You are currently viewing the stories for “September 2005.”
September 23, 2005: déjà vu? Here we go again, first from the East, now from the West. What a mess! While in Jefferson Parish, Wednesday, I noticed utilities crews leaving in droves. The US Army was on the move as well. It was a strange day, very hazy. Haze and cloudy skies are a good sign with a Hurricane approaching [...]
For six years I worked as a trainer and gym floor manager at the Vertical Club. What Studio 54 was to 1970s New York, the Vertical Club (VC) was to 1980s New York. A warehouse-sized health club, complete with neon lights and blaring dance music, it was where the Big Apple's social elite came to sweat, strain, moan, groan, and [...]
1973. Marvin was the photo editor at the Brooklyn College student newspaper. I liked him a lot, and when, in 1997, after I had an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, he saw it, and trying to locate me, called my mother, he described himself as an “old friend.” Yet I recall hanging out with him only in [...]
"The Case Of The Missing Pasta" I tried improving my second grade special education students' skills at addition by having them count pasta. I had them line up the brown and white rigatoni into two groups. Then all they had to do was add them. It worked well - my students were learning while enjoying what they were doing. Then [...]
There was a while when it seemed like every year New York played host to a parade of hand-painted fiberglass animals. The cows were the most famous. The German shepherds were a lot less famous and they disappeared from the streets pretty quick. But, here and there, you'll still see one, sitting guard outside the entrance to a hospital or [...]
It was a beautiful November afternoon. I was relaxing in my house located in Wagner Projects, when I realized that I had enough money saved up to buy the leather jacket I wanted. So I went in my sneaker box, where I had $500 saved and went to a store called Jan’s. Jan’s is located on 122nd and 3rd Avenue [...]
Sept. 21, 2005: Entering Orleans Parish “Enter Orleans Parish,” read the green sign cocked at a forty-five degree angle announcing my arrival. And with that, I traversed the bridge over the 17th Street Canal, leaving Old Metairie behind and driving into New Orleans. My only impediment to this point was some traffic through Jefferson Parish and a large pile of [...]
Sept. 19, 2005: Bad Press Vast has been the breadth of bad press. It is true that the scope of this catastrophe has gone beyond the bounds of everyone’s foresight. And, in the beginning, nothing short of evil seemed to be seeping from the deluged City. The bad press has evoked action from seemingly stunned inaction and forged a feeling [...]
I came to Washington Park because I did not know where to go. Riding in a cab with my friend John, on his way to study at the NYU library, provided me with a sure and fast way out of his apartment. This morning, a fight had been close to breaking out between the two of us, and the sound [...]
Although I moved to New York in 1994 with Manhattan in mind, I quickly became fascinated with the city’s boroughs. On weekends I'd take the subway to Coney Island, Brooklyn, Astoria, Queens, or the Bronx Zoo to see the other parts of my new home. Staten Island, however, remained elusive. In my early days, I often took the Staten Island [...]
Sept. 10, 2005: A History My first memories of New Orleans come from my childhood visits with my grandparents. My earliest memory comes from being told that if you dug down five feet into the ground you would hit water. As a toddler, this little nugget of knowledge stuck me, and I remember going into the side yard with a [...]
“Kneel. Sit. Stand. Kneel. Sit. Stand. Kneel. Sit. Stand!” Sister Mary Angelina bellows these words to a congregation of frightened eighth graders at St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in southwest Detroit sometime in the mid-1980’s. Almost twenty years later, those angry commands from the most powerful nun known to the class of 1985 have not been forgotten. They are engraved into [...]
i'm getting fat. the thing is, i i'm a dominatrix. so i really can't. it's not that i'm in the habit of over indulging. my sister just got back from switzerland. so i'm eating her presents. that's p-r-e-s-e-n-t-s, not presence. i know you're going to think everything i say is about sex. that's what happens when you're a dominatrix. this [...]
A curved Turkish saber? Yataghan. Faulkner's fictional county? Yoknapatawpha. A musical by Irving Berlin, three words? Yip Yap Yaphank. You don't hear these words every day. But Dad has explained their value. Lots of vowels, certain infrequently-found consonants. They make the puzzle come together. And I am likely to encounter them again, in future Double-Crostics. My father and I sit [...]
Earlier that afternoon I had come back from a trip to visit my Dad in the Midwest. I braced myself for the crush of people as always, but as I left the gate at LaGuardia I immediately noticed that something felt different this time. First in the airport, then on the bus, and finally on Broadway no one seemed to [...]
