upperwestsider

2011-08-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

Everything spretty much still closed today- probably a result of the transit shutdown. Lots of Police, still very few cars, either parked or driving about. Other than that , it just seems like we had an extra large summer rain storm. Big Puddles, fallen leaves and a few branches, Central park was closed, Riverside park was not closed, but I did not ride down by the river ,like yesteerday. The Hudson had white caps on it, and it was still very windy, sustained at 20 mph and much stronger gusts, particularly at the big intersections and along the River. The West Side Highway was open, with moderate traffic moving quickly. Unfortunately the main part of the storm happened undercover of dark, I fell asleep and didn't wake up until a;most 10. No Sunday news shows-no politics except three Bloomberg press conferences of the City officials congratulating them selves. Endless Hurricane coverage on every channel. The Paper of Record did not deliver today- but it's on line.

2011-08-28T18:11:00.001-07:00

Saturday 7 pm August 27 Well, aside from intermittent rain, nothing yet, but we'are under hurricane watch. I went down to the garden to put up "closed signs" in the garden because we got dead branches that could fall on people. Mayor Bloomberg closed the entire transit system at noon today ( all rides were free Friday through today) and Far Rockaway has been evacuated into shelters. The transit system closed at noon because it takes 8 hours to close it down and get all the train cars off the tracks and open air yards out in Queens and into tunnels for safe storage. Then they had to position work cars with pumps into place in the tunnels prone to flooding . I don't know why they had to stop all the busses. Maybe the buss drivers wanted off because the train operators got off. I took a bike ride downtown this afternoon to see what was going on after hearing on the radio that Times square was strangely deserterd. I started to ride down town on the new "bicycle highway" along the river that starts in Riverside park and goes all the way downtown.Riverside Drive was empty of car traffic and there were practiacaly no parked cars. It was more empty than Xmas. Down by the river the water was totally glatt- not a ripple, and but the air was filled with water- not raining, but every once in a while a drop of water would hit your face as you rode along. All the boat moorings were empty, and the house boats in the 79th street basin were tied up close to the docks and shuttered. I started out on the bike highway under the highway but a Parks Police guy shooed the bikers off saying it was closed, and told us we should use the pedestrian way along the river which is normally closed to bikers. The path along the river is pretty nice- better than that failure path along the bay in Sunnyvale. When i got to the part below 59th we were permitted back on the Bike high way along theWest Side Highway which was almost deserted. just a few taxis. Dump trucks were lined up prepared to pick up garbage left by the pending hurricane carnage, but near enough to the river to get caught by the water surge. I rode down to 42nd and decided to go over to Times square . There was almost no traffic on 42nd street, and only one car came out of the Lincoln Tunnel exit. (4pm Saturday). Four enormous Tree picker trucks capable of going up ten stories were parked towards midtown . Times square was devoid of almost all traffic other than Police, service trucks and taxis. A line of tourists were standing out side a Walgrens drugstore- i guess to use the toilets, because nothing else was open except a few bars. The big 42nd st Subway station was closed. Theaters, Movie Theaters, Restaurants, souvenier shops, even Starbucks- all closed. IN the pedestrian mall betweem 42nd and 50th there were about a hundred tourists milling around in the light rain- mostly Germans and other foreigners stranded by the closure of all the airports. train stations, and bus stations. When I looked up Broadway to 59th street from 50th street i counted 5 cars. I rode home up eighth avenue. Broadway and Amsterdam from 72nd up, riding much of the way in the middle of road because I could. There were cops at 72nd, 79th, 86th,.96th. They were mostly sitting in their cars eating. Almost all of the regular stores were closed, the restaurants were closed except for Chinese takeout and Kim's Used Fruit and vegetables at 104th. Stores that were not closed were going to be closed by 6 and stay closed until Monday. More stuff was closed than during the blizzard. The weather was fine- no wind, some rain, but not that much. When I got back the Condo Board guy said the mayor had asked all the buildngs to turn off their elevators tonight and tomorrow! They also plan to close down the power to downtown Manhattan and all other low laying areas tomorrow because flooding saltwater can damage "hot" wires. ( Powerlines in Manhattan are all underneath the street) 's Major highways out of the City are closed now-the thruway the Sawmill...I need to find my flashlight.

2010-03-13T15:31:00.000-08:00

SWIMMING WITH MANATEES Back from my week in Florida again. Got in an extra day this year because our flight into LaGuardia was called off due to snow. For the second year in a row we arrived to cancelled motel reservations. Fort Lauderdale was empty though, so we went down the road and got better rooms at the Peaceful Dove, for the same price, with WIFI. As usual I was down there with my friend Ernie- the organist music director. It was so cold we both wanted to leave the second day, but didn't bring the subject up until it was too late. The temps hovered in the low 40s at night and it was a windy and cold 55 at the beach during the day. I had to put on all my clothing to go to bed at night. By Saturday it warmed up to 65 and the water was warmer than the air so it was great swimming. After the initial plunge I went swimming everyday no matter how old it was except for the day trip down to the Fairchild Tropical gardens. This Garden has the only tropical rainforest in the continental United States. You could recreate something similar with Palms, Banana Trees, some other trees, Philodendrums and lots of different Begonias. Right now we have a few hundred variegated Begonias in the Greenhouse at St. John the Divine. I figure we cold buy a red Banana tree, a hardy palm tree, several Philodendrms, and use the Colcasia Esculantas, ( Elephant Ears) in my front bathroom and the greenhouse Begonias to create our own little rain forest here in Manhattan. Anyway, since it was not really possible to lie on the beach because of the cold wind, we huddled sitting or walked on the beach when not in the warmish calm water. Monday the sun came out and I was out beyond the surf paddling when there was commotion at the shore. Ernie started yelling to me to come in immediately. Two gray shapes were approaching in the water. They were shapeless and fat without dorsal fins, and had stumpy flippers. They swam towards me, and one had its mouth open in what looked like a sort of a smile. It looked big- a lot larger than me, so I quickly started galloping and swimming toward shore because it was clearly wild and unpredictable. Halfway back one of the other swimmers yelled over "it's OK, they are just Manatees" but I kept going- probably because of their size. I saw the two Manatees again in the water the extra Friday when we were supposed to leave - at roughly the same time, they headed down the beach in the deeper water just beyond he sandbar heading in the same direction.

2009-08-04T14:24:00.000-07:00

Florida dreams... Well, finally found my way back to my blogspot! It has been a long time and much has happened. Right now I am sitting here sweating because air conditioning sucks, and considering our upcoming trip to Orlando August 18- for five days. The only bright spot is that Barry's friend has a Condo at the beach where I can go swimming. My friend Ernie and I were down in Florida as per usual for our post Ash Wednesday trip in February. For the first time we decided to rent a car near the airport. When we arrived at the "Hurricane," our SRO motel on the beach, we discovered that the owner, Savi, had passed away that week and the entire motel had been commandeered by an extended group of Hindis coming in from all points East. There was no room in the inn. (Ernie and I have performed that number at least 40 times in Christman Rappings but this was reality). Fortunately, we had the car, so we could drive out to the wake to schmooze with Jonney, Savi's husband. We oozed into the funeral home trying to look as amiable as possible, pressing our hands together and bobbing our heads to express our sorrow in a respectful way. Finally, a cousin with a motel on the A1A took pity on us for lodgings. The rooms were of a higher quality and had a fast internet connection, but blocked off from the beach by huge and mostly empty Condominiums. Having the combination of a car and internet made all the difference- I would go to the beach and then come back and surf the internet until finding the entertainment of the day. We found an all you can eat place called Bubba's Crawfish, and the last orange grove in South Florida, and checked out the Everglades Park where they kept wild peacocks and had a hidden trailer park out back behind a large hummock of grass. Ernie and his friend Frank patiently permitted me to explore at will. Finally, I found directions to a place mentioned by one of our Florida Friends which was recommended for it's tremendous smoked fish, "Jimbo's" on Virginia Key. After fits and starts, including a side trip out to Key Biscayne, we finally found the place behind Miami's Solid Waste Disposal Plant. Driving into the littered weedy parking lot, I immediately recognized the tribe from my squatter attorney history. Imagine a squat located in a dirty corner of paradise by a beach, and you have the picture. We parked the car at a slight distance, closer to the solid waste disposal plant, and walked through the back area by the beach through the Sawgrass, ragged Palm trees, Palmettos, serious garbage , and burned out VW 's that had been painted and decorated. We should have known that this was not a place buy something to eat. Maybe something to smoke, but not anything to put in your mouth as food. After parrying an old hippie's attempt to get us to watch his entire video about the place, and admiring the more creative piles of junk trailers and dead boats along the beach, we found, or rather smelled the smoked fish shack. Inside was a hard bitten woman in a string halter who probably does all the work around the place. She sized us up as "outsiders" and grunting "salmon or white fish" she opened up a vast Styrofoam tub filled with blocks of wood. She whipped out a rectangle, and we realized it was smoked fish. Ernie asked how much and she answered eight dollars, hesitating, he asked "how much is that- a pound?" and she raised the price of the rectangle on the spot to 10 dollars! For us. For the heroine squatter attorney of New York! Well, after coming all that way we bought it as sort of the "price of admission", it was getting dark then and coming out of the shed, a couple of guys suggested we leave now, because we were not their type. The drive back to the Motel was redolent with the smell of fish, but we did interface with it for a late supper with salad. It stayed in my fridge after that, well wrapped, and I left it as a small gift for the Hindi cousin rather than inflict it on fellow passengers during the flight back to NYC.

2007-06-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

More plants, more trouble and a trip to Germany. Tomorrow's our big garden fundraiser - a flag day extravagana. As per usual with big enterprises involving cooperation of two or more people at least two or more are not on speaking terms. There's no politics like Garden Politics. Tomorrow it will once again cometogether - and at least 100 people will enter the garden and eat the finest food on earth- contributed by the restaurants of the Upper West Side of New York, and the Vinegar Factory on the east side. The Early Music Ensemble will play high class music and we will honor the parks commissioner, the NY Botanical garden, and the Mayor. Everthing is planted, the pickup and delivery schedule is arranged, tables and chairs delivered! Once it's over I have about three more things to do and then i go off to Berlin for my strangest vacation. My friend Ernest made all the arrangments and got me a companion ticket on Swissair. I have never been to Berlin, or anywhere in the east because when I lived in Germany we had a stamp on our passport that made us part of the occupying force after we got part time jobs with the Americans. So although when I sang in Bayreuth you could literally look over the borders from the train I couldn't travel over there without going through a big deal. This time we're going to stay in the east- Reineckendorf, and travel to Leipzig and Dresdan. [I wonder why people though that when we went into Iraq we would be out of there in a few months. The Seventh Army has been sitting in Germany since 1945. We've been in Korea since 1952. ]

2006-04-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

Shiny New Things...I remember my new bicycle in 1956 under the Christmas tree. Creeping down the stairs at 6 am in my pajamas and seeing a new Schwinn with red bows gleaming under the tree. Even though it was snowing outside with three inches of hard ice caked on the driveway I wanted to get out there and ride it right away in my jammies. Then there was the rush of the“new” Buick- a huge green beast crouching by the curb on 110^th Street, ready to whip off to a meeting, go shopping at the Fairway, or go on a quick spin up to Montreal. During the first six months I used the car so much I put on twenty pounds. Or how about the excitement of a new computer, bringing it home in its box , unpacking and checking cables, components and programs, looking forward with excitement to the extreme capabilities of new programs which will instantly organize schedules, write briefs, download bank accounts and create numbered exhibits on CDs. Rummy and his friends down in DC must feel like this. Type the special code and leave a hand print on the door of a hidden security elevator hidden under the flag hanging behind a desk in the Secretary's office. The elevator box descends down, down, and then jogs sideways for several yards, opening finally into a featureless gray hallway. You walk down a short hallway into a glass booth which overlooks a vast cavern carved under neath the Potomac. The giant cave is filled with shiny new things- green camouflage painted canons on giant rubber wheels, ranked behind them are larger canons with sharp caterpillar treads, Beside them, stacked rows of blunt cylinders. The are painted grey on each one is an orange symbol of three joined triangles. A whole cave full of shiny new tactical nuclear weapons, just waiting to be tried out...

2006-04-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

This moment of spring... riding a bicycle in the rain black shapes of the trees still visible behind a mist of green. Down in Riverside Park, the Daffodils are a sweet glade of yellow beneath the blossoming cherry trees along the Promenade. The Forsythia have held on wonderfully and cascade down a hill near 96^th street. Orange Quince bushes bloom along the pathway. Down by 80^th street there is a yellow Magnolia tree! The massive Magnolia tree on the grounds of St. Jone the Divine back by the greenhouse has been in full bloom for 10 days now. Its cousins on Broadway have just starting dropping satin petals. Even the Calary pears, which line side streets in the West 90's with white clouds have kept going longer than usual. In our garden, newly insured and open daily again, the first species Tulips have opened along with the early hybrids. Daffodils are putting on a show and the Crabapples are getting ready to pop. We planted frilly pansies out of the greenhouse a couple of weeks ago and they are strutting their stuff along the borders. Down our garden paths are lines of perfumed Hyacinths in shades of blue. The Lenten Rose, Hellebore, is still blooming in the Rock Garden joined by tiny blue Iris Reticulata. You can't escape it. Get off the subway at Park Place downtown, and City Hall park is a glare of spring blooms backed by soft green fuzzy trees. Driving up to Westchester along Route 100 I saw a mile long row of white Calary pears, translating a mundane suburban mall scape to the sublime.

2006-04-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

Two shibboleths of faith fall in one week--- Holy Week is here and I am on the subway coming back from court wondering where the sheet music for “The Palms” has been misplaced. All the tenor soloists who used to sing it have been driven off or died over the years, so now I have it all to myself. In the back of the train are three middle aged subway construction workers with hard hats holding silly little orange flags. They are in a loud conversation about truth coming out. My ears prick up, as I wonder if they are discussing the dark side of our national politics, when one of the other men says “But it wasn’t written down right away, they waited hundreds of years,” then another says “How do we know how old these books are?” Then they begin to talk about carbon dating. One of the men gets exasperated and says “Well they must have known about this before- what about the book of “Judas”?” I jump in and say “There is no book of Judas” and they all look at me. Incredibly these three men have been talking about the news article about the dead sea scrolls which say that Jesus had approached Judas and asked him to betray him. Jesus was manipulative! Good Friday was suicide by cross! Are things quite the same? Does Holy week have the same feel to it? Even soot covered track workers down in the depths are talking about it. Who is the martyr here, the man who died terribly and ascended into heaven for everlasting honor and worship? Or the man who did his bidding, committed suicide, and is reviled for all time? So there it is, something to turn over while sitting in a darkened church listening to the Passion. The other shibboleth that fell was found in an innocuous little booklet, found in a box of books from Swann we were clearing out for resale. The pamphlet was titled “The Jews and Their Lies” and was written by Dr. Martin Luther. Translated and published by a Methodist group in 1927, it had a dark picture of Dr. Luther on the inside title page. Looking at the picture and reading the preface, it slowly dawned upon me that the author was The Martin Luther, not someone named after him. That person in Germany we celebrate on reformation Sunday. The contents of this little booklet consist of some of the most crushing racist condemnations of the Jews I have ever read in English, worthy of the worst propaganda of the Third Reich. So, Judas is raised up and Luther struck down, all in one week.

