Entries from April 2006 ↓

These are some amazing photos that flickerer Runs With Scissors dug out and scanned, from his teenage years — the early 80′s. Start the photoset here, or go to Gothamist, which has blogged it as yesterday’s Photo of the Day.

They’ll take you back. For those of us who weren’t in NYC in the 80′s, they’ll take you there.

I could not be more proud of the Grannies Peace Brigade, currently on trial in NYC on disorderly conduct charges. The women, aged 50-91, were arrested after trying to enlist in the Army at a recruitment station, as a protest against the war in Iraq. Though they had previously been holding vigils outside Rockefeller Center to protest the war, Manhattanite Joan Wile got the idea for this recruitment center action from the Tucson Raging Grannies:

When Wile, a Manhattan grandma of five, heard about the Tucson event, she grew inspired. By then, she had formed Grandmothers Against the War and had organized the Rockefeller Center vigils. Yet the attempted enlistment seemed fresh, provocative, the kind of protest the average person would notice.

“It was obviously the thing to do,” says Corrine Willinger, 78, a local Raging Granny who heard about Tucson through the grapevine and who attended Wile’s vigils.

Willinger and Wile got cracking, sending out word to the Gray Panthers, the Raging Grannies, and Code Pink, calling any activist in their Rolodexes. To grandmas all over, they made their pitch to enlist, thus symbolizing a desire to spare kids—their grandkids—from a senseless war. It wasn’t an especially tough sell.

“I said, ‘Sure, see you there,’ ” recounts Marie Runyon, the oldest of the New York brigade at 91. Runyon is legally blind and walks with two canes, yet she trekked from Harlem to Times Square. “I thought it was a great idea to get the message through to that son of a bitch in the White House,” she explains. “Our men are dying and the Iraqi people are dying and for what—for that idiot Bush!”

Betty Brassell, 76, of the Lower East Side, decided to shuffle uptown with her walker after spotting a leaflet on the enlistment. She didn’t know the grandmas who would become her fellow defendants. Simply put, she says in a soft Southern lilt, “the flyer said Grandmothers Against the War and I’m strongly against this war.”

By October 17, 18 grandmas had committed to enlist. They convened in Times Square across the street from the recruiting center, where they met their attorney, veteran New York civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel, who was serving as a witness, not to mention dozens of senior supporters draped in “RAGING GRANNIES” signs and signature floppy hats.

When the anti-war grannies approached the station, the door was locked. No one appeared inside, though Wile says she saw someone peek from behind a desk. Evidently, the military had foiled the grannies’ plan, so they improvised what occurred next. “I was so angry,” Runyon recalls with a chuckle, “I started banging on the door, singing, ‘If I had a hammmerrrr!’ ”

The grandmas took over a building ramp near the station door and, one by one, crouched to the ground. “That was the hardest part,” Wile confides, “all these old, beat-up broads with arthritic problems getting down on the ground.”

Eventually, a police officer warned the grannies to disperse or face arrest. Minutes later, a half-dozen cops were gingerly escorting them to a midtown precinct, where the grandmas remained for four hours.

I applaud the Grannies. I think it’s ridiculous that they’re being prosecuted (and apparently in such a time-consuming fashion), but I think the publicity from this is all good. Apparently, they have the same idea. People have been packing the courthouse to support them, and Cindy Sheehan was there today, I was told by a Quaker friend who was also there. And what if the worst happens, sentence-wise? Well, Marie Runyon, (yes, I have to repeat this:) the legally blind 91-year-old lady with two canes who walked from Harlem to Times Square for the protest isn’t afraid:

“Oh hell!” says Runyon. “I would go to jail if I had to just to make the goddamn point! You’ve got to make a statement.”

What have you done to protest the war today?

She had been in ill health in Italy for some time. Nevertheless, the loss of Muriel Spark caught me off guard. She wrote twenty-one novels, and the best known and most celebrated The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is not even her best. Mind you, the movie of the novel gave Maggie Smith (another Dame) the chance to act the part of a crazy middle-aged woman, which is what she has always done best.

I have long been fascinated by Spark–as much as an example of what it means to be a woman and an artist in the mid-20th century, as anything else. She married young, divorced young, and raised a son as a single mother, while churning out those twenty-one novels. She was divorced, working and raising a son alone, when those were not things women did. Graham Greene was an admirer of her early work–no surprise, since they share a certain sensibility–and he helped her out when she was poor as a church mouse. She was a convert to Catholicism, and like most converts of any stripe, slightly obsessed (I speak from experience). Like Greene, her characters were as liable to think about moral questions (good vs. evil) as they were to drink a cup of coffee or read a newspaper.

