You are currently viewing the stories for February, 2003

Milk & Chocolate

by 02/09/2003
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

We’re walking through the Village, it’s freezing, and we’re trying to find a place that has both good hot chocolate and is a good place to breast-feed. It’s not easy. I have nothing to do with the breast-feeding (having no breasts), but I feel responsible for finding the location to do it in. The place […]

Forever Everyday: A Diamond Dealer’s Diary

by 02/06/2003
Neighborhood: Midtown

Part III. Rough diamonds are mined from volcanic vents in Africa. They’re separated into parcels for the London sight-holders who have the stones cut in Antwerp, Israel, or India. The finished products are divvied out to various diamond brokers and then brought over to New York. Over 80% of the diamonds sold in the USA […]

Billy Blanks Owes Me $150

by 02/05/2003
Neighborhood: All Over, Brooklyn

Like most martial artists of my generation, I dreamt of being the next Bruce Lee–or in my case, the “white Bruce Lee.” The difference is I went out and did something about it. As a result, I’ve actually performed in a dozen or so films (yes, I use that term loosely). The first chop-socky flick […]

Everybody Poops

by 02/04/2003
Neighborhood: All Over, Multiple

I found “Timmy’s Potty” laying on the carpet beneath our bed this morning. It’s a toilet training video that my wife purchased for our son about a month ago. It was odd to see it again. I remember the day my wife brought it home from the hippie bookstore. More specifically, I remember how she […]

Shelivedinpublic.Com

by 02/04/2003
Neighborhood: SoHo

“I want to crawl head first into a small cave and curl up into a fetal position.” -From Tanya Corrin’s journal, February 7, 2001 Tanya Corrin and I are having brunch in Little Italy and discussing reality TV shows like ‘Survivor’ and ‘The Real World.’ She’s saying that she doesn’t think that they’re real at […]

On Cleaning: An Interview With My Mother

by 02/04/2003
Neighborhood: Tribeca

I wasn’t always a compulsive cleaner. Quite the contrary: I was once slovenly and slothful– an unmitigated slob. The cleaning disease crept up on me over the years like a bad case of the measles; until, lo and behold, I’d become a fullblown clean freak. The kind who, at 6:00pm, reaches for the Fantastik with […]

I Found a Man in Central Park

by 02/03/2003
Neighborhood: Central Park

I found a man in Central park. I’d been running around the reservoir on a weekend and needed to get home and shower. I wiped my T-shirt on my face, and bent down to tie a lace, and I heard a man telling a joke. I heard him telling the back-story about how this certain […]

Introduction to the Brooklyn Maps

by Thomas Beller 02/01/2003
Neighborhood: Uncategorized

Neighborhood maps of Brooklyn have recently been added to this web site. If you visit them you will immediately notice a problem. The problem, I suppose, has to do with the ambition on the site, which is to have maps covered with red dots each linking to a story that relates in some way to […]

Why Won’t You Learn Chinese?

by 02/01/2003
Neighborhood: Chinatown

For a few months while I was writing my graduate thesis, I was a classroom instructor at an after-school program at P.S. 2, on the northeastern edge of Chinatown. From my apartment on the lower East side, I would walk south on Essex Street to go to work. It was a walk through New York’s […]