A Barney's window display of Lady Gaga's work has legendary multi-media performance artist Colette's notorious creations written all over it.

Colette, whose seminal performance art and multi-media installations originated out of New York City's vibrant art scene in the 1970's has traveled to museums and galleries all over the world; including the Guggenheim; MOMA; and The Whitney.

Upon seeing Barney's Lady Gaga window display in midtown, Colette takes to the streets in protest to send a clear message to the Gaga camp that Colette is standing outside the door and must be invited in and given proper respect.

Hurricane Irene Visits The West Village. A Short Film by Josh Gilbert on Vimeo.

The other day I was walking down 11th Street in the West Village past the recently shut down St. Vincent's Hospital building when something in the alcove on the corner of 7th Avenue caught my eye: a pile of stuffed animals laying in a heap: a teddy bear massacre.

St. Vincent's used to be a source of life, sustenance and healing in our neighborhood. It’s gone now. For 160 years it lived; established by well-intentioned nuns, god-fearing, mercy-seeking healers. According to the local gossip mill, it was bankrupted by a group of bandits on the inside.

Every day during the almost 15 years I've lived on 11th street, distant sirens marked the arrival of new patients coming north and south, up and down the avenues, from points east to west. This building drew patients into it like a gigantic, life generating magnet. Every day but one—but I'll get to that later.

For months preceding the hospital's final moment, stories circulated; pundits hypothesized; neighbors and poets railed and rallied; politicians pointed fingers. I was there when the news trucks, wheeled vultures, marked the final passing. I watched the St. Vincent's sign come off the building. I talked to an old man with a black eye, walking with a cane. He was outraged. Was it the economy stupid or was it just stupid stupid? Neither of us knew.

Then two days ago, on a rainy bleak weekday afternoon, squinting through a lazy drizzle with autumn coming on like a distant freight train, I couldn’t help noticing this dramatic scene outside the dead hospital’s door, with a “closed sign” papered to it.

I stood there and stared at the teddy bears, then took out my camera.

I remember standing by this same alcove, during the mid-morning hours of 9/11/2001, less than an hour after the second tower fell. People from all over the neighborhood flocked here and waited in long lines to donate blood for the victims who never came up the avenue. We waited anxiously, expecting to see ambulances that never arrived, not a stretcher in sight.

Beginning that day and for months to follow, this same alcove became the epicenter for the missing persons fliers that spread throughout the city, with pictures and words describing the details of loved ones lost but not forgotten, and always remembered.

I still don't know where those teddy bears came from. They look so sad, and it makes me even sadder seeing them there.

Josh Gilbert produced and directed a/k/a Tommy Chong, and is currently at work on a new documentary about a young autistic man named Jake, who aspires to become a professional filmmaker.

Our photo editor, Josh Gilbert went out one snowy January day and politely asked some to strike a pose or two.

That’s all for now.

I didn’t know Bubby growing up. She and my dad had a fight when I was 2 and didn’t speak for the next 15 years. Bubby lived out in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in the same apartment my dad grew up in. We lived in California, 3000 miles away. Their differences were easily maintained by the distance and Bubby was rarely discussed. She never sent cards or gifts on birthdays or holidays and was absent from family gatherings. For all intents and purposes, Bubby didn’t exist.

Then came that summer before my senior year in high school when my parents took a fabulous Honolulu adventure tour. Sitting on a bench at a shopping mall in Waikiki, my father casually glanced at the squat old lady sitting next to him and realized he was sitting next to his mother.

They went out for a coffee, and during this brief, fleeting moment of détente, decided it was time for Bubby to pay us a visit.

Several months later she arrived on our doorstep in Los Angeles, swearing about the morons at the airlines and the bastard from the shuttle service who dropped her bag. She ranted and raved, and for the first time in my life, I saw my father shut down in a conversation. She actually rendered him mute. As a rebellious teenager and my father’s chief rival in a game he controlled, I was immediately enthralled by this.