2006-02-22T10:27:00.000-08:00

King George... Here in New York, I have always thought the Upper West Side looks similar to some of the older parts of Frankfort. Sometimes I walk down Broadway and imagine what it would be like if trucks were parked along the side streets and people herded out of their apartments into the trucks in the middle of the night. My guess is it would be done by troops, while the regular NYC Police stood by. We would be taken to Riverside park where the train comes out of the tunnel and herded into train cars. Or maybe they would put us on special express Number 1 trains to 242 street. Then we could be herded into Van Cortland Park to wait for transit to the camps in Greene County. When the facilities in Greene County filled up, they could truck us out Route 17 to the Otselic Valley, the nearest really isolated area to New York City. I lived in Heidelberg for roughly 9 years in the 1960's and 70's. I looked German, spoke German, and usually passed for Dutch or Danish. I worked at the Opera Company, and spent a lot of time around people who had worked there twenty or thirty years. They talked about the war and years preceding it a lot, the way my parents talked about the depression at the dinner table when I was a child. Just so, whenever we were all sitting around during a break or after a rehearsal, at dinner, or out for drinks, the subject would tend towards those confusing years when everything had been turned upside down. Unnoticed, I sat in the background listening to the stories. No one took the ideas of the Third Reich seriously at first. By the time they began to realize what was going on they were frightened for their lives. If the Government could take the assistant conductor in the middle of the night, the government could take any one of them away.. Whenever a Government gives itself the prerogative to set aside basic human rights at will, we are on a path that changes the relationship between the government and the people. What can be justified in one instance can be justified in all instances. If you can justify rounding up one group of people and placing them in concentration camps without an indictment, a list of specific charges, or an attorney, you can justify rounding up another unpopular group of individuals. If a government can set aside rules against torture for one person then it can basically select anyone out of the population for the same treatment on any “urgent” basis whatsoever. This is what my German friends realized too late, that to the Government, individuals are all the same, and once the rules re set aside for one individual, they have basically set aside the rules for us all.

2006-02-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

Snow Day...I just looked across the street from my window to check the snow and saw a neighbor returning home after a Sunday afternoon out. It’s about 4 pm and the man is dressed in a mid-length woolen coat with a woolen hat and is pulling a sled. I vaguely recognize him as a fairly stodgy middle aged man. He is covered with snow and looks happy. I start to wonder- I’ve never seen him with a female companion or children, so was he out sledding alone? The sled is one of the “American Flyer” type sleds with the little metal runners and a wooden slat at the top for steering. It’s been years since I’ve been sledding. The last time was in the Alps near Garmisch with my son. The hill was steep and snowy and we went over a teeth rattling bump at the end of the ride. I think about Riverside park and where a solitary adult could go to enjoy a quick sled run. Riverside park is more like Delaware Park in Buffalo than the Alps. In Riverside park there are potential sled runs between the upper walkways down to the main promenade just above the Soccer fields. This being New York, an adult could probably go sledding in Riverside park without raising any eyebrows. In Buffalo no one sledded after their 20th birthday, unless they were there with their kids. I stopped sledding when I became a “big girl”and took up Ice Skating.

2006-02-11T16:06:00.001-08:00

Forty years...one of my longest friendships slipped away unnoticed at the end of 2005- Tony Depauw, the week day manager of Gryphon Books , and lately, Westsider Books, passed away in his apartment at the end of November or early December. We're not sure exactly because he lay undiscovered for several weeks. Tony was the bald guy with a black fringe of hair and a mustache who was a fixture at the front desk as you came into the book store. He was there everyday Monday through Friday and spent his days pointing customers in the right direction for research, chatting with people about their book needs and interests, ringing up sales and packing up mail order purchases. If you ever visited the Gryphon, (now Westsider Books), the used books store on Broadway next to Staples at 81st street, if it was during the week you have met Tony and had a conversation. I had many conversations with Tony, cause he lived in my household for almost twenty years. He took a European out from the Army in Heidelberg about 1965, and got a job in the map shop at headquarters US Army Europe, USAREUR, on Roemer Strasse. His job was located in the Adjutant General's office where Richard, my first husband worked on contingency plans. Richard invited Tony over when my son was an infant in1967, when we were still living over the "Snookeloch" ( the Student Prince bar of "drink drink drink" fame) on Haspelgasse in Heidelberg. We were already fast friends when Neal Armstrong walked on the moon, and watched it together on a grainy little German TV. I was performing in German Opera and Special Services Army productions and got Tony involved in back stage work at the US Road Side Theater shows. After our move into a bigger apartment he came home with Richard every day, ate dinner with us and basically moved in. We played Scrabble or MilleBorne almost every night for five years. When Richard rented a garden from the City out on the Rhineplain Tony became one of my loyal garden slaves, coming out to the garden on his bike every day after work to help pull the witches grass, plant, and pick strawberries and later, cherries. We all had bicycles, and in 1970 we took off on a train for France with our bikes for a trip through Normandy. Tony was our map man, and he brought big old army ordnance maps for the trip. They showed altitudes, so he made sure we avoided all the hills, except at Avranches, which is basically located on the top of a hill. Tony also know all the history of the battles, so we got a blow by blow description of what happened at every rest stop location. Staying at pensions or small hotels we found along the way, we ate picnic lunches with food from the local Charcutierie. At night we had the best food of our lives. The next year, in 1971, we got a summer place in Altneudorf in the Odenwald with a friend who was a TV News producer for Southern Germany TV. Tony came in for a share and we went up every weekend. We took hikes, had big BBQs every Sunday, and planted a big garden with seeds I ordered from Stoke's through the APO. I had squash if every description and, of course, American corn. Tony worked on his compost heap. It was the most scientific compost heap ever built, and no one was permitted to touch it. Finally, Tony got a government job in Maryland at the Social Securities Administration, so we said good bye at the Frankfort Airport in 1975. A year later I came back and got my place in New York . Tony was the first person I visited, and he started coming up every other weekend to go to theater in New York. He moved up here permanently in 1978, taking up residence in our maid's room. After looking for a government job in the City, he followed his dream and got a job as Technical Director at Shelter West Theater on VanDam street. I was doing a lot of theater then, Barry and I were together, and Tristan got into Bronx Science. When he wasn't working, Tony took a welding course (which he talked about constantly) and got really interested in "how to do it" books. He also collected odd things from the street for the theater, and by 1988 we started looking for a new apartment for him. It was just around that time that he left Shelter West during a financial crisis, and got the job at Gryphon Books, where he stayed until this past November

2006-02-11T16:06:00.000-08:00

2006-01-28T09:39:00.000-08:00

Even in cronehood there is a special excitement about acquiring clothes. Yesterday, I finally bought the perfect denim jacket, and even on sale 65% off at Macy’s Brooklyn it was not really cheap- not Thrift shop cheap, just comparatively inexpensive. God knows where I’ll wear it- it’s no good for Court, and it’s too nice for turning compost at the garden. But, it goes perfectly with the long denim skirt from National Wholesale Liquidators, hides fat, and well, makes me look ...young. Other than professional clothing, which is necessary, because without a good suit and expensive briefcase no one takes you seriously, it’s a mystery why one continues hunt for that perfect summer top, another shirt dress, or a new evening skirt. A couple of years ago, I walked into the Housing Works thrift shop on East 23rd street and found a green-colored boiled wool cape with large silver double headed eagle buttons and a black crocheted border for 10 dollars. Made in Austria, it is the classic fingertip length style with the extra buttons along the border to secure hand access so the cape doesn’t flap in the wind on a bicycle. This very cape was all the rage 30 years ago when I was a starving singer-student and mother in Heidelberg. All the young women had just such a cape. I would enviously look at the other women at Market in their capes, their hands extended out of the buttoned hand holes and holding little lined market baskets for their groceries, or walking along the Neckar river, pushing prams in their boiled wool capes. I longed for one so badly in those days that I bought some cheap corduroy in Nuremburg on a train stopover to a rehearsal in Bayreuth and made a cape with a matching skirt to wear bike riding in Heidelberg. Now, here was the perfect Cape, thirty years too late, in a New York City thrift shop. If course I instantly bought it, and even occasionally wear it bike riding along the Hudson to the uptown Fairway for groceries. I often wish it could be sent back in time and space, addressed to Jackie Hansen-Bukowski, 6-8 Marz Strasse, Heidelberg 69.

2006-01-16T12:25:00.000-08:00

Community Gardens in Chicago and Philadelphia have group insurance policies- why can't New York? Maybe there really is something in this country that discriminates against New York City. Plutonium mines have insurance, rock climbing experiences have insurance- how come New York City Gardens can't get a quote? We don't know if its because New York is still viewed as a terrorist target, or that New York is viewed as more litigioius than the rest of the country. All the Community Gardens in New York City (about 650 gardens) lost their Community Garden group insurance policy last August 31, 2005, ( except for Restoration Foundation's 50 gardens which have their own seperate policy) We were not notified of the pending termination and many of us did not find out until sometime in October. Since then, despite our low "loss runs" none of us - the City, the Landtrusts, and Individual gardens - can get an insurance quote. This loss of insurance affects almost every Community Garden in New York City, and has resulted in a total closing down of public access. The City of New York Parks Dept -Green Thumb, is trying to find a "work around" [The City doesn't want to wholly self insure Gardens on City land because they don't have on site employees.] The Gardens located on the Department of Transportation property are also looking for a quote. One of the biggest gardens in the City is the Bissel Garden, on the Bronx/Westchester boarder on an unused Railroad right of way. A big land trust like Trust for Public Land with some 60 odd gardens and little independent Gardens like mine are together in the same boat scrambling for an insurance quote.As a Board member for our little 16,000 square foot Garden, (westsidecommunitygarden.org) I have been working with two insurance agents and they can't get anyone willing to insure us. The one serious consideration finally turned us down because their actuaries thought someone may get injured by herbicide/pesticides. This excuse came from Chubb- who specializes in large landtrusts that have rock climbing trails, canoes, lakes, and fast flowing rivers. I responded that we are an "all organic garden," and besides, gardens located in the middle of Manhattan don't really have big problems with hordes of locusts, (except twolegged ones). We certainly don't need to use herbicides cause it takes about two minutes to weed the tiny lawn in our amphitheater. If nothing happens by spring, we will have to cancel neighborhood school field trips and our regular school program, a summerful of Children's Shakespeare theater in the floral amphitheater, and a proposal for classical Viol concerts this spring/summer. For the first time in 30 years, our gates will remain closed during the annual Tulip Festival of 15,000 bulbs in bloom.

2005-09-30T18:12:00.000-07:00

Subway Prayer Rules... Usually there is a lull on the West side subways about 9:20 am. First you have to wait awhile for the number one train, and then there is another wait for the express at 96th. Thursday morning was typical- I had a Civil Court calendar call so I headed out about 9:15 with a medium briefcase. There was a three minute wait at the local stop, and when we pulled into the express station at 96th street a crowd was already waiting. I was at the back of the platform because I go up the stairs a Times Square to catch the Q train down to Canal and Lafayette. As we waited, people shifted around the platform trying to get where we thought the doors on the express would land when it pulled in. Every one moved away from the lady with the baby carriage, because baby carriages at rush hour jam up the area near the door. Finally, after about five minutes I sighted the express train- a warm light curving in the tunnel- a number three train. The three is the one to get, because it starts in Manhattan it isn’t crowded, and has lots of empty seats. The two comes from the far reaches of the Bronx, and is always jammed up. Anyway, the three pulls in and I lose the door lottery- I’m four feet away from the nearest door. As I crowd into the train, I spot an empty seat next to a young woman with her eyes closed, but a young guy moving quickly gets it right in front of me. I stand in the empty area in the middle of the car and reach up to hold onto the overhead rail as the train hits 72nd Street. As we head out again, the train speed picks up markedly, trying to make up time, and the train starts swaying, nothing bad but you have to think about keeping your balance. As I sway with the train, the young woman with the closed eyes opens them and curtly remarks “Ma’am please watch your brief case, it just went into my knee!” I turned and looked down at her, defensively saying “The train is swaying, I didn’t realize I touched you because I’m trying to keep my balance.” She answered sharply “Well you did” and snaps her eyes shut again. I moved the brief case to my wrist and grab one of the center bars to hold my self steady, disgruntled, mostly because she had a seat while I stood, and looked her more closley. She was fingering a set of beads in her lap and moving her mouth in prayer. At that moment I felt bad, feeling that maybe she had an injury and my briefcase brushing against her knee had activated the pain, and said “Look I’m sorry, if I hurt you.” but she impatiently shook her head and continued to pray. The train thundered on, and just before we reached 42nd street she opened her eyes and looking up at me unsmilingly, announced “ I wanted to finish my prayers before I accepted your apology. Now I accept it, because I realize you probably did not intend to have your brief case touch my knee.” Smiling, I told her to have a nice day. Then, obviously uninjured, she jumped up and got out the door ahead of me while I lumbered off the train. I can’t get this incident out of my mind. Did my briefcase hurt her? I’ve tried swinging it at my knee but barely feel it. But it must have been annoying to have a brief case brushing up against her, hitting her knee. But if she was religious, shouldn't she have used a gentler tone of voice? I’m a lot older than her, what about respecting her elders? Is it OK in her religion to be annoyed at an old person trying to keep their balance because her prayers were disturbed? Isn’t that against prayer rules? Why didn’t her God tell her to get up and give me her seat?

2005-09-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

I lived in Heidelberg for ten years 1965- 1975 in a 7 story apartment building without Central heating or hot water. We had a coal/woodstove in the kitchen, a "running" gas heater for water in the bathroom, and an oil heater in the living room. When we were low on funds I ran up onto the mountain to get wood for heating. My friend in Stuttgart lived in a 17 story building built after the war, and it also had no central heating. They had an oil stove in the living room, and when I wanted a bath there was a water heater in the bathroom with a scuttle of coal bricks beside it. We all dressed in heavy clothes around the house and slept in featherbeds. Normal everyday travel was by bicycle, and we rented a piece of roadside land from the City at 30 marks a year with the proviso that we would cultivate it. We reached it by bicycle and raised a lot of American vegetables- things like summer squash, acorn squash and eating corn, which they didn't have in Europe then, and American origin vegetables tomatoes, potatoes, and beans. Except for dairy and some meat, we basically ate off the garden between June and November. There was a big strawberry patch and a cherry tree already on site, so I made preserves, and sold fresh cherry pies to American army expats. Vacations were made on bicycles, and we took our bikes to the train station, got on the train with them, and rode around Paris or Normandy. My son had a kinderseat on the front of the bike. The summer I had a singing job Bayreuth I got a reduced fare train pass. Life in the City of Buffalo where I was born and grew up in the fifties wasn't that different then. We had a coal furnace in the basement, a big backyard garden, and I walked or rode my bike to grade school, high school, and college. When I was very small Buffalo still had a belt line with commutor trains and street cars, and my older brother would take the train downtown to work. Buffalo was killed even before the steel plant closings by the dismantling of the mass transit and huge eminent domain takings of entire middle class neighborhoods to build highways. I recall riding my bike through miles of a empty formerly German- American middle class neighborhoods destroyed for highways. I was an usher for the Philharmonic Junior Committee and my social life stopped when they stopped running buses after 10 pm. The developers also convinced Mayor Sedita to seize and dismantle downtown Buffalo - mostly east of Main street, and downtown became a huge vacant area. When I went to Mannheim Germany for voice lessons I stupidly asked my voice teacher if they had ripped down downtown Mannheim for a redevelo[pment project. He gave me a tart answer- roughly translated "No , your people redeveloped us- with bombs." Right now I live in Mannhattan, and still have a Garden- two gardens really, but use them mostly for herbs and flowers- I buy our vegetables in Chinatown after Court, or the GreenMarkets or the Koreans.. I got my first car as a gift when I was fifty, for trips outside the City. I am always amazed at the waste of good land I see in the suburbs. Our brother in law has a huge 12 room house in the suburbs of in Fairfax Va.,- they never use the deck, preferring the central AC, and the huge plot of land is manicured by Mexican day laborers There is, no vegetable Garden and you need a car to buy a quart of milk. But strangest of all- whether its in Va. or upstate, I never see anyone outside - people have huge houses on big plots of property and never sit outside or walk around. If my relatives are any indication, everyone is sitting around in the basement watching TV , or at the mall looking for more uninteresting stuff to buy. Why do they have to take up all that land if they are just going to stay inside all the time? In the Cities, people still walk around on the street, take buses and trains and ride bikes, and different types of people get to mingle and talk to each other.

