted by a hangover, no sleep, I walk zombified thru campus at dawn in search of a cheeseburger. In two hours, a car will take me home for the summer. I will turn 19, still a virgin. I will steal Crown Royal and Jack Daniels from the liquor cabinet, soften and rot like a banana peel in the sun, and wait for fall.

(Summer 1981)

 

3.

We showered together every day in June, sometimes making love before, sometimes during, sometimes after. If I were to put music to those days it would be the jazz falling water plays against skin. I've been told that justice is when you get what you deserve, mercy when you don't get what you deserve, and grace when you get what you don't deserve. These days surely then were grace.

(Summer 1984)

 

4.

I never understood life, never understood people. I walk the streets of my neighborhood, 40-oz. bottle of Midnight Dragon tucked inside its paper sleeve, and peer thru the windows of those newly arrived home from work. Watching a guy, still in his suit pants, shirt untucked, skillet-fry a burger on the stove. Might as well be on the moon.

(Summer 1991)

 

5.

We’ve been climbing all morning, despite a light but stubborn rain. At the summit, the sky rips at the seams, suspending an arc of color between the peaks. You’d think it was a bluebird, the way we become silent, as if our voices might frighten it away.

(Summer 2000)

 

6.

Blood was everywhere. I’d driven faster than an ambulance. “I’m not standing over a grave,” I said. “When this day is done, I’m not standing over a grave.” A few moments later a nurse emerged from the operating room to say mom and baby were fine.  Then they brought you out, no larger than a loaf of bread. “Welcome, doll,” I said, and raised your tiny forehead to my lips.

(Summer 2006)

Not So Fast Times

My 30-year high school reunion is this year. My attendance is unlikely, mostly because the few friends from that time with whom I stay in touch aren't going either. Vacations, family plans, miles of concrete have gotten in the way. It's alright. Truthfully I've been able to reconnect with nearly all my old friends through social media sites like Facebook.  And since I attended 3 high schools in 4 years, I really never knew that many of my fellow grads anyway.

My high school years were rather unremarkable. I was the invisible kid.  Bad at sports, joined no clubs, wasn't in a band, never had a date. I just "did my own time" as the jailhouse saying goes.  Got up, went to class, came home, did homework, watched TV. Then, late in my senior year, I discovered diners, and that it was possible to hang out for hours with a few friends just shooting the shit at some greasy spoon. A few of us who were also dateless non-athletes spent our nights driving around the county from diner to diner, I think secretly hoping we'd discover a group of stranded Penthouse Pets whose van had broken down. That never happened.

Thirty years later, I look back o that time and try to make sense of it in terms of our society's current techno-obsession with interconnectedness. These days, every high school kid seems to have a cell phone, as well as s Facebook or Myspace page and maybe even a Twitter account. I remember trying to gather the courage to pick up the lime green Princess phone to call a girl for a date (only to be gently told to go away by said girl).  These days it must be easier. You chat on FB, share photos, etc. There are so many ways to interact using simply your laptop. Certainly would have helped me eliminate those stammering awkward phone calls.  

I do think teens have it easier now. Yes, there are stalkers and crazies. But generally the Net creates a more even footing. the jocks have their playing field, but on the Net, nobody cares how fast you can throw or run. Social media favors the witty, the snarky, the darkly funny, the geeks. Can't help but wonder if I might have participated in my life to a greater degree had today's technology been available then.

out to dry

 

Was a time

everyone in Brooklyn

had a clothes

line.

 

Mom let me

play

with the clothes

pins.

 

Alligators vs

Cops

was a great

game.

 

The cops won

mostly.

 

A couple of goodbyes

Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010)

I asked Tuli Kupferberg once, "Did you really jump off of The Manhattan Bridge?" "Yeah," he said, "I really did." "How come?" I said. "I thought that I had lost the ability to love," Tuli said. "So, I figured I might as well be dead. So, I went one night to the top of The Manhattan Bridge, & after a few minutes, I jumped off." "That's amazing," I said. "Yeah," Tuli said, "but nothing happened. I landed in the water, & I wasn't dead. So I swam ashore, & went home, & took a bath, & went to bed. Nobody even noticed."

-from Memorial Day 1971 by Ted Berrigan & Anne Waldman

* * *

Harvey Pekar (1939-2010)

I try and write the way things happen. I don`t try and fulfill people`s wishes.

-Harvey Pekar

NoLibs

Took a trip to the Philly neighborhood known to William Penn simply as "the Liberty Lands," later termed "Northern Liberties," and more recently abbreviated "NoLibs." This long-time home to textile mills and tanneries, candy factories and glass works, rug makers and breweries had fallen over the years into blight. Recent redevelopment, however, has made it a hipster Mecca, with its focal point, the Piazza at Schmidt's Brewery.

The rain kept the crowds away, and so I tried to photo a bit of the fading factoryscape alongside its boutiquish replacement.