"She’s a random noise generator," my father whined to my mother several days later, helpless, after an afternoon of sight-seeing. "We’re driving along and all of a sudden, out of now where, she starts telling me about five different people, using pronouns to describe each one of them. I don’t have a clue who or what she was talking about. She wouldn’t shut up. I almost drove into on-coming traffic."

It was borscht belt mayhem and great theater. But more than that, she solved my secret, unsolved mystery. She was the half man, half monkey of me. No wonder my dad said "fuck" every other word and flew into those fits of loud, gibbering fury; I suddenly understood why my father was part baboon. He’s been raised by one. My grandmother Bubby, the 4’10", fire-breathing, Yiddishe maniac.

Moments after she boarded the plane (in a wheelchair, complaining) headed back for Brooklyn, my dad came down from the proverbial ceiling and swore he wouldn’t be seeing Bubby again any time soon. But her visit left an indelible impression on me and I was determined to stay in touch.

When I left for college I began calling her every several months for an aural transfusion of her vintage rants. I’d start her off with something provocative. "Hey, Bubby, how’s life out there in New York?"

"What kind of horseshit question is that? How’s New York? It’s a fuck’n sewer. That whore Reagan and his little pimp Bush. Those bastards are fucking everything up. Haven’t you heard all their promises and lies?!? Do you think they care? They don’t care!""

After college, I took a road trip from Santa Cruz to New York, eager to see Bubby and finally catch a glimpse of the "shitbox" my dad grew up in. The shitbox he credited for his prodigious, meteoric ascension through the ranks of academia and into the wealthy suburb I called home. I wanted to see the view out their living room window: the famous Brick Wall of Bensonhurst.

"When I was 8 years old," the old man said one night, during one of his own patented, inebriated rants, "I looked out that shitbox window and I stared at that fuck’n wall and I thought to myself, I gotta get the hell out of here. I gotta get the hell outta here, no matter what it takes."

Ten years later, as a senior at Brooklyn Tech, he had the highest college boards in the state of New York and a full academic scholarship to MIT. I wanted to see the wall. I wanted to take a gander at the fold-out couch my dad shared with his brother for 18 years in the living room of their one-bedroom rat-hole. But Bubby nixed the idea. She wasn’t prepared to "entertain." Instead, she suggested we meet at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. "Bubby, you like modern art?!" I was incredulous.

"Are you crazy? Who gives a rat’s ass about modern art?! It’s air-conditioned! You can sit in the nice, cool cafeteria all day and no one bothers you. I’ll bring sandwiches."

She was right: no one bothered us. We sat in the cafeteria for hours while Bubby fulminated about how it was all my dad’s fault they didn’t get along and how it was actually my uncle (the homeless drifter, but that’s another story) who was the real genius of the family. It was my first trip to New York and my first visit to MOMA, and it took some doing, but I finally convinced her we should take a look at the Pop Art exhibition. She reluctantly agreed.

"Jesus Christ would you look at this crap! You got a toothbrush?!" Her loud voice echoed through the wing.

"It’s a Rauschenberg, you realize. He’s a very famous artist. A seminal thinker. A creative genius. This toothbrush isn’t just a toothbrush, Bubby. It’s a concept."

"Oh what a bunch of horseshit. It’s a mess. It looks like your aunt Ida’s living room floor!"

POW! ZAP! KERPLOW! Bubby stole the show, blazing a trail through the gawking crowd like the chrome rocket bumper detail of a 1956 Chevy Bel Air.

Several years later, my great aunt Bea, Bubby’s sister, suggested they move down to Florida to a retirement community in now-famous Broward County. Bubby was game but there was one huge problem. She was an epic pack rat. Her apartment was piled high from floor to ceiling with things she "might need one day, you never know." The thought of moving compelled her to finally consider what to do with my father’s baby carriage or fifty years of newspapers or the 250 thousand sweet&low packets she’d stolen from diners over the years while no one was watching.

