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"I have to get to New York" says the woman in front of me at the Portland, Oregon airport. "You don't understand, I have to get there." She repeats this urgently, in a slightly hysterical voice to a man in uniform behind a counter. I smile at her sympathetically. The flight to JFK has been indefinitely delayed due to snow. [...]
In 1986 I became an international pop music recording sensation. I don’t mean that at the age of 15 I admired and tried to emulate Ad-Rock, a squeaky, strutting third of the fresh hip-hop phenomenon the Beastie Boys—I mean I was Ad-Rock. His band mates—Mike D and MCA—were my homeboys. Sure, there had previously been a Tintin phase and then [...]
The New York Giants are heading to Indianapolis for their fifth Super Bowl. 25 years ago, I spent a perfect day in Pasadena. “Tommy, want some action?” Al said to me on the school bus. “No, the Giants are favored by 9 ½ points.” I answered. “What about over and under, it’s 39 ½?” Now he had my attention. I [...]
Dear American people Dear NYK people Ten years ago I wrote my emotion published on this web place. Ten years after, my emotion and compassion is still strong! Ten years after, one thing is very clear: we must be united to struggle against enemies of freedom. We must be all together finding solutions for economic problems and avoiding extrémisme in [...]
10 years ago today, 9/11/01, I had not yet read E.B. White’s 1949 essay “Here is New York,” which includes the following passage: “The sublest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no [...]
The Asian bug has bitten my younger son Jesse. I don’t mean the flu that comes around every several years and gets blamed on that continent. No, he has been smitten by the mysterious East, and, like Marco Polo, fallen under the spell of the Orient. He is dating an Asian girl. Not that there is anything wrong with that, [...]
1. My first night back in New Orleans I get pulled over by a police car. It's night at the edge of the French Quarter. 2. From amidst flashing blue lights, pierced by that one super bright lamp the cops shine into the car, a figure emerges. I am alone. 3. "I'm sorry," I say. "I for some reason thought [...]
Some people say the 1958 NFL Championship game between New York and Baltimore was the greatest game ever played. Some say it was the playoff game where Carlton Fisk hit that home run. Some say it was the 1980 Olympics when the US Hockey Team beat the Russians. All those people are wrong because I didn’t play in any of [...]
It was Tuesday and I held the door for a well-dressed black woman on my way into Starbucks at Mack and Woodward. She thanked me and I thought of my mother who had taught me to be a gentleman. I followed her up to the counter where four or five more people were waiting to get their badly needed morning [...]
I should have known I was in trouble when I read the wedding invitation and saw that the reception was in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge someplace in New Jersey. The second clue was that the directions were in a foreign language! I was no stranger to ethnic couplings, having seen both the Indian epic Monsoon Wedding, and [...]
"Whether you know it or not, you’re in the Quiet Car," the conductor announced. "That means you have made a commitment to silence. The first obligation is to shut off your cell phones. And just because the train stops at a station doesn’t give you the right to turn it back on to listen to your messages. The phone is [...]
Every Tuesday when I was a small boy my mother would take me to visit a statue of Saint Anthony in Saint Francis Church on 31st Street in Manhattan. Saint Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of the poor. Curiously, he is invoked by those looking for lost things. Along with Saint Jude he is also sometimes called the [...]
Climbing the steps of the Chelsea townhouse, I hoped the guy who opened the door would be a stud. I found him on Craigslist, in the rideshare section. He was headed to L.A. via Omaha, where I was getting off. Nine days had passed since I answered his cross-country-in-a-cargo-van ad. In that time he assured me I was going, then [...]
The middle of May holds much promise for the North Fork surfcaster, or fly fisherman. By that time the striped bass have moved up into the shallow flats and bays around Orient and the water has warmed enough so that the bass have begun to feed with a good deal of purpose. In mid-May the bay waters are clear and [...]
This is a love letter to you, New York, because I have been gone for four months and won’t be coming back for yet another one but I am counting the days, I am crossing off boxes on my calendar (wildlife scenes, pretty pictures of nature, which is what I am living in now and it is beautiful and harsh [...]
I took Bobbi Zymanski to see "Airport '75" at the Holiday Showcase movie house near the airport in October of that same year. It was our first date and I thought the timeliness of seeing an "Airport" movie near an actual airport in the same year that was in the title would sort of sanctify our evening together. That night [...]
Six months out of college, with an undergraduate degree in English literature and still operating on the assumption that my real life had not yet begun, I was offered a job conducting interviews for a market research company. The firm occupied a converted warehouse in a Garden City industrial park, but most of my assignments were to be "random intercepts," [...]
As a survivor of a tragic event, I remember it like it was yesterday and yet, it seems like a dream. The first five weeks were surreal. I don’t know how I got through it. My friends helped. Everyone said I was strong--I wasn’t. I wanted to die. I almost did but I held on bc I figured Jon would [...]
Tan Dun’s new opera, "The First Emperor," which premiered in December at the Metropolitan Opera and included Placido Domingo in the title role, was a complete sell-out for its run. The Met’s new GM, Peter Gelb, created a unique opportunity to expand the audience, by telecasting the WQXR “Live from the Met” broadcast in cities around the country. As one [...]