2005-08-25T13:25:00.000-07:00

Plummania... It's the time for beach plums out at Canarsie in the Jamaica Bay wildlife refuge. I've been going there for about fifteen years to harvest the small reddish-blue astringent fruits. They taste like a cross between a cranberry and a plum. When the harvest is good, I have enough beach plum jelly to serve at Thanksgiving Dinner with the bird, alongside fresh cranberry-raspberry relish. The jelly is gone by Christmas, but if the harvest is good, we have beach plum shrub spiked with vodka and ginger ale. Beach Plum shrub is also good in seltzer or in sweet and sour sauces. Last year, 2004, was not a good year for beach plums. I didn't get out to Canarsie until Labor Day, and only found one lone beach plum. A friend of mine called to report that she had gone earlier and had found only a few plums. The natural cycle of beach plums alternates between good and sparse years. Every five years or so they have a prodigious year, yielding a huge crop of succulent plums - enough for jelly, shrub, preserves, and some to freeze. This year was average, but the fruits were very small, only about an inch wide, which is a pain because they have big plum pits. To get out to Canarsie Pier, take the L train from 14th street. Emerging from the tunnel in mid Brooklyn, the train travels over the highest point in the 'subway" system, soaring 200 feet at Broadway Junction over the "A" and "J" line stops. Looking out from the train, it is at eye level with a nearby seven story building. The next stop, Atlantic avenue, is equally high, and as you move on to the next stop at Sutter you can look down into junk yards where giant cranes lift up cars and trucks, placing them into crushing machines. The crushed up metal is taken on a conveyor belt over to the next yard and fed into a noisy shredding machine which spits out metal nibs onto a blackish pile. Descending, the train is at street level by the last stop. Busses meet the train inside the train stop, no fare necessary, to continue the trip. Although the buses travel under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE) directly to Canarsie pier, there is no bus stop directly at the pier. Instead, travelers must get off a block away at the bus stop and walk to the pier. Cross the BQE exit ramp( there is a signal), walk under the BQE and then cross the BQE enter ramp ( there is no signal- watch carefully) in order to get to the pier and wildlife area. Once you have navigated these dangers, you'll find a large pier and a picnic area. Forget them - unless you like large expanses of concrete and parked cars. The little restaurant is usually closed, but people like to gather there to promenade. Old guys hang out along the fringes of the pier fishing. I saw a kid last year catching crabs in a trap by the defunct restaurant, and a 40'ish guy with sideburns was putting on his own DJ radio type show by the restrooms, with strong interference from the younger set. To find beach plums, Face the pier, turn left, and walk on the bike/jogging path along the expressway. You'll see a line of wildly inappropriate Arbor Vitae ( a columnar evergreen which prefers slightly acid soil) ) which is turning brown. Walk to the end of the line of dying evergreens and then lurch into the brush. The beach plums are on small shrub like trees or bushes with oval leaves. Look carefully for the small purple plums, they are overgrown this year with vines (maybe I'll take a trip out there next spring for some vine removal) After you spot a few, your eyes learn what to look for, and it gets easier to spot them. I quickly picked a pail full and then, since it was low tide, wandered out on the beach to enjoy the sky and watch the birds. A family was quietly fishing nearby, hip deep in the water, dressed in their bathing suits Working my way back up through the brush onto the pathway, I navigated the peril of the double BQE ramps to the bus stop. Getting on the bus, the fare box registered "transfer" on my Metro card. A cool one fare round trip between Manhattan and Canarsie Pier if you clock back onto the bus within 2 hours of your start time.

2005-08-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

Swimming in New York...It was 95 in the shade when I got out of court today, so I rushed out to Far Rockaway for a swim. Ernie, who works mostly weekends as a church organist, joined me on the long air conditioned ride to the beach. When we got there it was blisteringly hot, with only the slightest breeze coming from offshore to promise relief. We spread our blanket ( actually my orange Halloween tablecloth) on a promising stretch between two jetties near the water where the breeze was strong. The water was green and glaucous with bits of seaweed churning in the waves like torn up bits of salad. The surf was pretty high with some waves over my head and it was cool and exciting tumbling in the waves. You couldn't go past waist deep to swim because the lifeguards were double teamed on the whistles, herding the people into a little patch of water directly in front of their chair. There have been a couple of unnecessary drownings in the papers this summer so they are super vigilant, guarding their reputations. Rockaway is like New York's secret beach. It's so big that it is never very crowded, and you can get there by train. Change for the shuttle at Beachchannel, and the subway lurches right on a concrete subway viaduct when it reaches Rockaway. After a few stops, it comes to the end of the line at ground level. The exit is in an old shopping district, and a couple of short blocks away is the beach, which spreads out for miles on either side. It's a world class beach at the end of the "A" line. The place I really want to swim is in the Hudson. Most evenings I take a bike ride down into Riverside park and ride along Cherry Walk, the path between 98th street and 125th streets, by the water. The Parks Department has put giant rip-rap along the water, and some of the large pieces of rock jut right out into the water. On hot evenings it would be nice to climb down and sit on one of those rocks - to take off my sandals and dangle my feet in the river, and then, as the sun sets, slide down into the water for a swim.

2005-06-30T14:52:00.000-07:00

Speer's Toothpick.. Today the paper of record carried a couple of stories about the new design for the "Freedom Tower" in downtown Manhattan. The minute people start talking about building monuments to freedom I get nervous. Generally, governments that build monuments to abstract concepts, like freedom, are actively engaged in taking it away from us and giving us the freedom tower as a tombstone.Appropriately, the proposed monument looks like something from the drawing board of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect. The best monument to freedom in this country is the law and impartial administration of justice and the rights it preserves and protects. Rights that this administration feels less and less compelled to uphold, and laws that it feels are outdated impediments to its imperial power. How can there be justice without a government that is bound by law? How ca n there be freedom without justice? Meanwhile, let's name that building downtown something else. How about WTC2?

U.S.C. TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 47 § 1001.
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, WHOEVER, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by ANY trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or USES any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
(b) Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party's counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding.
(c) With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to—
(1) administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or
(2) any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate.

2005-06-29T19:46:00.000-07:00

Taking up space. The building next door to our garden needs to repoint their brickwork and wants to close one our 90th Street Garden gate and a quarter of the Public area 8 am-4 pm weekdays for about three weeks during the work. We found out about the scope of the project a scant three weeks before the beginning of our annual Tulip show. A large part of the Tulip display would have been in the closed off area. After a meeting at the Garden, the building agreed not to begin the project until later. So now we're negotiating for August dates and we would like them to contribute a sum of money to pay for new plants plus an amount to reimburse us for the loss of use of a quarter of our Public area Monday through Friday during the work. The building points out that if we were just another building they would not be expected to put up any money for stepping on our roof top, and any damage would be paid out of their insurance. They are right, but we are not a roof top. We are a Garden which can't wait several months for insurance to pay for lost plants and trees and shrubs. At this point, they have pretty much agreed to a small sum to replace lost plantings. It's the lost use of public space that is giving us problems. It's a hard concept. We are open daily, and the 90th Street gate and area to be closed during the work is the most accessible for the handicapped. Many disabled people come to the Garden every day, many pushed in wheelchairs or helped along by their Aides. They will not go around the block to the 89th Street Gate, they will just go someplace else, and after being turned away a couple of times many will stop coming to the Garden for this season. So what is the value of that? I'm having a hard time convincing the building that public access and public use of the space has value. I can point out that we will lose donations, but even that is hard to quantify. Our Corporate purpose, covenants running with the deed, and agreements with the City of New York all mandate that two thirds of the Garden be open to the public daily except during icy conditions. So what is the loss of a quarter of our Public Space worth? What is the worth to the 50 or so people who cannot walk around the block to a more inaccessible Gate, and how do we make the loss up to them? What is the value of the loss of pass-through egress to the hundreds of people that walk through the Garden daily on their way to work, or as a pleasant short cut while running errands? What is the value of open space to the public in a City anyway?

2005-06-18T16:15:00.000-07:00

It takes a village to support a Garden... Well I've been distracted for the past month with our annual Garden benefit. The Garden needs about $30,000 a year to operate and maintain. We only charge $15 yearly dues, and $25 for members with vegetable plots, so you can see there is a constant fundraising component built into our continued existence. What does the money go for? Well there's utilities... right now Con Ed is charging us over 200 a month to light four lights. Then there's the tools, Newsletter costs, insurance, soil amendments, greenhouse supplies, plants and perennials that we buy, our annual picnics, the Arts Festival, and of course the costs of raising money. Finally, there is maintenance. Plumbing ( always a headache) brickwork at our gates, iron work on our railings and fences, sidewalk patching, doors to the two toolsheds, locks, keys, etc.etc.etc. We're open daily to the public so everything has to be maintained top notch. No one in the organization gets paid, but we have to pay our plumbers, ironworkers, and other craft people. Anyway, we raise money from grants- (too many to list here) booksales, neighborhood supporters and the annual benefit. It helps to be in an affluent neighborhood on the upper west side of Manhattan with good restauraunts nearby that donate food. Our members also make fabulous dishes- stuffed pork loin, shrimp appetizers with endive, spiral cut ham with plumsauce, asparagus with proscuitto, cakes and cookies. About 25 Garden members worked on the benefit this year- everything from setting lanterns the morning of the event, and working the food prep tables to designing the invitations in February. and inviting local officials and celebrities to be a part of our "Benefit Committee and Supporters" in January. Any way it's over, the garden is beautiful- and we can look forward now to our Shakespeare in the Garden Performances in July and August. Check out the website, westsidecommunitygarden.org for pictures of the Garden, membership forms and the latest schedule and coverage of events, and thanks to everyone who worked on this excellent Midsummer Revel.

2005-05-23T17:11:00.000-07:00

Lucky tree...Last week we noticed ominous lines of pencil sized holes in the bark of a large poplar on the southern border of our Garden on 89th Street. The tree was already large when the West Side Community Garden was established in 1975, and survived the various building cycles which resulted in a neighboring townhouse development and the landscaping of our permanent Garden site. The Poplar tree was almost a goner when lightning struck it in August 1988. It survived, and now bears a long pale vertical scar along the north side of its trunk, as a reminder of the summer storm. Tom Thies, head of our Flower and Greenhouse regiments, noticed the holes first and alerted me during a walkthrough last Wednesday with some of our funders and supporters. Heavy hearted, I called 311 after the visitors left, and asked for the Asian Longhorn Beetle hotline. The young man manning the line is part of the Parks Department, and we went over the specifics of location and types of nearby trees. The beetles not only enjoy Poplar, they also would like our Birch trees, Plum and Crab Apple trees. I didn't think to ask him about the airy Sappora trees that shade the table or the rare Tibetan Cedars. While I was on the line I also checked the other Poplar tree in the property, located on the border of the vegetable garden and the 90th Street playground.. That tree is very large and grand and probably the largest tree below 110th outside of Central and Riverside Parks. It has no holes. Going back to the 89th Street Poplar, the hotline guy asked me to take a pencil or pen and see if it fit into the holes, and to check their depth. The tree looked healthy and our garden Mockingbird twittered in the branches as I approached. The holes were about a third of an inch deep. There was no sawdust about. The hotline mentioned there is also a possibility the holes are from birds, and promised to send an inspection crew out to look things over as soon as possible. This morning I heard again from Tom, who had contacted our regular tree pruning guys to come and take a look. They tell us it is highly likely that the holes were drilled by Yellow Sapsucker birds dropping by for a snack on their way north this spring. Keep your fingers crossed... lucky tree.

2005-05-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

Memories of Buffalo... The recent stories about the Buffalo Fireman who regained his memory , and the proposed sainthood of Father Baker brought back memories of second grade back at PS 68 on Westminster Avenue in Buffalo. The ultimate threat from a teacher - even in public school- was " if you're not good we'll send you to Father Bakers." Father Bakers was widely known in Buffalo children's culture as a correctional orphanage for bad boys. The threat had teeth, because we all knew that parents who had too much to handle could make arrangements to ship an errant son off to Father Bakers. Big boys in the neighborhood working on their cars in the back yard would regale us with tales of deprivation and whippings at Father Bakers. Once a year the Buffalo Courier Express featured a story about the yearly Christmas party at the orphanage, with pictures of thin little tykes getting toys, and the older boys getting socks. It was said the boys slept in dormitories, and wore hand me downs. We'd make fun of kids in the playground by saying they got their clothes from Father Bakers. Now that time has padded some distance on the Father Baker story - and a symbol of terror from my childhood is being exalted. What else is weird is seeing the "Our Lady of Victory Basilica " getting press. Our Lady of Victory Basilica is a huge Italianate over- the- top structure on the border between Buffalo and Lackawanna. Originally built in white marble, pollution from the steel plants and factories turned it bright yellow. The whole area was engulfed in a horrible stink from sulfide gas. The nearby Buffalo river was so polluted that it caught on fire. The surrounding Lackawanna and South Buffalo neighborhoods consisted of workers hovels - A cheap two story wood frame house built in the twenties would have a tunnel of two or three tiny shack like houses built on the back of each other, extending into the back yard and filling the entire lot. The area was so low class that nice people ignored the Basilica as a sort of a Folly. My father would take the route past it on the way to the beach when the lake road was blocked with traffic, and occasionally we would visit the South Park Conservatory and Gardens located across the street. When the steel plants and factories went out of business, the smell abated and people rediscovered the Basilica on Buffalo's south side as a pilgrimage destination. The trip is actually enjoyable, and you can get world class "Beef on Weck" while you're there.