Meanwhile, the super had "the shitbox" promised to a comrade. After two years of procrastinating and excruciating indecision, the comrade showed up on Bubby’s doorstep and offered to pack her things for her, for free. The idea repulsed her, but it was an offer she couldn’t refuse. So she grudgingly relented and looked on, disgusted, as "the rat bastard" packed up 350 large boxes of her essential belongings.

"How could I be so stupid to let this stupid Russian bastard bamboozle me into coming in here and packing my things?!? You wouldn’t believe how stupid he is, putting china together with heavy books. Could he be any sloppier."

"Bubby, he’s been working for free for three weeks."

"Nu? He’s getting a wonderful apartment out of the bargain."

"You mean the shitbox?"

"I’ve been BAMBOOZLED!"

And with the last box through the doorway, I imagine Bubby standing in the empty apartment. Overwhelmed by a surreal, stark vision of sudden total emptiness. Since 1921 she hadn’t seen the floor.

A fleeting thought of relief. All her stuff would be waiting for her in Florida. She was finally free from the sewer of New York. All those dark gray buildings, rats and morons.

As she boarded the bus to the station, a spasm of angst ricocheted through her gray matter. Sparks flying. Random images. Poor, scared peasants run screaming through the dirt streets of a burning shtetl. The statue of Liberty monolithic through the railing of a steamship on a freezing cold winter day in 1917. The oppressive smell of wet wool in a crowded room on Ellis Island.

She Arrived at Penn station and elbowed her way through the crowd and checked the time on the board against the time on her watch…panic. She was late. Of course she was late. Those morons never get you there on time. Scurrying past all the blurry faces, remembering…

Her husband languishing on his deathbed with two small children to feed and clothe. And no help from the community either. Those orthodox bastards at the synagogue! She wasn’t good enough for them. She didn’t have enough money for them to care about her welfare! The bastards wouldn’t help a dying man’s family. One of their own. The trash can. The sewer. Down the escalator to the train. To the tunnel. To warm weather 265 days a year and an all-you-can-eat salad bar in an elegantly appointed community center.

A strange warmth inside big dizziness.

"Excuse me, m’am, are you ok?"

There’s her train. Ready to board. Ready to take her away from all this. To that long-awaited tropical paradise.

Someone call an ambulance.

With all the strength she could muster, she muttered her last, dying words to the unsuspecting paramedic: "take your fuck’n hands off of me! I have a train to catch."

I dropped by the New York Academy of Art with my spiffy digital camera, feeling like an artist and ready to snap a few pics while I waited for my friend, Beag.

Needless to say, it didn’t take long for me to feel like a fraud. For one thing, my friend was taking an exam. An exam in art school isn’t as formal as it is in Law School or Medical School, but there she was, all the same, taking an exam and no one was talking and these big statues were all around the room and I started feeling like an imposter. Then I realized no one noticed, or cared, so I couldn’t help snapping a few pics of my pal Beag through the easel. Here she is, mise en scene, focusing on answering various questions about composition, framing objects on a two dimensional plane, and the like.

Which is to say, fully involved in learning to be a real artist, as opposed to a pseudo digi techno image renderer, Charlie, which is what I am.

Which brings me to my next encounter, with this here monkey:

I framed him in the foreground to add a monkey-feeling to the room.

Meanwhile, those of you out there who are thinking, “Fuck this finance shit, I’m going to Pearl Paints for some charcoal pencils and a sparkle ball. Art school is for lovers. It’s time to express my will through the stylistic imperatives of a Greco-Roman tradition,” please remember, it’s not just about picking up chicks after clay class. It’s about the hard work and quotidien confrontations with the blank page…and spending considerable amounts of time alone in your shades-drawn apartment thinking, “Where the fuck did I stash my weed!?!”