It’s snowing outside the window, here in northern Michigan. A scattering of thick white flakes, puffs like breath escaping the warm cave of your mouth, swirls like white smoke exhaled slow back in the day when cigarettes were still glamorous. At night, when they fall, you look up into a sky that is seamlessly black, stars like change on a [...]
Most people I knew in 1969 thought they would live for ever or die young and pretty. Consequences for bold acts were not important, although less for some than others. I, for example, could push things just so far. There were no lawyers in my family, no connections, no one to bail me out of a jam. Still, stealth and [...]
It’s snowing when our plane touches down in Washington, D.C. Christmas morning, cold and dark. The terminal doors slide open and we are hit with a blast of bitter air. We bundle the girl in blankets and she stares through the car windows at the falling flakes of snow. The wipers beat back and forth and the tires hiss through [...]
It never fails. When I venture outside of midtown, something extraordinary happens. My muse, Madelaine, had a graduation party last weekend at a new downtown club. I invited The Prince of Darkness to accompany me. The Prince of Darkness works like the devil, so, needless to say, it's difficult to get him out of his crypt. The Prince of Darkness [...]
It sounds like Harlem when black people in New Orleans talk, but way more so. They open their mouths and cane syrup sounds roll out. “Awright, Sugar. Heego, dawlin’,” said the steam table lady serving shrimp as I lunched at a conference that brought me recently to this gorgeous, mangled city. I asked where she was from. “Law Naan,” she [...]
This past Saturday's election was as colorful as the primary--Just with fewer candidates. Scholars will probably dissect Mitch Landrieu's loss for the next several months by analyzing black versus white voting patterns and the numbers from each precinct along with the fact that it was a beautiful day for a stroll to the polls and then, perhaps, they will count [...]
Johnny Depp slips me a twenty when we shake hands. Do that again, I say. "It's preparation, it's all preparation," he explains, and we shake hands again, more of a brush of fingers really, the sort of discrete low key maneuver any drug dealer in the park would be proud of. A twenty dollar bill appears in my palm. Johnny [...]
Election day in New Orleans has always possessed a flare unlike anywhere else in the world. My first recollections of how crazy election day can be come from 1989. Nothing, however, topped 1991, when Edwin Edwards and David Duke competed against each other in the run-off. Nothing, that is, until Saturday's semi-circus atmosphere outside the condensed polling locations. My polling [...]
I, Granny, took the helm at approximately 1200 hours. Steering a true course, all was calm for the day. The squab finished his mess; skies remained calm, no squalls of crying. Grandson and I played toss with a small orange ball and spent hours crawling around. Tumble salts off my legs; giggles of delight. Peek-a-boo's repeated over and over again [...]
The odds for winning the Powerball are146 million to one. I would suppose that finding the winning ticket lying on the street would be a million times the 146 million to one. But I do propose to you the question of how likely it would be for a mayoral candidate of New Orleans to be walking in downtown Baton Rouge [...]
So I fell in love with this girl named Kate. And all that remains is this sordid little correspondence that I have left from the beginning our affair. I wish it included all the walks we took on the snowy streets of Detroit or the hours we spent laying in bed daydreaming about tomorrow. But it doesn’t, it’s just a [...]
"Philadelphia is nobody's sixth borough," proclaimed the heading of a column in one of Philly's daily newspapers. "Especially not New York's," the column went on to say. The writer was responding to a New York Times article chronicling the migration of New Yorkers to Philadelphia. It noted that Philadelphians themselves occasionally referred to their city as New York's sixth borough. [...]
At the beginning of February, the city was overrun by rabid sports fans. I went downtown about 9 days before the big foosball game. Streets were barricaded and blocked off. Downtown Detroit had a different type of buzz. Metro Detroiters were excited because so many people would be in town. Here in the Midwest, we suffer from big big city [...]
The headline on the Detroit Free Press was bold. But it was just another clever way of stating the obvious. Ford Motor Company was going to announce "The Way Forward," actually a way to cut back. Ron Novack sat at his kitchen table and skimmed the story about the plant closures and layoffs that would be announced today. He sipped [...]
I learned a lot from my grandpa, John Francis O'Brien, a native of Cork city (Ireland) and an immigrant to America. He used to always say that he was closest to God when he was connected to nature. Grandpa was quite an unusual character in our working class neighborhood on Detroit's West Side, just a few miles from the city's [...]
Today I had perhaps the most unique experience that I have ever had in my lifetime. I began walking the streets of New Orleans and speaking to people on a one on one basis. This may seem odd to you, and perhaps it is, but I canvassed New Orleans today not as a citizen but as a candidate for Mayor. [...]
Before we could convince him to go the neurologist, my father had two head-on collisions in eleven months without remembering how he’d gotten into either of them. Despite my suspicions, I didn’t learn it was Alzheimer’s for sure until my oldest brother called to tell me on the day before Thanksgiving. The call came ten minutes before my parents were [...]
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