2005-04-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

Kruschev arrests bicyclist... page 2 of Metro section of the paper of record carried a shocking picture of assistant Chief of Police Smolka forcibly arresting a bicyclist who was walking while straddling her bike at a Critical Mass gathering. To us cold war veterans, Chief Smolka bears an astonishing resemblance to Kruschev, leader of the evil empire back in the sixties. Naturally, this picture and the accompanying story will further inspire car drivers in their ongoing campaign of rudeness towards bicycle riders. Today I saw a huge SUV frustrated in a left turn onto Broadway from 110th Street honking and inching forward towards a man crossing the street with his little girl with the light. Police parked on the opposite corner did nothing- the SUV hadn't actually run anyone over yet. As soon as the man and his little girl walked far enough toward the curb to provide room for the SUV to get through, the driver surged ahead with a little burst of annoyed speed, only to wait for the signal at 109th street. I am so sick of drivers in the City who threaten us daily. Rushing us out of crosswalks so they can make turns, honking at lights the minute the light turns so they can race ahead, tunneling down Amsterdam Avenue at breakneck speeds to catch the lights any unlucky pedestrians crossing at the end of the light, and honking while they pass within inches of bicyclists trying to negotiate passage around cars double parked in the bike lanes. Let's reassign Chief Smolka to traffic cop duty. Maybe then he'll see who the real enemy is.

2005-04-28T18:38:00.000-07:00

Methane Hydrate and global warming... Update on the apocalypse theme. I just read a book that takes place at and around the South Pole. It has a somewhat fantastic, overly complicated plot, but it gives the reader a picture of what it must be like to live and work in that region. One of the plot lines turns around a substance called Methane Hydrate, a mineral sometimes found under the glaciers at the South Pole. Interested, I googled the mineral just to see how much the book exaggerated climate risks posed by release of methane into the atmosphere from glacier melt. The 2005 information turned up was more alarming than the plot of the potboiler-written in 1999. Methane Hydrate is a crystalline substance composed of methane and water crystallized under pressure and cold. It's found at the presurrized cold at the bottom of oceans and glaciers, including the east coast continental shelf, and is a component of permafrost found in Canada, Russia, Alaska, China, and Antarctica. There's a lot of methane in the environment locked up in crystal form. When it "melts," one liter of Methane Hydrate forms 20 liters of methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than Carbon Dioxide. Several scientific web sites discussed the mass extinctions at the end of the Permian Age as a result of a global warming caused by sublimation of methane hydrate into large quantities of methane into the atmosphere. Other web sites discuss how the permafrost in northern climes is rising in temperature, leading to instability and release of Methane. Another web site discusses how drilling for oil in the far northern areas may have an unsettling effect on Methane Hydrate, and could release methane. [If we could figure out a safe way to mine it, it would be the perfect fuel.] At least one website talks about release of methane hydrate as a destabilizer of the ocean floor on the coastal shelf, which could lead to an east coast Tsunami. At least one large tidal wave occurred in Norway and Greenland from a gas release. The theory is that once we warm up to a certain level, methane hydrate begins sublimating into methane, which rapidly escalates global warming, unlocking more and more methane and creating radical fast climate changes. Scientists from the Pentagon warned the Shrub about this possibility, but secure in his belief system that Jesus wouldn't want that to happen, the warning was shrugged off. Now I'm wondering why people who swallow the Left Behind fairy tale totally reject the idea that global warming may affect our civilization in some radical way because it is based on scientific extrapolations. If, as the ocean temperature levels and perma frost summer temperature levels indicate, there is a global warming effect taking place, why would a prudent world leader not take all possible steps to avoid a possible catastrophy? And why are people so prepared to accept extrapolations about the end of the world taken from the book of Revelations, but unwilling to accept in the tiniest way the possibility that continuing in our present course of fossil fuel usage could endanger civilization?
Some websites with methane hydrate information:

http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-sheets/gas-hydrates/title.html
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Durham.html
http://healthandenergy.com/methane_hydrate.htm
http://www7430.nrlssc.navy.mil/7432/hydrates/index.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1215-24.htm

2005-04-28T14:59:00.000-07:00

Tulips make you feel good. Last November, about 50 people converged on the West Side Community Garden the week end before Thanksgiving to plant Tulips. We roasted hamburgers on the last of summer's charcoal, served roast turkey and chili out in the cold air for the workers. Money for the 8,000 bulbs came from the Green Acre Foundation, and neighborhood contributions. Species Tulips, Darwin Tulips, early Tulips, late Tulips, fragrant Tulips, Peony flowered Tulips, Lily flowered Tulips, Parrot Tulips, green Tulips, striped Tulips, pink and yellow Tulips, red Tulips, as well as some Bluebells, Crocuses, Daffidils, and Hyacinths. They are all in bloom right now. You can see them on our website- westsidecommunitygarden.org, but you should go to West 89th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues for the full effect. People go in there and wander around with their mouths open, stunned at the sight of so many different Tulips. Children grow quiet and walk the paths smiling. People set their newspapers down in their laps and just sit looking. Lots of people come with their cameras, taking pictures of the Tulips, then their companions and the Tulips, and then pictures of themselves in front of the Tulips. No one picks the Tulips- even the flowers in the tree pits remain unmolested. I went there yesterday after a hellish morning in court where my adversary fluently lied to get his motion granted and found myself leaving with a stupid grin on my face. This happens every year, and every year the experience is slightly different but the same. The garden is open daily from 9-ish to dusk.

2005-04-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

Left Behind club... I recently got my first e-mail bulletin from the Left Behind club. After wondering how they knew I had acquired a copy of the first "Left Behind" book ( I got one as a forced Christmas present), I clicked on the free button for five of the ten signs that we are living in the end of days. But, the free button took me to a LB Club web site with only one puny sign of the end days- the death of Arafat. Nothing about the Jews being back in Israel, unrest in Babylon, or the Pope's death. The free offer for the other four signs required my email and account numbers. If I elect to join the LB club, I get all ten signs, and email bulletins updating me on our progress towards world's end. I've always been a sucker for apocalypse stories and alternate universes since reading A. Merritt's "Dwellers in the Mirage" at the Kensington branch of the Buffalo Public Library as a kid. The "Left Behind" book extends the predictions in the biblical book of Revelations, exploring similar ground as the "Omen" movies. But unlike "Omen" movies and Merritt's 1930's pulp fiction novels, LB purports to be a fictionalized version of true predictions contained in Revelations that are actually going to happen. Much like the Omen, the LB novelist has taken material from Revelations and liberally translated it into the humdrum world of malls, airplanes and highways, extending the predictions to modern day people caught in the intricacies of an end war between good and evil and the second coming. The LB club catches the wind, and invites us all to join the club, follow the score card, and breathlessly apply the implications of end war to our own lives. A year or so ago, the paper of record carried an account from a survivor who was on the very floor where the second plane hit the south tower. He recalled seeing the terrorists through the window in their final moments as they drove into his office, and they were smiling.

2005-03-08T09:50:00.000-08:00

$40,000 a year to live in a nursing home facility. That's what the financial report on Monday Morning's NPR morning news said. The poor can't pay this and their Social Security can't cover it so the Government pays the facility the difference. Social Security is charactorized as the most successful retirement plan in history, but I don't know anyone who can live on Social Security. I have a relative who worked for many years at fairly good jobs paying $50,000 a year. She's getting a little over a thousand a month now. There is no way she can live on that., and due to a catastrophic hospitalization she was stripped of her savings. There are a lot of people like her- they are getting social security, they have little in the way of savings and they can' pay rent and buy food on their social security. The minute they get dragged into court and evicted the solution is to get them into a "home" where it costs $40,000 a year to keep them- but the government won't come up with the extra $300 monthly to keep them in their own apartment. Visiting a friend in a facility I saw what she gets to eat- canned green beans, a cup of clear orange gelatine, a white roll and a pat of margerine, some kind of creamed chicken thing on a half cup of white rice...What normal person would want that to look forward to for the rest of their life? There was also a salad- a leaf of iceberg lettuce with a hard slice of tomato with a dab of orange salad dressing. Most people would be much happier in their own homes with a little extra money to get their own food. I guarantee you they won't be eating any half cups of orange gelatine and white iceberg lettuce. Isn't it cheaper to goive someone an extra $500 a month so they can pay rent and eat than to pay a nursing home $3500 a month to keep them in a place where they must share a room, give up most of their own possessions, and eat institutional food for the rest of their life?

2005-03-07T14:39:00.000-08:00

"Enjoy your day"... This little saying has migrated from someplace in the islands to New York City. The first time I heard it was from a client from Jamaica. We'd get together to talk, and at the end of the appointment, as we parted, he'd give me a wide smile and say "Enjoy your day." I next heard it from a woman at some City Agency after we completed some complicated transaction- she gave me the same dazzling smile as we parted and said "Enjoy your day." Now I'm starting to hear it around the neighborhood- the laundromat, in the copy shop, here and there. I don't know what island it come from, but I want to go there. It carries much more good will than "Good Day," which is too curt, or "Good bye " "Good Afternoon,"" Good Evening" "Chow", and all the other parting statements. "Enjoy your day " is like a reminder of what life is all about- we are here to enjoy time, to savor the hours, to take time for a walk in the park, to stop on the way home to pick up shrimp, to sit and read a book, or look at art.

2005-02-20T15:53:00.000-08:00

Social Security Debate... What we really need in this country is a good poor person lobby. One composed of independent poor and disabled persons who can talk about what their life is really like, and how they are mangled by services set up to help them How come in all the Social Security talk I haven't heard one word about Social Security Disability, Medicaid, Medicare, and Nursing Homes? It is a true fact that if you are poor, disabled, and over 50, the present system shoves you into a nursing home the minute your situation becomes destabilized with a medical problem or housing issues. Rather than give a person on disability an increase so they can pay their rent or find an apartment, and an Aide to come in to assist them, they are summarily carted off to a "Facility." The Facility gives them a nice bed in a little shared room where they can't have their own things, and it's usually in a place far from home where their old friends can't easily visit. The facility takes over their disability payments, and since it isn't enough to pay for all the "services" the person is getting, they turn to the government for additional money. Facilities must have good lobbyists, because they seem to get the laws passed to keep the money flowing. I once had a client, a 94 year old man who went to Tompkins Square park every day to socialize with his old friends in the neighborhood. They would sit on the park benches together speaking Polish, remembering the old country, and go to the Odessa coffeshop for dinner. Then he had a minor stroke and was taken to the hospital. Next thing we knew, he was moved out to Queens, way-out past the subway lines, and shoved into a facility. There was a lawsuit in progress about their club house on 8th Street, so I drove one of his friends out to see him and to confer about the lawsuit. The facility was a big place on a bare field, built of yellow brick, with windows that didn't open, and wide corridors paved with cold blue linoleum tiles. We found him in the second floor lounge and he looked miserable. He felt like he was in jail. No park, no friends, no polish coffee shop every day for dinner. They wouldn't let him come home to his apartment where he had lived for 40 years because it didn't have a shower. Fortunately, he had a room mate taking care of the rent. So one of the young club members got together the room mate and the landlord, and together they put an accessible shower in so he could come home.

2005-02-17T15:04:00.000-08:00

February Orange... On my way home from church on Sunday I biked up Central Park West about 1 pm. The Park walkways, the sidewalks, and the street were jammed with folks that turned out to see "The Gates" draped over 23 miles of Central Park's walks. Over on Columbus Avenue the restaurants were filled with out of town brunchers. The side streets were packed with their out of state SUVs and the bike paths blocked with double parkers. I heard on NPR that over a million people visited the Park on Sunday- some kind of a record in February, even for a sunny Sunday. I like The Gates better in yesterday afternoon's misty weather, or in the twilight at sunset. They lend themselves to a gray day, adding a secret layer of not too bright orange fluttering throughout Central Park's muted winter paths. In the bright Sunday at high noon, they looked traffic cone orange, too bright, too effusive against the digitally accessorized crowds, too loud, too crude, too New York.

2005-01-10T16:57:00.000-08:00

NY trash... I saw one of my "positive" clients from the infamous Hotel Malibu on the street yesterday selling chatchkes and tapes in front of the Chase Bank. His rent is paid by the City... $2490 a month for a 9 X 6 room without its own bathroom or kitchen. They throw in a small refrigerator for his medication. Meanwhile, he gets a small amount of walking around money for food and everything else. I was looking at all this stuff laid down by him and the other two venders. Little carved statues and ceramic ware, clay pots, pewter ware, pictures and picture frames, ornate woven straw place mats, baby clothing, strange kitchen implements and pots, small boxes with drawers, tapes, and used books. The gleanings from New York City trash. I flashed on this idea - nothing sells on the street for more than $5.00 here, but most of this stuff would fetch better prices on ebay, and would not be confiscated by the New York City Police Department. What we need is a homeless ebay network to redistribute the gleanings from New York City trash to the rest of the country! Homeless guys with wifi laptops could skim off the good stuff out of the trash and go on line at Bryant Park, or one of the other free access sites in the city, and sell their stuff on the web for better money than they could get on the street. Paypal would deposit the money directly into their bank account. Although most people don't like to admit it many of the homeless, or marginally housed persons like my clients, are not any crazier than the rest of the population- they are just people who fell out their support network of job , friends and apartment. Some of them have substance abuse problems, but a lot of employed people with jobs have the same type of problem, but have never had the bad luck of getting sick for a while, losing in housing court, or being arrested. Many of the housed people I know are just about three paychecks away from homelessness. Give them a serious illness, or even a flu that goes on for a couple of months, and they could be homeless.

2004-12-15T16:06:00.000-08:00

Looking for work... Ever since 9/11, paying clients are more scarce. Of course, I could always fall back on my career as a gifted opera singer, or invest in a sure fire pyramid scheme. Or... I could find a regular job with a paycheck doing what I do anyway - representing people in a jam. So today I went for my first job interview in about 10 years. It's a not-for-profit type place, the kind that I applied to massively after getting out of law school and passing the bar. They are very active in a lot of interesting projects and missions, and it seems like the type of place I could do something interesting and good. I get there and am doing OK, not too overbearing ( I hope), and then the interviewer, a girl from Buffalo who is younger than my son, asks me the trick question "where do you expect to be in five years, what are your long term goals?" Now, when you get to be a certain age, this is the type of question that tends to throw you. Should I say the truth? "I'll probably be dead, or marginalized as an old person", or should I invent some lofty goal on the spot- "My long term goal is to be elevated to the Supreme Court", or "I expect to be working on a book while serving time for civil disobedience." Once you reach a certain age, long term goals and five year plans become superfluous. They have their place when you are young, to sort of whip up your enthusiasm and get you off the couch, but as life continues, experience teaches that you should do as much as you can right now and do it as well as possible, because this may be as good as it gets. I'm not good at this, I stammered something about retirement and working as long as possible and then helpfully added, "but I may be dead."

2004-11-04T13:56:00.000-08:00

Values in the Shrubbery...People coming out of the voting booths in the "heartland" gave "personal values" as their biggest reason for voting in the shrub. What are these personal values the heartland voted for? Definition of marriage? How is gay marriage threatening to straight people? No one is forcing people into same sex marriages. A few years ago, the best Mother in Barry's class was the gay transvestite uncle. Permitting women a choice? Why are unborn unconscious lumps of cells more important to us than living breathing children living in poverty? Where are the heartland's moral values when we kill 100,000 of our fellow human beings as they sleep, eat, or go about their daily business over in Iraq? Many more people died over there from our war than would have died under Sadam. Then there's our young people over there fighting a useless war. Isn't their life worth more than an unconscious clump of cells? And, how come these people don't come out against the death penalty? People are sitting on death row who were represented by a real estate attorney, or an attorney who fell asleep during their trial. Where are their personal values then? And. how about the 50% of all children in our country who live in poverty? How about those children from families without health care who are living in poverty even though both parents are working? How come those living children don't rate the same priority enjoyed by the unborn? Although I go to Church, attend retreats once a year, and serve as a trustee, I have no illusions that my actions are endorsed by God. I don't even know if there is a God. As an attorney living in New York City I do not have any "personal" values. Here, we just labor away in the darkness, trying to love our neighbor and do good works.