My friend Beag didn’t realize I’d walked into her classroom and she approached me without realizing I’d photographed her (or the monkey for that matter). After she recognized me, and saw the camera, she said, irked, “What are you, a sidewalk in New York city? I fuck’n can’t go anywhere up in this motherfucking building without getting my zeros and ones streamed video to the Man. Damn, dog, why you puttin me on front street? What’s the dealio!?”

To which I replied, tartly, “Actually, since you put it like that: yes.”

(Here, assume a digipic of a large, orange ball)

There was some post-exam socializing. Here Beag is talking to a guy who doesn’t own a digital camera.

Notice the intense focus she brings to this conversation. Meanwhile, he1s probably thinking in his perfectly practiced, vague way: “Chalk up another one for Schwantzie!”

Hereafter, we went up to her specific yet somehow general “time to focus” pod area and met a girl who shares the floor with Beag. It didn’t take long for me to begin obsessing over her pierced tongue. I would have snapped a pic of her (imagine, if you will, a spiky smart blonde with a pierced tongue) but she was holding a tube of oil based paint, which made me feel small and quiet.

Looking at that teardrop of metal on the front central quadrant of her tongue, fuck me if I didn’t think to myself, “I’ll bet she likes James Brown in the house, two margueritas into a surf splashy Mexican sunset. I wish I brought my boxers off the railing. Does she even know my name?” I thought I’d lost her completely when she gave me this complicated look with one raised eyebrow and said, (it was very coincidental that I actually turned at that moment and saw the following pic on her wall that mirrored her and my — was it only projected? — atmosphere):

“Whatever.”

On the way outside, heading for our coffee and some chitchat about the inevitability of art, I came across this masterpiece:

I spent some time noodling around with my digital camera, eager not to miss this classic New York photo op. Beag got impatient and I said to her (I may have been over-reacting): “For crack’n ice, Beag! This rat is dead. I have an obligation to snap a pic. If I don’t remember him, who will?” To which she replied, “I’m sure it1s already a series of zeros and ones in that wall-mounted ditty over there.”

We both looked up. There is was: an industrial video camera mounted on a brick wall, aimed at the dead rat, and us.

With pic captured, we went on the Bubby’s. Weird that the hippist spot for a burger in Tribeca is named after my Polish grandmother. I would have snapped a pic of the spot, but my LCD read out indicated my evening of picture snapping was over.

This morning the cops woke up homeless Ed by banging their stick on the pavement next to his head.

Making a face.

Ed demonstrates what a career in the ring will do to your nose.

Ed has promised to sit down and tell us some stories from his days as a boxer.

For now, we have to wait, but we promise to be back with some more about Ed.

“That plane is flying too low,” she said.

No one seemed to notice. “That plane is flying too low,” she repeated, adding, “And it’s flying right at us.”

People started paying attention and watched in mounting horror as the American eagle plane flew close enough to their building for them to read the letters on the side of the plane. Suddenly, at the last moment, it veered and smashed into the tower next to them.

They heard a loud, thundering explosion and heard the whoosh of air sucked in by the vacuum. Smoke and flames shot out all around them outside their windows. Chaos ensued. People started screaming and running toward the stairwell.

Jennifer joined the rush to safety, making it down to the 52nd floor when, as she put it, “Some jackass started yelling up at us through a bullhorn saying: ‘This tower has been secured. You are in America. Return to your offices!’”

People stopped briefly to process the message. It made no sense, but then what did? They’d just seen a commercial jet fly into the World Trade Center after almost crashing straight into their office. Jennifer and her colleague wondered briefly if they should heed the advice of the bullhorn wielding moron when the second plane struck their building. A gigantic blast of hot air shot up the stairwell with the vacuum created by the blast and the chaos returned in a hellish instant. They turned around and ran up the steps to the 55th floor, which allowed floor access, and ran across a hallway on that floor to a stairwell on the other side of the building where they managed to climb down to safety. Once on the street, they ran screaming through the smoke and falling debris to the Brooklyn Bridge, where they stopped and turned around in time to see their tower collapse.

“We started screaming again and running North and didn’t stop screaming or running until we got home.”