If I only read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I probably would have stopped there. It’s a good enough novel, but not my cup of tea. But in my 20′s, I went on a Spark bender, reading a number of her works in close succession. I started with The Girls of Slender Means, which is set in London just at the end of WWII. The Girls live in a women’s residence, which I think attracted me because at the time, I lived in one too (a women’s hotel: remember Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari in drag in “Bosom Buddies”?) In the 90′s, when I lived in one, of course, it was a hangover from another time, when young ladies who worked too far from their parents to live at home, did not have their own apartments. These places still exist, and can be a great place to crash for a few months when you move to a new city, like New York. They’re also quite archaic and funny, and always home to a few odd older women (not unlike those in the May of Teck Club in the novel).

So there I was in a women’s residence reading about the Girls in their 1945 version of the same. A kind of palimpsest, no? The novel was layered with narrative upon narrative, voice upon voice, another palimpsest. David Lodge once said something to the effect that Muriel Spark has employed all of the techniques associated with postmodernism–she just did so forty years ago (and he said this 10 or 15 years ago). I think this experimentation was often overlooked by critics.

Then I moved on to Loitering With Intent and my personal favorite A Far Cry from Kensington, in which the main character lives in a rooming house, works for an editor, and loses an enormous amount of weight by “eating half” of anything she would have eaten before. That in itself is a clever enough idea but takes an enormous amount of focus and will-power, and obsessiveness. And Spark’s characters are so often obsessed. Muriel Spark knew something about people. The idiosyncratic craziness inside each and every one of us, just waiting to surface.

Spark returned from South Africa to London, and then lived in New York and the Rome and Tuscany, but she always wrote in long-hand on a particular brand of bound, lined notebooks, shipped to her from a stationer’s in her native Edinburgh. She was as obsessive as some of her characters, but I mean it in a good way. The English language has lost one of its best living writers. RIP, Dame Muriel Spark.

…not right now. But I walk a lot. And I have been taking some photos here in beautiful Long Island City (LIC, NYC). For the uninitiated, we are in Queens, just over the East River. It’s only technically Long Island (like Brooklyn is Long Island, you know?)

Soon the water taxis will be running and the “beach” bar will be up and everything will be rocking and rolling here in LIC.

Enjoy!

This is the view northwards: Queensborough Bridge, the illuminated Pepsi sign (that’s the big red light you see, which looks like a hand pointing to the heavens, or maybe one of those foam hands people buy at sports games, which proclaim “We’re Number One!”).

This is an old railroad gantry, next to the pier (from which all these other shots are taken):

And this is the view across the river: that’s the Empire State Building lit up on the left, and the large rectangular building towards the right is the UN. This one’s especially for Warwick in Australia, whose folks lived in NYC a few years back while his dad was a UN delegate.

Okay, that was pretty easy. It isn’t high art–they’re all taken on my camera phone.

I will be doing more photo-blogging, kids. Stay tuned!

Hello there! I have come out of the cave in which I am working (dissertation, job, unpacking boxes, you know) in order to bring you a special bulletin.

Cyrille de Lasteyrie (aka Vinvin) is a genius, and I am not in the habit of using such terms loosely. His Bonjour America is the best thing I have ever seen (for free, on the web). I discovered him while trying to catch up with Bicyclemark’s recent blog postings. (It’s a truism that most of my good internet finds come from Bicyclemark.) He’s a Frenchman who has something to say to America. And he is a very funny man. What’s refreshing is that while Vinvin is critical of American culture and foreign policy, his commentary is (from what I have seen) always funny and never facile. He obviously loves us, dislikes Bush, and wants to teach us about cheese.

Go and watch “The Frencheese Project.” As Vinvin says,

You’ll be scared, and then you’ll learn a few things about cheese. Is the french cheese good for the health? This is the big question of this episode!

Or watch “What do we think about America? A big poll,” and find out what the French think about Dick Chenay. (Yes, Dick Chenay.)

Or just enjoy a nice impersonation of Charlie Sheen with a French accent.

What could be better? Well, there is a whole archive worth of vlogs from Bonjour America. So have fun answering that question yourself. And do answer it, please. If I keep posting at the heady rate of once every 5 weeks, I do expect you to try and keep up. In return, I will endeavor always to include a picture, Dear Reader, for your enjoyment.