2004-10-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

It's better to fight terrorism in Iraq... than over here. The shrub makes this statement, or some varient of it in almost every day . Then he pauses and smirks, looking about proudly as the shrubbites cheer. I don't believe the war over there is keeping us safer over here, but aside from that heresy, t here is something immoral about cheering the idea that innocent Iraqis are dieing to spare us over here in the USA. Yes, when we see road side bombings over there, we are glad they are not right on Broadway. Push come to shove, I would rather that some lady in Iraq die in a terrorist attack than me. But , is it moral to take comfort in the misfortune of the Iraqis, so we do not suffer over here? Was part of the reason the war was mismanaged was to create a magnet for terrorists so they wouldn't bother to come over here? That's a radical new theory. Up til now. I thought we were trying to control the largest group of oil fields in the mideast, and/or find WMD, and/or stop the development of WMD, and/or punish and remove Saddam because he was an evil man who may have been implicated in 9/11, and to bring God's gift of democracy to the Iraqi people. I didn't realize we had another role for them- that through their death we may live. Sounds familiar somehow.

2004-10-17T17:44:00.000-07:00

Black Dirt Country...I don't think most people are aware that New York state has its very own gourmet onion country. About 65 miles away, up around Pine Island, New York in Orange County is an area called "black dirt country" where the best onions in New York come from. It's unmistakable when you are out driving because it is a large flat area of black dirt, with huge onion farms to the horizon. It's the lakebed left by a glacier lake about 10,000 years ago. The town of Pine Island is literally an island in the middle of the old prehistoric lake. Apparently, leaves and vegetation dropped into the lake forming the thick layer of black muck. Clients of mine have a house on high ( normal) ground nearby and they told me they are forbidden to take any of dirt from the lakebed and that the black dirt land may only be used for farming. The nearest big town in Middletown- which is not in black dirt country. Yesterday we ended up at an Orchard store- Soon's Orchard off Route 6 near blackdirt country, where I bought 10 pounds of grade AA black dirt country onions for $2.59. Soon's is memorable for its unlimited samples of cider donuts. They also had cheap winter squashes, pumpkins fresh vegetables and about 15 varieties of Apples. Winesap, Northern Spy, Macouns, RedCoats, and all the more common varieites like MacIntosh, Empire and Cortlands. There are also big bags of "Utility Apples" by variety, and I got a bag of Utility Redcoats for cooking. They looked great, just as good as the other apples, very large, and make nice apple sauce. In spite of very dank weather, the leaves were lovely going from the Palisades parkway over Route 6 and west on Roiute 17 and 6. They will be gone very soon- perhaps mostly by next week end if it's windy with rain this week. It's almost Halloween, and 2004 is almost over.

2004-10-14T11:12:00.000-07:00

Free Association, after the Last Debate... What is it that people like about the Shrub? Everyone says he is such a likable guy. I just can't stand him, he reminds me of all the obnoxious frat boys I ever knew. Do they like Shrub's take on foreign policy? He believes that freedom is a gift by the creator to all peoples. Does anyone really believe we went to war to spread freedom? Does anyone really believe that more Iraqis would have died if we left Saddam in place? The Shrub wants us to believe we are doing God's will by warring to bring freedom. What part of the teachings of Shrub's Messiah inspired this war? Isn't it more believable that we went to war in Iraq because they have the biggest known and unknown unexploited oil reserves? I didn't hear any follow up at the debate about the disappearance of machinery and buildings and materials in Iraq which could be used to manufacture WMD. The UN inspectors and satellite photos show the disappearance of entire buildings after the war and stuff from Iraq is being sold on the black market in Holland. Kerry wants to deal with terrorism like an international crime. Which it is, only on a much more serious scale. But doesn't it seem more sensible to go after it with detectives, spies and black ops than to go into neighborhoods which may harbor terrorists with tanks and blast away? Think about it. How effective would it be if we went after organized crime by going into the lower east side and blowing up the buildings where suspected criminals hung out? Last night Shrub was pushing the medical savings account for health care . Apparently, this tax free savings account is combined with a health insurance policy with a very high deductible. So if you get the flu and call the Doctor you pay for that out of your health savings account. But if you need dialysis, the insurance kicks in. For someone like me, who rarely gets sick ( knock on wood) it sounds OK. But what if you've got a lot of little cheap health care expenses that are not covered. And if you need dialysis, will you have to pay the high deductible every time you go? I can see those health accounts won't go very far once you get a chronic condition needing constant care. And no one said why it's still OK for the VA to get medicine from Canada, now that the Shrub has officially classed it as a third world country. There were no real answers on how other things are going to get paid for. Kerry is going to raise taxes on the people earning over $200,000 yearly, and we're supposed to go to a web site and look at his plan. The Shrub, after telling us that Rubin looked at Kerry's plan said it won't work, just wants us to go to his web site. No thanks, I'll just read Krugman and the financial pages of the Times. Also, something about Shrub's demeanor seemed to indicate that Social Security may turn out to be a little bit negotiable. No one talked about the latest findings on the environment, and information about accelerated oceanic warming and heightened storm cycles. Years from now, people will look back on these debates as historic records. I wonder if they will find them willful, or shortsighted for their failure to deal with the most important issues that affected the future. Well, in the words of the Shrub, as reported by Bob Woodward, "we'll all be dead"

2004-10-13T17:29:00.000-07:00

Free Association, before the Last Debate... Will this be the last debate of the free world?? Will this mark the victory of the right wing and the establish a one party system firmly in control of our country, and by extension of the rest of the world?? What will happen to the Supremes? How about a woman's choice? Health care insurance for the uncovered? Will a large proportion of people continue to get their health care from the most expensive source- the emergency room? Will poor children get a better education? Will we continue spending $50,000 a year to jail young black men instead of funding education for them before they get to jail? Will the deficit really get as big as the Dems predict? What about the trade deficit? Will Iraq break the bank or will the winner cut and run? What happened to all the unguarded ordnance in Iraq? What happened to their equipment to manufacture WMD? Who stole it? Will we still be at war someplace 4 year from now? Will there be a nuclear strike somewhere soon? How will it affect the environment? Is it too late for global warming? Will the ocean temperatures continue to rise, fueling ever more hurricanes? Will Florida continue to be habitable? Will there finally be a north west passage, from Alaska to Greenland, and a north east passage from Alaska to Europe? Will we find oil under the Arctic sea? Will the price of Oil hit $100 a barrel? Will there be laws about driving to conserve fuel in my lifetime? Will food transport make the price of food go up? Should we be burying our good local farmland under subdivisions? Is Canada the land of tomorrow?

2004-10-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

Cell phonage...Saturday I went by the Garden on West 89th Street and our craft ladies were out in front of the Garden gate selling quilts, knitted and crocheted items. They had been rained out at our September Arts and Crafts Festival, and we had given them this past week end as a rain date. I asked, "How are things going? " Eleanor, the craft lady who crochets's unusual hats sniffed, "OK , lots of people coming along, but most of them are on cell phones. They don't see us, they don't see anything, they just go along in their own little bubble. It wasn't like this last year" She's right, the market penetration of cell phone has finally made them ubiquitous, and a necessary object. Down in court a few weeks ago, a Judge on the bench demanded that I call my client right then and there to check on a date for a conference with the parties. In the hallways of justice, on Centre Street, the din of haggling has been heightened with the buzz of cell phones ringing ( lawyers eschew fancy ringtones) and shouting over poor connections. Along Fifth avenue, well dressed people alone on the street walk along, talking loudly and gesticulating to imaginary companions. Look closer, and you see an unobtrusive earbud screwed into their ear. Barry, my signficant other, tells me his teaching assistant at school has never had a conversation with him when he walks her to the subway, because she is always on the phone. The craft ladies commiserated, "its just like living in the suburbs, where everyone is in cars and don't notice anything." There has been major shift in New York street life this year. Before you could always go out and there would be throngs of people relating in a semi social manner. People noticed the guy begging at the corner, the voter registration people with clipboards and the "published poet" sitting at his little table selling original poems. Now, part of informal street life has been chilled. People pass along, in the throng, but not part of it, sealed in a bubble, talking to the ether.

2004-10-02T15:40:00.000-07:00

18 Permanent Bases in Iraq...I ran into one of the anti-war activists in the neighborhood and she was grousing as to how come none of the pundits have commented on the fact that we are building 18 permanent military bases in Iraq. I heard Kerry say it during the debate, but no one has said anything about it anywhere I've looked. A commentator on NPR on Friday did remark that we will probably have US soldiers guarding oil fields, refinerys and pipelines all over the world for most of this century, until we work out some alternate fuel. It is true that once we establish permanent bases we tend to stay a long time, and a whole culture and presence springs up around our overseas bases. Once its safe, we build US style hospitals, housing developments, supermarkets, gas stations. hotels and recreational areas, and even snack bars along the highways for US citizens with Department of Army ID cards. Spooks and counter spooks establish them selves, US insurance agents and lawyers set up shop, and we establish schools for the American children. When I visited Heidelberg in 2001 I was surprized to see that our presence at that time, over 50 years after WWII, was even greater than it was during the "cold war." I lived over there for almost 10 years in the sixties and seventies and worked varioiusly for the Heidelberg Opera Company, the Festspeil at Bayreuth, and for the US Military doing plays and musicals at Roadside Theater in Mannheim, and touring to various bases in Germany. Another job was as the Protesant chior director at the Mark Twain Village Chapel " on Roemerstrasse in Heidelberg. That Church was ( and is) across the street from Headquarters US Army Europe, "USAREUR" and the American army as well as all the civilian employees and dependants had a big presence in Germany and an impact on the economy and culture. USAREAR Headquarters in Heidelberg is not only on the site of the old Roman garrison (Roemerstrasse- get it?) but also in the Nazi Wehrmacht buildings that we took over after WWII. On the red sandstone gates you can see the bar relief of German Soldiers with their distinctive helmets. I thought all this would be gone when I returned for a few weeks in August 2001 , but there seemed to be more Americans than ever. My landlady,Frau Beck, ( I had rented a small studio apartment for the few weeks) agreed and when she drove me to the supermarket she pointed out all the new apartments buildings occupied by US Department of Army civilian employees, US service people and their dependents, and a plethora of other US citizens living in Heidelberg who had employment connected to the American military, schools, or companies that serviced the military in some way. One of the first modern terrorist acts I remember against our country took place in Heidelberg in 1972. A terrorist war protester drove a car loaded with explosives into Headquarters USAREUR and it exploded about 5:30 in the afternoon. Thankfully, just after most of the employees had left. I was at my garden in Handschuhsheim about three miles away and heard the explosion. Nixon was President. We thought we'd be safe after the war was over and he resigned.

2004-10-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

Chutney Again! Italian Prunes really make the best Chutney. Better than mango or peach. The fresh Italian prunes give it a deep winey flavor. (See Thursday September 30 posting). We had it on scrambled eggs this morning, and will have curryed vegetables with rice and chutney tonight. . I just wanted to add that a quarter teaspoon of dried red pepper flakes or half a small chopped Ancho pepper would be a good addition with, or instead of, the black pepper. I tend to add the hot stuff to the stir fry on a meal by meal basis which is why I left it out of the recipe. Also green bell peppers are almost as good as the red bell peppers in the main recipe.

2004-10-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

Shrub on the Run... like a petulant little peanut during most of the splitscreen reaction shots, our leader kept repeating the same important phrases... "support our troops, don't give mixed messages, we're winning, stay the course, evil in their hearts, don't forget Poland, a group of folks who don't want democracy" Shrub on the Run sounded like a crazy Mel Gibson in "Conspiracy Theory." when he defensively said " I know Osama bin Laden attacked us, I know that" in his comeback to Kerry's point that Iraq had not attacked us. At the end he came out with a wonderful bible image referencing the promised land about "standing on the mountain top looking down into the valley of peace." But, consider the high place the devil took Jesus up onto when the devil promised Jesus "all this can be yours" as they looked down at some middle eastern real estate.
Hey what about the Sharpster? I wanna see a debate between Shrub on the Run and the Sharpster up there with Kerry. That would spice things up.

2004-09-30T15:08:00.000-07:00

Downtown Harvest... Downtown on Chambers street today Italian prune plums and red bell peppers were 3 pounds for a dollar from the street vendors. I couldn't resist the prune plums and red peppers so I made chutney when I got back. Three pounds of washed and pitted sliced up prune plums, two thin sliced red peppers, a medium sized diced onion, about a tablespoon of grated ginger, and three cloves of pressed garlic went into my enameled soup stock pot with a cup and a half cider vinegar and a cup and a half of sugar. I mashed these things around a little as they heated up. After things started cooking I put it on simmer and added a half teaspoon fresh black pepper, a table spoon of pickling spice and a half cup of raisins and about an eighth of a cup of honey. This mixture simmered down nicely in about a half hour, and I filled a large cleaned and boiled pickle jar with chutney for the refrigerator, and filled a two cup storage tub with the rest to freeze. There was a small amount- mostly thick liquid, on the bottom of the pot so I poured it into a jar for immediate use. Chutney on grilled chicken with curry rice and vegetables tonight during the debate! The downtown neighborhood between Chambers and Canal has some weird bargains- the aforesaid fruit vendors, (the cheapest two are near Broadway and Chambers) the Linen Depot that has huge panels of earthen color velour curtain panels out in front on the street for seven dollars, Ralph's Discount on Chambers near Church has two packages of Peak Freens for a dollar as you walk in the door, two loaves of Vermont organic assorted breads for $1.25, various spices, tuna fish and candies. Dee & Dee is good for dollar t-shirts and jerseys, and Ruby's Book Sale down Chambers near west Broadway still has a great selection of cheap maps, and back issues of popular magazines in back. Going north on Broadway from Chambers there's Anbar Shoe Sale on Reed Street just off Broadway west where anything in women's shoes is liable to show up for under $40, Italian Shoes, Swedish sandals, European Boots etc. P&S fabrics is up past Worth Street on the west side of Broadway. P&S has the best fabric and ribbon and yarn bargains at the door as you go in. This week they have unusual novelty yarns for making fringed sweaters on sale, three large hanks for ten dollars. They also have wonderful linens and silks Dupioni Silk for 5.99 a yard, ( downstairs) large pieces of African fabric for $20, dress fabrics, woolens, cottons, denims, odd buttons, patterns, decorations, ribbons, edgings, tassels and cords. Downstairs at P&S, the door is hung with weird curtain fabrics to suggest a household fabric wonderland and there remnants and bolts of upscale upholstery fabrics marked down, and a corduroy section including bolts of printed corduroy and velveteens, and a plastic section with weird plastic lace panels, plastic and oilcloth table coverings by the yard. Further up, just before Canal there is Fabric Warehouse which has leather panels for between $5 and $15 dollars. You could make yourself a leather coat for $20. Walk east on Baxter past Centre and stop at Dragonland baker for some pastries. Miniature custard pies for .80 walnut tarts, coconut cream buns, or various Chinese style buns filled with cabbage or pork with decent coffee or assorted bubble teas and drinks. Coffee and a pastry runs under two dollars. And, you get to sit at a table with a window in it, look down and see a giant live turtle inside the base of the table, sitting on a rock with some water and looking up at you. The tables are all giant "turtleariums". There is a new Dragonland bakery opening up on Worth east of Broadway, but I don't know if they are going to have the turtlearium tables.