Johnny Adriani lived in New Orleans. Then, shortly before the Hurricane Katrina disaster, he moved to Baton Rouge. Johnny is a former EMT, and he has tried to lend a hand to Baton Rouge residents and city officials faced with shortages, traffic, civil unrest, and more that have developed since tens of thousands of New Orleanians moved to Baton Rouge [...]
September 2, 2005: Rumors From the local paper: "Rumors of evacuees rioting and looting at Wal-Mart are false," it said. "Please do not assume that information heard is true unless it is from a law-enforcement officer or a release from the office of the Mayor-President." This statement is not exactly fact -- certainly the incident at Wal-Mart was not a [...]
August 29, 2005: Update from BR -- 03:30 Several people attempted to reach me during the afternoon -- I apologise for being "in medias res" of the realm of chaos. I am unsure at this time what will be left of New Orleans when all is said and done, though, I do hold out some hope as I view the [...]
Hello. Thank you for tuning into “The 1st Anniversary of the 2004 Republican National Convention.” Happy Birthday, Mr. President, indeed. Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is proud to present twelve stories recounting the way that the Republican National Convention reshaped New York City, articulated from a wide variety of perspectives and in a wide variety of voices. Click here to enter the [...]
On the far Northern side of a vast concrete enclosure, we had been divided up into two parallel rows at either side of a narrow barricaded space and Jason, our Arresting Officer, stood between the two rows talking about sports, TV, and how he was looking forward to his retirement. Jason was a 23 year old beat cop from Staten [...]
Senator Wellstone: I will not go on about the curious timing of your death. People are very impatient with conspiracy theories these days, even when past theories have revealed conspiracies. Still, I read with weary cynicism that you spoke to a meeting of war veterans in Willmar, Minnesota in October 2002 and told them that Dick Cheney said to you, [...]
(Following is an excerpt from “Chapter 15: Prelude to Battle” of "Now is Not a Good Time," a book-in-progress about (among other things) progressive patriotism, the antiwar movement during the first term of the Bush administration, and one woman’s attempt to learn to love her country and its people—if not its government—in complicated and troubling times. The setting is a [...]
One morning last August, a week before the Republican National Convention, I took a cab to my studio in the Film Center Building on 45th and 9th. My cabdriver was wearing a natty chauffeur’s uniform, cap and all. Once we got going, he smiled at me in the rearview mirror and said, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m all dressed [...]
Take one large city already threatened into a constant state of low-level nervous breakdown with terrorism jitters and a rockpile of an economy. Scare away a large percentage of the population by placing a Republican Convention in the city’s center. Pour in 5,000 delegates, half a million protesters, seven billion journalists and a concentration of cops greater than the entire [...]
I saw your ad for RNC experiences and thought I'd share mine with you. My wife and I participated daily in protests against the RNC and our organizing efforts were filmed by a documentary film crew from Spain's CANAL+ network. When we first heard the Republicans were holding their convention in NYC, we were outraged. It was yet another example [...]
I had that week off from work. I hadn’t yet taken a summer vacation and figured that, like thousands of other New Yorkers, I would get the hell out of the city during that time. I’d walk in the August 29th protest march, make my sentiments known, and then hit the road. But as things turned out, I couldn’t leave. [...]
>From: "LL Smooth J" >To: Subject: RNC Diary: Day One >Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 04:59:29 +0000 > Hello Friends. Pat Flynn threw down the gauntlet with his Boston DNC diary, and no one's picked it up just yet: Whatever, No Problem! I can do it! Day One of the RNC was quieter than expected, and besides I had to [...]
I work in the New York Public Library in the Wertheim Study. Tuesday, August 29th, 2004 I decided to work there and show up at the demonstration against the Republican National Convention to meet at the front steps of the library. Not only did we opposed the war in Iraq, as an expression of an attempt at submission, the Republicans [...]
I expected to lose some dignity, I just didn't expect to lose it on the convention floor. The month of August the New York party business is in a coma--waitstaff and chefs either decamp to the Hamptons where there is plenty of work or vacation themselves. But last summer there were so many parties in town that the waitstaff could [...]
Last August, I lived with my ex-boyfriend in my ex-neighborhood of Brooklyn, neither of which could I find my way around. Coming back from the city late one night -- I remember it being very hot and damp out -- I exited the G's Metropolitan stop around 2 a.m. and halted at the top of the steps, utterly baffled. I [...]
The revered pugilist/philosopher Iron Mike Tyson once mused: "Everyone has a plan until they get hit." And get hit everyone will. Case in point: Many of the Anybody-But-Bush (ABB) protesters who took to the streets of the Big Apple during the Republican National Convention in August 2004. I don't just mean blows suffered at the hands of an over-eager policeman; [...]