2004-07-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

Another Opening, another show... This summer the Children's Shakespeare festival continues with a performance by the Meri Mini Players of "Comedie of Errors" in the beautiful West Side Community Garden floral amphitheater. The production is adapted cleverly from the original by Morna Martell who also directed it. The actors are all professional young actors. Admission is free and performances are 5 pm Sat and Sun through the second week end in August. If outdoor theater is not your thing, the Garden is open daily from 9 am- (or whenever I can get someone over there to open the gates) to dusk every day of the week all year long- icy conditions permitting. It is located on West 89 and 90th steets midblock between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues in Manhattan and is a more pleasant place to sit and day dream than the local Starbucks. If you feel like exercise, I need fresh blood to turn the compost. All work is done by volunteer members. Membership is $15 yearly, and if a vegetable plot is your goal, there is a two year waiting list, but caretaker plots come up pretty quickly. Check us out at westsidecommunitygarden .org.

2004-07-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

Food Shopping Above West 100th Street

Well I've ducked out long enough on the blog site, and will start posting again. This has been a depressing spring in the Upper West Side. The West Side Market at 110th Street closed and there is no place to shop along Broadway in the neighborhood between 100 street and 125th Street that has the variety and reasonable prices they had.. It's very sad, because the West Side Market was open 24/7 and had everything I'd ever wanted on two continents for the past 40 years. They had the special German Linseed bread and Chocolates that I used to have to search for when I lived in Heidelberg, they had a huge selection of juices, including European black currant juice, Indonesian noodles, red curry, and fish sauce, all manner of sauces, soups, and curries, health cereals, including a low glycemic cereal that I was addicted to for only 1.99 , and a vast array of produce, including bok choy, giant radishes, tropical fruits, and strawberries year round. (Strawberry Shortcake for Xmas) The Associated that took over the University market at 116th Street is as expensive as a Food Emporium, and the D'Agostino's on 110th street tries, but it is tiny and limited as to selection. The vegetables at both places are extremely pricey. The Gristedes at 107th Street closed, and is being replaced by a Garden of Eden- the most expensive food store in the City. The other day I was in the Dags at 110th buying three bagels for a dollar, and the woman in front of me spent $53 on nothing at all. A ready made salad, a vegetable brush and some sponges, some yogurt, a couple of frozen dinners, bread, juice, and cheese. She didn't seem to care, but I was mystified as to what cost so much. We've been reduced to buying vegetables near the Post Office at the Used Vegetable Market at Amsterdam and 104th Street. It's not really called that, but the produce is extremely cheap and looks like second hand produce. Some things, like the Corn, are always bad there, but the Onions, Green and Red Peppers, Lettuce and Tomatillos are usually a good deal. Of course they always have Plantains, and I've learned to plop a few slices in the pan with onions, peppers, garlic and cilantro near the end of roasting chicken or pork for a nice side dish.

2004-02-16T09:32:00.000-08:00

Ordinary Time Out in Queens... Sunday I went out to a church in Queens to sing for a service. Being the only attorney in New York who sang at the Wagner Festspiel in Bayreuth, I sometimes get singing jobs even now. Anyway, this is a truly beautiful church painted with bright murals in a lively area filled with Italian Pastry Cafes, Polish Pork stores, Mexican Restaurants, Irish Gift Shops and cheap supermarkets. Theres even a chaotic National Wholesale Liquidators set behind a parking lot over on nearby Northern Boulevard. When we finished the service, some second sopranos invited me for coffee at one of the Italian Cafes on 30th Avenue. I got a latte and a cream filled pastry for 2.85 - both much better than Starbucks, and we sat down to discuss the Choir Scene. They are raising a volunteer choir to sing at St. Patrick's Cathedral in commemoration of Police killed in the line of duty and need strong voices, because one of their New Jersey contingents can't make it this year. I said yes, because its a good cause. We all agreed the acoustics are bad, but it's a chance to sing at St. Pats, which has its own cachet. One of the ladies at the table had a lilting Brogue, and told us about the vicissitudes of handling the family farm in Ireland. It has a thatched roof and you can' find anyone these days at a reasonable price to fix a thatched roof. After coffee, we moved out into the sunlight. We were in the wind and it was cold, but there were people sitting at the outside tables along the Avenue. Getting into my car, I drove over to Queens Boulevard to look at a construction site that is of professional interest across from the Georgia Peach Diner. Sitting in the warm car, the side of my face felt hot, as if a space heater was aimed through the open car window. I suddenly realized the heat was soming from the strong early spring sunlight flooding the inside of the car and hitting the side of my face. The thermometer at a BP station on Queens Boulevard read 25 degrees F, but spring is on the way!

2004-02-13T17:33:00.000-08:00

GAY MARRIAGES AND AWOL ...I don't want this election to be about Gay marriages and Bush's going AWOL for several months in 1972. It looks like the right thinkers are going to pump this gay marriage business into another knee jerk issue like abortion. Instead of being happy that people are getting married and committing themselves to a lifetime relationship, they act like its some kind of a slippery slope- if they let the gays get married, then all of a sudden masses of straight people will turn gay. Your mother will suddenly want to abandon your father and go off with her best friend from high school. Your boyfriend will see married gay guys and suddenly change his sexual orientation and start picking up men. This whole idea is moronic. All the gay people I know knew they were gay since the age of 12 if not earlier. Why would we deprive someone of the benefits and recognition of marriagebecause of an accident of birth or early childhood conditioning? Everyone in our society deserves the same honor of full rights and responsibility that come from being a member of society. Speaking of responsibility, why are the lefties so interested in Bush skipping out of the Guard to work on a political campaign in Alabama? Vietnam was an unpopular terrible war, and many people, especially the more left leaning socially responsible types, did what they could to stay out of it. But with all this recent history to chew over, why bother with something that's tired meat? How about the environment, the loss of jobs, the failure to secure our container ports, the war in Iraq, the mess that followed, and our country's unpopularity in the rest of the world. I was in Europe when Bush turned his back on the Kyoto Accord, and his unpopularity overseas shot up right then. Every time they showed him on the TV my landlady would start into a tirade about "my president." Europeans softened up after 9/11, but we totally blew it in the windup to the war in Iraq and its aftermath. The war is widely perceived in Europe as stupid and blatant imperialism. The problem is that we are all responsible for what our country does, not just the few in Washington. Go overseas. When people perceive you as an American, they want to talk about your country's foreign policy, like you personally just thought it up. No I don't want this election fought over gay marriages and Bush's attendance record in the Air National Guard thirty years ago. There are real issues here that need to be addressed.

2003-10-01T18:02:00.000-07:00

Screed against Bush....And the guys around him. So, last week Bremer gets in front of the camera at a Senate hearing and they are asking him how come some of this money the Bushites want can't come from the sale of Iraq's oil. Well, Bremer starts shifting around in his seat and looking uncomfortable, saying how like all the Iraqi's oil field equipment is old, and the pipelines need refurbishing and all, but the Senators keep pushing, and he finally blurts out that Iraq will need all its money to pay back the 200 billion that they owe. What! Can't we just excuse that debt? Wasn't incurred by that bad guy Saddam? Why do they have to pay his debts??? Well, Bremer says like we're trying to excuse it, or a least some of it, but it turns out that we'll,... uh they'll... just have to pay it. Cause after all it was real money lent to Iraq by real banks that real people put their money into in places like France and Russia and Japan. And the people of Iraq will have to use some of that oil revenue, actually almost all of it, to pay off those debts. Now, remember last February when they were all gearing up to war, they said if there was damage or we incurred expenses, the Iraq oil revenue would be able to pay us for our trouble? Well. I worked in an investment bank on a research project once upon a time (before the internet) and I remember that all the debts owned by various countries were well known and published, and banks bought and sold them as debentures. So, these guys must have known about Iraq's debt before the war, and knew it when they were saying how Iraqi oil would pay the extraordinary costs. So, not only did they lie about the WMD, they also lied about how much all this would cost, and how it would be paid for. Now we are stuck. We can't really expect to go into a country and remove its government and take over without taking responsibility for building things back up again, can we? I hope all those people that voted for Nader, thinking that it didn't matter if they took votes away from Gore because there really wasn't much difference between Gore and Bush are paying attention. I cannot believe this country has gotten into such a fix in three short years. Yes, things would have bad because of the recession and 9/11 but there seems to be an almost willful desire in this administration to make things just as bad as they could possibly be, just so long as the upper upper class is reaping big profits.

2003-09-26T15:13:00.000-07:00

Rebuild the Towers ... Although the twin towers were really pretty ugly, except at sunset or in the mist, I personally think they should just rebuild the towers exactly the way they were, right way, except maybe correcting some of the burn flaws and aesthetic errors. That would make a better statement to the world than all this crapping around about the footprint, the bathtub, the towers of light, the memorial, the loved ones, the brave firemen, the cops, the grief struck iron mongers cutting the tangled girders on the building they spent 10 years putting up, the brave window washers that died doing their job, and all that etc. People think hat no one would want to work in replacement towers cause they are a 3x target, but I bet people would rent the space right away, I know I would. The more I hear about it, the more convinced i am they should just get on with it and rebuild them pretty much the way they were as fast as possible. That would be the best statement to the world, the terrorists, and the people that think we needed to be taught a lesson. Last month I took my bike downtown and was riding around in the park around the SI Ferry when i came upon this crushed up golden globe like statue thing. I stood there looking at this strange crumbled art wondering why does this thing look so familiar? It was never here in the Battery before... when I realized it was the arrogent gold globe sculpture that used to sit in the middle of the WTC plaza that got crushed when the towers fell. They have set it up in Battery Park with an eternal flame and a little plaque. I immediatly burst into tears. As far as I'm concerned that is enough memorial for me.
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2003-09-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

Towers on 110th Street... Went to the neighborhood meeting Tuesday Night about what's happening on 110th Street. Now that we have spent 2 years living through the Columbia Construction on the corner of 110th and Broadway for the inappropriate Primary School and apartments, the moving of our bus stop to a mid-residential-block so sleepers can enjoy the heaving of the Number 4 bus starting around 4:30 am, we learned that the owner of the NE corner of the intersection has decided to put up a luxe condominium tower. What does the neighborhood lose? The best market in the neighborhood- The West Side Market with all its wierd Gourmet choices, bakery goods, and reasonable produce, Columbia Bagels, Mailboxes Etc. ( my place for cheap copies on my way to court) Dynasty Restauraunt, and the methadone clinic. Each of these amenities has a special place in the life of the neighborhood- even the clinic, which reminds us of how seedy the area was not that long ago. The biggest loss will be the West Side market, a source for cheap vegetables and fruit. It will have its biggest impact on the eating habits of all the people on fixed incomes who can't get to the used vegetable store down at 104 and Amsterdam. A head of lettuce at West Side is usually $1 a head- while the Dag's has it for $1.79 a pound. Baby Carrots are 1.29 at West Side, Dag's has them for 1.79 except for when they are on sale. And then theres the fact that it will no longer be possible to run down to the market at midnight for some fresh strawberries or ice cream before going to bed. People that come to dinner parties at my house wait until they get off the train to pick up fruit or some specialty to bring. We even rushed down there New years at 1 am to get some more cheese and some seltzer for drinks. Such convenience will be sorely missed. We still miss the Woolworth Store which was replaced with the Footlocker. Things that were avaiable in one trip to the Woolworths now take planning and 2 days of going to different stores out of the area to obtain. The older ladies that liked to crochet had to give it up, cause they can't buy crochet thread in the neighrbohood anymore. We also can't buy nice cheap cotton underwear, Parakeets, Canaries, Goldfish, inexpensive hardware, Lampshades, pots and pans, graters and all sorts of cheap little kitchen gadgets. They had bedroom slippers and cheap cotton sandles, nightgowns, pajamas, no run pantihose, rayon stockings, and half slips, stupid little novelties like the porcelin hen sitting in a basket nest, little starfighters and rubber duckies, board games, Ouija Boards and costumes for halloween, lots and lots of cheap garish cosmetics, dynel hairpieces, hair nets, and color rinses to fool around with. Woolworths was the place to go if you had a craft or sewing project, or just needed a quick fix for your clothing. They carried their own brand of sewing notions which were excellent, iron on tape for a quick hem, rick-rack , and quilting supplies different colored thread, needles and crochet hooks, yarn, fabric, and interfacing. In short, all the things for a full household in a civilized society. Now that Footlocker is finally closing, I wonder if the West Side market will move there.

2003-09-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

Rudeness of Cars... Have you noticed that people coming out of cross streets on Broadway no longer bother using turn signals? It's a kind of guessing game here at 110th. Is he going to go straight, or turn? Does that wobble indicate he's going to turn? Is it safe to cross the street? I've got the signal, how about if I just go through the intersection on my bike? Will I get run over cause he's really going to turn? It's not possible any more to tell where cars are going. And with the double park situation right on top the intersection, double parked food trucks, Con Ed emergency vehicles, Moms dropping their kids off at the new school, and turning Number 4 buses, cars get impatient. They make these little agressive rushes when they think they have the light, honking their horns impatiently and going fast without using their turn signals. The situation has become nightmarish. The other new thing is cars honking their horns at you if you are not moving fast enough. They do this constantly - to pedestrians, bikes, and other cars. If I am driving on, for instance 89th street on the block where there is a school, I tend to poke along if there is a red light up at Amsterdam, cause I don't want to hit any kids that may pop out from between cars, and the light up ahead is red and I'll just have to wait anyway. This attitude drives SUVs crazy. They honk and honk, and try to sneak their huge vehicles around me, so they can rush up to a red light and slam on their brakes. Here on 110th a friend of mine had an accident last week after a rude SUV that kept blowing his horn at her, forcing her to move in a tight space created by double parked trucks. The sun was at just the wrong angle, blinding her, and she hit a traffic pole. The honking SUV just sped away. What we really need is a remote that mutes car horns. Some idiot is behind you blowing his horn for no reason, and you just press the remote button with a directional finder on your dash board and his horn goes silent. Pedestrians would carry a more conventional remote with them to shut up cars that are honking because they are not moving fast enough on their walkers. There could be a long distance remote and you could aim out the window at night to silence offending car alarms. Yeah.

2003-08-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

Went to see the "Mini Midsummer Night's Dream" directed by Morna Martell and presented by Drama Tune Inc. yesterday at the West Side Community Garden for its final Sunday performance. (The Garden is located on 89th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue, and is open daily for those who wish to stop by and look at the flowers) Last Sunday the performance was canceled due to a 3 hour downpour. This week the weather held, and there was a good turnout- about 120 people attended. The acoustics were perfect in the Garden amphitheater, and the actors experienced in projecting Shakspearian diction. The audience of all ages and backgrounds followed the story with attention and frequent laughter at the right spots. The most delightful piece of foolery was Puck, played by Jenne Vath, who expertly herded her pack of fairies (played by fifteen neighborhood youngsters) through the machinations of the plot enchantments. Titiana ( Christina Malina)was the beautiful long golden haired fairy queen, and lovingly stroked Bottome's( David Lutzer) hairy donkey ears to the delight of our local pack of fairies hiding in the wings behind the tall Asters growing in Mary Lou Briggs Flower plot. The lover's mixup was an amusing trifle, and the last piece, a "play within a play" for the Athenian king was followed with great amusement by the audience. The cast forswore the timeless Mendelsohnn songs to sing pleasant unaccompanied songs by Ralph Martell. There is a special raindate performance Thursday, Septmeber 4,at 6 pm. It's a wonderful piece, enhanced by a lush Garden setting. I think I'll bring refreshments for the end of the run.

2003-08-16T09:45:00.000-07:00

My Third Blackout in the City... New York was finally all the way back last night at about 11 pm, and the subways started up this morning. We were out in the country when it happened. I had just gassed up and we were up at Roger's Book Barn. My brake light started going on and off after we left the book store, so I headed for a repair shop. Just as i was going to pay the guy $20 just to look at the brakes, everything went down. The lady there said "oh no, not again", and said it had happened an hour earlier that afternoon but went right back on again. I got the impression it was something local or to do with their fuse box. They went off somewhere to try and get their computer up, and a guy waiting in line with us said $20 was too much "just to look" and that they got a good mechanic down the road at the gas station. When we left the repair shop, I noticed the traffic signals were out. When we got to the gas station the pumps were already closed with cones, but the mechanic immediately told me that the red light meant that my brake fluid was low. He charged 2 dollars to put it in. We couldn't get any radio stations so we thought the power glitch was a local thing, and decided to head back to the City. Along the way we looked with wonderment on scenes of people trying to get gas, closed stores, people sitting by the roads, and local Firemen, boyscouts, Police, and State troopers directing traffic at the intersections. In Fishkill Plains, people were emerging from a pizza place with pizzas so we went in to see about dinner. It was the only place we saw open in three counties. He had the old manual cash register and terrific pizza with real mozzarella cheese. The pizzas were being put together in the darkened kitchen in back of the bar by lantern light for the crowds of people and cooked in old gas ovens. We found out while we were waiting that the blackout extended throughout New York, and over to Cleveland. After we grabbed the pizza I headed back on the Taconic/Sawmill and West side highway to W 95 St and riverside drive ( no signals the whole way) and managed to miss traffic jams of epic porportions on every other approach to the City. The Bronx/Manhattan Hudson bridge was open into Manhattan, and there was practically no inbound traffic anywhere, including the West Side highway. The other side was jammed solid with traffic and throngs of people people walking home on the highways. There were no speedcops anywhere up in the country- they were all deployed at intersections, so I went about as fast as the car would go 85-90 the whole way back so we would get in before sunset.Once back, we parked on 110th and climbed six floors into the apartment to quickly find candles, matches and flashlights before it got dark. It was real hot, about 90, even with all the windows open,so we went back out to the car with the flashlight and sat in the car intermittently running the airconditioning and watched the crowds on Broadway and traffic jams. An event like this really gives you a fair idea of how many people are in or come into Manhattan everyday. The Police had set up red flares at the 110th Street intersection and were trying to control traffic, but it was impossible because there were so many pedestrians - people in business clothes with brief cases walking uptown from work and other throngs dressed up or in shorts walking down towards Times Square. It was weird, cause just one block over on Riverside Drive there were not many cars and practically no foot traffic, even on the wide sidewalks under the trees. We walked around some, to see if lights were on in Queens and over to the River to look for lights in Jersey. Some of the bars were open and letting people run tabs or taking cash. The V & T Pizza Sidewalk cafe part was open and serving pizzas, but surprisingly the Hungarian Pastry Shop cafe at 111th and Amsterdam was closed. The other stores were all closed and locked. Places like the West Side market with substantial outside merchandise had the help sit out in front in case you might want to take a watermelon or something. The guy in front of the Famous Deli had a baseball bat. WNCY was back on the air so we could listen to the radio and read some in the air conditioned car. About 1am it got cooler so we went back upstairs. I read for a while by the light of the big Pascal candle (decommisioned from Church after Easter) and went to bed. We got up early, and I was sitting in the living room when the light went on. Barry went down at 9 am and came back with a quart of fresh milk and the papers.

2003-07-28T12:31:00.000-07:00

Blogomat... Just looking in the Times magazine again today and noticed the article by the older guy who ruins himself playing Tennis every chance that he gets, and how Americans have become big "consumers" of exercise. Our President is characterized as a "gym rat", people pay big bucks to join gyms with special machines to exercise, and I am constantly being shoved off the sidewalk or roadway by rollerbladers or cyclers intent on getting their exercise. They all have special little suits to wear too. Pastel shorts, little warm-up items with white stripes down the sides, helmets, kneepads, exercise bras, wrist weights, sneakers. Thus, exercise has been transformed into a consumable item, a consumable that can be referenced as a class item. The other day on the train coming back from Ocean Hill I eavesdropped in on a conversation between a young black man, and a white classmate he met on the train going to Manhattan. After catching up on grades and class schedules, the white guy asked where the black guy was heading-" Oh I'm going to my gym in Manhattan... You mean you go all the way into Manhattan to use a gym? Well yes, you meet better people, and the whole experience is just better in Manhattan...." I ride a bike for basic transportation inside the City. I've been riding a bike for just about my whole life for transportation, first as a protest against automobile culture in Buffalo where I grew up, then as cheap transportation in Germany where it cost over a thousand marks to get a license in lessons fees, and finally in New York, where I rode a bike to my job in midtown everyday until they laid us off. During the nineties, I got a car as a gift, and became a car owner for the first time in my adult life. We use the Buick to go outside the City and on vacations, but still use the bike to get around town- no parking muss, quick routes through traffic, nice routes through parks, no subway or bus fare. The exercise has been a pretty secondary reason for owning a bike - a cheap one that doesn't get stolen more than every two or three years. Everyday on the elevator, my nesighbors confuse me with one who is part of the exercise culture- "Oh, are you going out for exercise? Do you ride in the park? " I nicely but pointedly say, "No, I am going to a meeting", or "I have errands to run. " I wonder how much longer the guy who ruins himself playing tennis, or the young black guy that rides into Manhattan just to use a better class of gym, will keep on exercising. I wonder if the tennis guy rides to the courts in a big black SUV, like many of my neighbors, even in the upper west side of Manhattan. When did exercise become something that was the province of the rich ( or middle class) and the young, or those aspiring to be young and/or rich? How come when I travel outside the City I rarely see anyone outside walking or riding a bike dressed in normal clothes as if they were heading to church, or a shopping center? I wonder how exercise, which used to be an inevitable part of everyday life performed by everyone as part of going about their normal daily business, became a class conscious consumable item.

2003-07-20T19:33:00.000-07:00

In the bushes...Looking at the shrub on TV this week, I flashed on an image of the inside his head - that if you could lift off the top of his head and peer inside you'd see a little brown leather brain, wheezing like a tiny bellows when the shrub cogitated about those bothersome things like what he calls the "skepticists," or tried to remember the name of the country that his good friend Tony Blair represents. Like two tiny leather footballs stuck together...

2003-07-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

More slow burn...Look, I know the term "burn rate" has been around for a while in places like venture capital firms...I've just never heard it applied by high level government officials to a war in front of nationwide TV before. A Secretary of Defense that refers to the use of our taxes as the "burn rate" in a war that's not really over and where people are getting killed doesn't really inspire much confidence. What's the insider slang for the deaths over there? "broken units?" The government usually doesn't give us an inside view of what they really think about us on national TV. Of course we all know that this gang is in high office because they are ambitious and want power, and not particularly interested in helping people, serving the public, saving money, educating children, or making our country better and a good place to live for everyone. But this is the first time I remember hearing officials in an administration talk the talk that they use behind the scenes right out in the open. And how does that term jibe with a deliberate manipulation of intelligence to get them the war they want? And, after hearing how they really feel about us, how are we supposed to swallow the platitudes dished out to us about freedom, liberty, and being a shining beacon of democracy for the world? How do you justify the two persona's here- the President who gets up every day to read his Bible and tells us that "Amurrica is being tested" and an administration that talks about the "burn rate" for our money? Or how about that guy Brenner on "Meet the Press" this morning who, when asked about the four soldiers killed in an ambush yesterday, included in his answer talk about how the tide of forces for freedom and justice were on the rise. How can we take that seriously? Can you imagine if four people were ambushed up on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx and Commissioner Kelly told a reporter that " the tide of justice is rising in New York" ? There are definitely some unmatched codes here- one behind the scenes a group of testosterone driven, power mad, oil glutted elite power queens, and the other- a pious, Jesus saved, prayerful simple folk face, who just wants us to all get along., but "he's going to get those evil varmits who are causing all thet ruckus over there..." Come to think of it, I'll take the power mad millionaires...

2003-07-18T15:58:00.000-07:00

NY Cowboy- 6-23-2003
Broadway Cowboy

A couple of weeks ago at about 7 p.m. we were cruising up and down Broadway in my Buick, looking for the store Judy remembered that had blueberries for $2 a pint and came upon a cowboy in full cowboy work gear with his horse on the west side of Broadway at 94th Street.

Judy whipped out her digital camera and took a picture [which i am unable to post here because technical difficulties] as I exhorted her to "get in the buildings... No one will believe this is New York unless you get the buildings into the picture..." The Cowboy had parked his horse at a parking meter, and without putting any quarters into the meter, went into a fruit and vegetable market to buy carrots and Romaine lettuce, which he fed to his horse. There is a car parked on the expired meter, behind the horse, but it moved out just after we took the picture. The person with the car came across Broadway, glanced at the horse, got into the car and pulled out when traffic was clear, without any acknowledgment of the horse obstacle, other than avoiding it and not blowing their horn. The pedestrians were equally blasé- about one in 3 actually looked, and the only people besides Judy and I that stopped were some tourists from out of town who actually engaged the Cowboy in conversation. (We could tell they were tourists cause they had on pink and blue pastel jersey shorts and tops that tourists wear.) I was double parked in front of the Whole Foods supermarket and didn’t want to leave the car, so I didn’t find out the pertinent information like "where are you from...where does your horse sleep at night?" We found the blueberries at Barzzinis, but when we went back to see the cowboy again he was gone- disappeared into the sunset over New Jersey.

2003-07-17T17:32:00.000-07:00

Just as a matter of mild interest, since I am deep in the throes of amending my 2002 taxes just what is that thing that the white house refers to as our current "burn rate" in Iraq? The first time I ever heard the term burn rate was out of Rummy-(one of my all time faves) on Sunday July 13 with George Stephanopolis. It just slithered out, "Burn Rate" and George didn't bat an eyelash. Emboldened, Rummy started slinging the term around more and more- "burn rate burn rate for this..., burn rate that we had thought..., but the burn rate can't be calculated for the future cause we don't know the future...". Now< Tuesday on the Newshour I heard the Whitehouse head of Office of Management and Budget - and he suddenly outed with the term "burn rate" too- giving a sly smile as he said it, as if it is a piece of insider slange that they are letting us in on-. He gave the burn rate as being over 4.2 Billion- somehwat highter than Rummy's 3.9 burn rate even though it was only a couple of days later. And how come none of those news guys ask them about the term "burn rate"?
Just what is it that "burns?" Is that our money? Do they just burn it? Will there be any money to return to me if I am due a tax cut? Is that why they are implementing tax cuts? Because they don't want us to get too mad about the fact that they are just "burning it"? Where are they burning it? Do they have a big bar-b-que in downtown Baghdad where they burn money? Couldn't they just burn oil instead and let me have my money back instead of burning it?? ?

2003-07-05T07:43:00.000-07:00

Fourth of July... 2003. More late tree stuff. Went out of the City for a trip to someplace high up where its cool. We settled upon New Paltz ( Neu Pfaltz) as a destination, with a run up to Lake Minnewaska for advanced cooling. As we drove up into the mountains, we discovered the Mountain Laurel are in full bloom- a full month late. This is usually a Memorial Day experience. They are especially full this year, and the floor of the forest looked like it had 3-4 foot drifts of fluffy pink scattered under the trees. The forest gloom surrounding the hiking trails around Lake Minnewaska is lit up by the pink and white blooms, and the meadow we like to hike to was filled with bowers of bloom. People were swimming in the sun warmed lake and the beach was also surrounded with the late Mountain laurel blooms. Even without the Mountain Laurel this is one of the most scenic spots on the East Coast, if not the world.

2003-07-03T07:28:00.000-07:00

test FindLaw - Law, Lawyer, Lawyers, Attorney, Attorneys and Legal Resources

2003-07-01T20:09:00.000-07:00

Another two hours poured into the black hole of computer hell.
Well I downloaded and installed City Desk, which is Ok but has a headline on it: "My new site" which I did not put in and which I don't want. And, it doesn't have a way to install "comments" that I can find which is the main reason I installed it. So I went to squawkbox.tv which has some type of comment code to slip into your template. Of course I was in Internet Explorer, and on my computer the default lettering for Explorer is something called "Aeterna" so I couldn't read the code. So I went over to Netscape, and simultaneously brought up the blogger.com templates, and squawkbox to get the code in Times New Roman, and tried to install the code, but nothing doing. First, you have to install it between the "head" tags- wherever and what ever they might be. Then- this long ass line of gibberish has to be installed as a single line. So I found something like and installed the code right in alongside the word "head" between the darts. Then I took the other code ( which also had to be installed in a single line) and put it down below, and pressed preview. Voila- no comments and my email address was gone! After a erasing or not preserving my "work" I got my email address back, but could never get the comments thing to appear no matter what. I tried between Head outside the darts, and something else both backwards and frontwards. Asshole Explorer, asshole Aeterna default font ( and how did that get to be the default font I'd love to know?), asshole Netscape, asshole head tags, and especially asshole things that have to be installed as one line, in a small pop up window that can't be resized

2003-07-01T15:53:00.000-07:00

Tuesday July 1, 2003. Homeless in NYC ... Had to go to the garden and sit for an hour or so waiting for the exterminator guy to come and check to see if we had a rat problem. J., the 75 year old evicted person, came and sat in the Vegetable Garden under the Fig tree with me to update me on her progress as one of the newly homeless. She saved her rent money when it became clear that eviction was inevitable, and used it to move to a "tourist" hotel on Riverside Drive. I had advised her to take a room in a hotel to relax and get over the horrible eviction experience when I left her off at the Health Department last week to get a TB test, ( a prerequisite to getting into the welfare system in NYC) So it turns out the hotel she checked into is a rent stabilized SRO and she is requesting a lease. She went up to the NY State office building ( DHCR) today to check the rent history on her room and we have our fingers crossed that the rent stabilized rent will be no more than 2 or 3 hundred a month. Not only that- the room is airconditioned, has a private bath, and a refrigerator. If everything checks out, she will have a much nicer place to live for the rest of her life, and will not have to interface with the Welfare system and nosy bureaucrats trying to push her into a "facility." The rent stabilized rent in these places is usually low because the owners illegally converted them to Tourist Hotels in the late eighties. Therefore, the rent is based on the last legally registered tenant's rent back in the late eighties or early nineties. The reason the legal rents are fairly low and affordable is because the last registered tenant lived there for a long time as a resident. After J. left, I turned the Compost until the rat guy appeared. He looked around, but there were no more rats left.

2003-06-30T18:03:00.000-07:00

Monday June 30, 2003 Unter den Linden... Well its finally hit, about two weeks late this year, but its finally arrived, the best time of the entire year to be outside in the Upper West Side of New York, when the Linden trees are in full bloom. The air is so laden with perfume in some areas it makes me swoon. The Linden are blooming all along Riverside Drive from West 72nd street to the George Washington Brige, Morning Side Drive, Central Park West, and all the adjacent streets. You can smell them along Broadway, and even on Amsterdam Avenue if the wind is right. Tonight the Linden odor was so strong I could smell iti n the Post Office at 103rd Street as i waited in line to get a Certificate of Mailing for my rent. At night I lay in my bedroom on 110th Street with the windows open, breathing the perfume laden air as it rises from the Linden trees by the Rite Aid at 110th and Broadway. A woman going down into the Number One Downtown subway today remarked to me, " What a nice smell, I smell it everywhere today, it must be some new kind of cleaner they are using on the subways" When I told her it was the trees she responded "What, in New York City?" During these weeks of Linden fever I escape whenever possible on the bicycle down the length of Riverside Drive and into the park at 95th street just breathing deeply. There's an area in Riverside Park near 79th Street just before the tunnel to the Boat Basin where there are two giant especially odiferous Linden Trees that overhang the path. The Linden season lasts about two weeks in total- usually starting around June 15 and over before June 30. It was so cold and wet this year that I thought we would miss it, because the trees had bloomed in the rain and the smell had all washed away. But this weekend it started full force. A few of the smaller trees started in Morningside park last week and are almost over, but the big trees are in full swing along Riverside.

2003-06-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

Eviction of an old woman
J. is a feisty75 year old who is living on $639 monthly from Social Security and SSI. The rent is $930 a month. She is being evicted into the street tomorrow at 11:30 am, because she owes back rent- much of it from when she was hospitalized with shingles. She is currently blind in one eye and has skin cancer. The $639 a typical payment for woman who worked at various jobs at small businesses and never got into any retirement plan. She came to New York in the fifties from Pa. to pursue a career acting, temped at office jobs, married for a few years, had no children, divorced, and never remarried. When her Mother got old she found a good old folks home for her in Pa. But now that its her turn, there's no one left to help her out. When she moved into the VOA's Brandon Residence for Women at 340 West 85th Street in 1995 the rent was $500 a month for a 7X 10 foot room, with no telephone, and no AC. It was leveld off at 678 under a stipulation, but they claim that it should be $930 a month. There is a communal bath & WC on each floor shared by 30 women, and a communal kitchen on one floor for heating up tea water soup mix etc. The first floor of the building is pleasant with two large lounges- one with a stage, and the other for watching TV. There is a conceirge who gets all the mail and slops it into boxes. The New York Headquarters for the VOA is located on site, with offices on the second and third floors, and Richard Salyer, the President or chief minister ( yes the VOA is a religion- I found this out when I called the Secretary of State for their financials as a charity, and was unable to get them because the VOA is a religious corporation) lives and entertains in the penthouse on the top floor. In the basement is a cafeteria for the female residents where breakfast and dinner is served. The Cafeteria Workers are from one of the VOA's drug rehab programs and there is, or was, a drug rehab program on site for recent releasees. The VOA started a nonpayment case against J. in 1996-7. J.withheld rent because there were warranty of habitability problems in the residence-heavy mold in the bathrooms, electrical wires draped from the overhead fixtures and strung in the hallways, and broken doors. . After motion practice, we signed a stipuation in 1998 to get repairs, and giving J. a 3000 rent abatement. Another feature of the stipulation was that they could not bring a future holdover action against her. She got sick and defaulted on the repayment plan so 30 something Civil Court Judge Tammi Elsnor issued a warant, snapping at us from the bench that Joyce "should have saved money when she was young and made better plans for her future." We stopped the eviction by declaring Bankruptcy under Chapter 13. US Bankruptcy Judge Cornelious Blackshear was more accomodating, we kept the case alive for four years. When the Bankruptcy was finally dismissed for failure to pay the trustee during a bout of pnuemonia, January 2002, the case went back to Civil Court, and after more manurverings Civil COurt Judge Milin issued a judgement of eviction but stayed it 30 days to permit the respondent to "Move with Diginity" How does one move with diginity to the street, or Riverside park? I was getting ready to go on vacation, so we filed for bankruptcy again, this time under Chapter 7, with no repayment plan under a new theory. The VOA came roaring into court screaming that Joyce deserved to be evicted, that she was simply decalring bankruptcy in bad faith to stop an eviction, but US Bankruptcy Judge Gropper stopped them dead, stating that everyone stands equal under the law- if Enron and other large corporations can obtain relief under the shield of bankruptcy so can a 73 year old woman with no money and no place to go. This time I had new theory - under bankruptcy law, - specifically" the anti discrimination rule" no government entity can discriminate against a debtor for insolvency, or owing back rent. Therefore they may retain their possession of their apartments even after all the back rent is discharged under bankruptcy. The Government may not discriminate against them by evicting them because they owed back rent. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld this theory in "In re Stolz" and I guess City housing praying that their tenants don't find out about this. Anyway, in our case my job was to prove that VOA is so entwined with the government that it is, or stands in the place, of a government entity. As you can see from their website, the VOA is the largest provider of Homeless services and services to the aged in the area. 95% of their funding is from Government contracts. The constitution of New York state provides a constitutional right to shelter - which in this town, the VOA overwhelmingly provides. So I reasoned, the VOA stands in the shoes of the Government in providing this service which the State Constitution mandates is a right . Unfortunately, because the Brandon is not a shelter- it is supportive housing, or as the VOA falsely claims "housing for professional women and students," we lost. ( My other case- with the two 80 year olds in a HPD TIL building won) So here we are, at the eleventh hour, once again looking for someplace to put Joyce. The Marshall just called, he's having Adult Protective services come, but he agrees with me that they are useless. I've called all the senior services, but they are full to the gills with homeless seniors. Basically Joyce can go to Peter's Place on 23rd street, and they will try and find a placement for her for the night. (The guys at our church shelter are usually bussed in by the City at 7:30 for the night at our mens' beds, and are bussed out at 5 am the following morning).I've been looking for months, and have found nothing in Manhattan. Most social workers tell me that unless the person is actively homeless, they can't find them a placement. Last resort- we are looking for a large space at Manhattan Ministorage on the West Side Highway. They allow access 24/7 and according to a NYT article last summer there are showers and toilets. I've visited the one downtown in the west village and there are large cubicles separated by cyclone fencing with an electric light. Years ago, I represented some guys at the Stanford, a flop house on the Bowery. They lived in cublicles separted by Chickenwire, with an overhead light. Now that the flops are gone, I guess we'll have to go into storage.
Then there's a possibility of a "facility" somewhere in the outer boroughs, usually between something like the Bruckner expressway, and the Hutchinson parkway, located two trains and three buses away from the old neighborhood and old friends. There's an 8 pm curfew, with a monthly trip by ambulette to the Rite Aide on White Plains Road for diversion. There's tapes of movies twice a week in the lounge, and yarn crafts, and a cafeteria for all your meals. You share a room, and are limited to a minimum of personal possessions cause you don't need them anymore. Your social security check is signed over to the facility, and they immediatly ask the government for more money- another 1500 - cause its impossible to keep you there for 639 monthly. I've visited people in such places and they are all desparate to get free....

2003-06-21T19:20:00.000-07:00

First Day of Summer... Today started very gray, I overslept because there was no light outside, on today, the longest day of the year. Even the birds ( yes we have birds that chirp in the morning in Manhattan) seemed subdued in the mist and gray. I lay in the living room lethargically reading an alarming story about the Shrub administration's reaction to global warming in yesterday's Times and drinking coffee until my friend Judy from the Garden called to see what's up with the Garden Compost, and do I have plans for today etc. About a half hour later, after we both dragged ourselves to the garden for the first day of summer, it started raining lightly, so we decided to erect one of our little tentlets over the compost area so we could work in comfort, protected from the rain, and later, if the sun ever comes out, we could work in the shade.
The tentlets were our brainstorm to protect us from the rain at our annual Garden benefit party this past Wednesday. They looked festive and I hung lights on the musician's tent. Alec Baldwin, the actor, attended and presented one of our environmental awards - a framed picture of the garden to ABC TV for their support of environmental projects in NYC. Pictures of the garden are posted at www.westsidecommunitygarden.org.
The tentlets are 10 foot square shelters made out of aluminum poles that hold up a roof made out of some type of translucent plastic cloth. Judy and I found them last Saturday while we were on our annual quest to find the cheapest decent paper plates for the benefit. We found cheap plates and better yet we found the tentlets for $19.97 at National Wholesale Liquidators out on Route 17 in New Jersey.
Anyway, the compost area is exactly ten foot square, with a concrete brick wall behind the bins on the west side, and our tool shed bordering the east side of the compost area work yard. Overhead on the south side of the area is our giant fig tree -[ which made it safely through the winter, thank you very much] and on the north side, where the neighborhood guys hang out on the sidewalk drinking beer and malt liquor, is the compost gate to the garden. The three wooden bins themselves are about three and a half foot square and four foot high, with removable wooden slats on the front and interior walls, and are set flush against the concrete wall.
People come from the neighborhood and deposit their coffee grounds, tea leaves, vegetable parings and rotten fruit through the compost gate onto the end bin. One man keeps his stuff in the freezer and bicycles over from the East Side with bags of frozen spoiled fruit and vegetable waste. There's a stable on 89th Street, so we scrape up horse offerings left on 90th Street on their way to the Central park Bridal path. Although Judy will reluctantly carry the pail for me while I collect the offerings, only a Presbyterian will actually scrape the stuff up off the street in broad daylight.
Today, although the compost pile was hot underneath, it was smelling rank because it had rained during the night and it's way too wet. The remarkable thing about a good balanced compost pile is that if its kept turned and has a goodly population of red worms, it has a fresh almost piney smell, despite all the horse manure.
So these two women of a certain age - let us say well over 50- dragged one of the disassembled tentlets from the shed to put up in the lightly sprinkling of rain. Because of the presence of the compost bins, all assembly had to be done above the bins, sort of in midair, with Judy holding the assembled pieces flat while I formed the aluminum rod roof assembly.
The first problem was assembling the slippery wet aluminum rods. They are numbered with tiny numbers that can't be seen by middle aged eyes without glasses to clue you in as to where each rod fits. The # 7 roof rods have little wire loop tabs that must be depressed firmly with a (wet) thumb while the rod slides into a rigid plastic corner of the roof square.
After the wire things slide into the plastic joint, they pop up through a slot to strengthen the corner joint. Unfortunately, the wire tabs are made for heavy strong men's hands to depress, and we struggled away for about a twenty minutes in the intensifying rain to get the rods properly seated in the plastic corner joints. The rain intensified then, and we stood in the tool shed for a few minutes while it poured, nursing our smarting thumbs while Judy prayed loudly to the God of Complaining.
When it let up a little, the "dimples and bumps " problem emerged when I charged out to work on the center roof rods and side rods which connect the corner joints together.
The dimples and bumps problem is based on the premise that in cheap tentlets, each connecting aluminum rod has a dimple which corresponds to its corresponding rod's bump. The dimples and bumps must be mated exactly to slide together, and then you must turn the rods smartly to lock them. Naturally, there are two ways to turn the rods smartly, and if you lock them in the wrong direction, it's impossible to proceed to the next step of assembling the tentlet.
As the rain intensified again Judy stood in the downpour holding the partially assembled rods in midair while I tried to locate the dimples and bumps and clicking them together one way, then another, until the roof assembly was "complete."
Soaking wet by now, we took the balled up plastic cloth roof and stood under it while we spread it onto the roof rod assembly. As soon as the roof cloth was partially stretched over the rods, they began popping apart again, and the dimples and bumps had to be lined up again and turned smartly again, this time under the plastic cloth, until the roof assembly was squared off over our heads while we held it flat, so we could fit the tentlet to the corners.
Wholly disheartened by now, I put the top legs into the corner elbow, hoping that they would lend some structural integrity to the assembly, and also hoping that the legs would not slip out and fall between the compost bins and the concrete wall. [ did I mention that the bins are bolted to the wall?]
Against all reason, this worked after a fashion. Although the dimples and bumps kept popping apart, we finally got them to hold together by looping the tentlet's interior Velcro tabs tightly onto the aluminum rods. But, while this operation was underway, rain collected in the slack pockets of the roof where the dimples and bumps were coming apart and dumping down on us when we Velcroed the tentlet to the rods. After more trial and error, we put both top and bottom leg sections on each corner and pulled the tentlet down over each corner, stretching the tentlet tails down each leg and fastening them to a hook at the bottom of each pole to form a tight structural unit. Of course we couldn't open the tool shed door, but a couple of blue slates and Belgian blocks dragged over to prop up the legs of the tentlet by the tool shed raised it enough to provide clearance for the door. Yes, it's lopsided, but we will be able to turn the compost in comfort in the only tented compost bins in New York City.

2003-06-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

Turning the Compost - Well here it is another rainy weekend in NYC. I'm sitting here contemplating going to our garden on West 89th Street to transplant Farinacious Salvia into the shady east side of the Garden before the hot weather hits next week, and turning the Compost, which is wet as hell at this point, but cooking away nicely. Our red worms which used to live in the compost and help me turn it died in the protracted cold winter, so I've got to go down to 14th streeet market and see if Christina Datz from the Lower East Side Environmental Action Center is still around selling them. I like to turn compost. Its the perfect ruminative activity for turning over legal problems that come my way. First I do a lot of research, then I turn the compost. Right now I have a 75 year old client in fairly good health who is penniless and is going to be evicted on the street, unless I can come up with a new angle. Its an old case- five years, and we've been through Civil Court NYCounty with several stays, twice to Bankruptcy Court, and on to US District Court with a unique procedural argument I came up with a couple of years ago whilst turning compost, but now it looks like the end is nigh. Don't feel sorry for the landlord- the landlord is a well known very well funded charitable organization which prides itself for helping people- just not my client. She doesn't want to move into a "facility" and none of the agencies i have contacted have any rooms. So it's back to the Compost and then to court again.

2003-06-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

The Hallelujah Man... I was riding my bike up Broadway this afternoon and I saw him again, the Hallelujah Man. He' been a fixture on the upper west side since i moved here in the 70's. Today he was at 97th street handing out trachts and saying God ,God, God, God, God Loves you, God Loves You, God, God, God, to everyone who passed. Usually he just stands on a corner and shouts Halleujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah. He's toned down the volume some from the old days, after some people hasseled him up at 106th street. The Hallelujah man is about 70 now, a slight light skinned black gentleman, always impeccably dressed and wearing a fedora. Today he was dressed in a sharply pressed gray suit, and carried a raincoat. By his accent I would say he's Haitian, one of the remnants of the Haitian community which used to dominate the streets east of Broadway between 97th street and 106th street. His appearences have decreased some since the late 90's perhaps due to age and increasing frailty. I don't mind his shouting, in fact there is something rather reassuring about it now after all these years. Sitting on the couch reading on a rainy night, I'll hear him in the distance shouting Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah over and over again and I'm comforted.