You are currently browsing the stories about the “Letter From Abroad” neighborhood.
Sprouting out of the ground, just south and east of New Orleans, is Christmas. It is a bizarre sort of nativity scene which bears the fruited colors of the season: green and red. Absent are the Magi bringing frankincense, myrrh or oil. Rather, what is present, green on the outside and red upon being split open, is the fruit of [...]
On this warm, wet Christmas, I ambled without purpose somewhere in America. I prefer the inevitable disappointment of a sodden Christmas--the remains of an earlier December snowfall dribbling down storm drains, the exiled smokers unshivering, unbothering with jackets, exhalations elongated in the humidity, the theatrical coziness of houses all the more fake against temperatures well above freezing. Through the neighborhood [...]
12 December 2005 It has been some time since I have written an update concerning New Orleans. In truth my delinquency is due to the fact that I have been extremely busy in the process of cleaning up. You know when I am busy when you do not receive a rambling of text ranting about the shortcomings of Government. Through [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
We crossed the Delaware River, made a tremendous 270 degree turn under the bridge and dropped down in to the city streets. The plan: stay at Alison’s parents house in Philly that night, wake up early, pick up the two vans from Hertz, proceed to a designated church in the suburban township of Devon for an organizational meeting with members [...]
Thomas Beller's new book is a collection of essays titled, "How To Be a Man." ** "Those who live out here are very likely living in the cultural shadow of golf. It's not so much the game of golf that influences manners and morals; it's the Zenlike golf ideal." -- "Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia" by David Brooks, NY Times Magazine, [...]
The following article was reported and written in the winter and spring of 2002. This article deals, in part, with the fact that Jason Kidd's childhood was formed in part by his chores caring for horses. ** It was a cold winter night, and the Knicks were playing the Nets. I took the bus from Port authority. No sooner does [...]
A flaming sunset in western Cambodia, in the middle of 1972. I was coming back from my uncle's house. I was about 500 meters from my house, when there were suddenly terrific sounds, like thunderclaps, "Boom! Boom! Boom!" Immediately, I saw the spark and the firelight emerging into the flaming sky. I was very frightened and scared and ran very [...]
We were natives. We were cool, urban sophisticates who would never admit to being otherwise. If anyone asked, we were from New York City, even though we’d been raised in the suburban sprawl—my cousin was from Jersey and I was from the Island. He and I had legitimized ourselves as New Yorkers by boasting we’d never been to any tourist [...]
P> My boiler broke in February, after the pedestal sink on the second floor of my home gave way and tipped over, thanks to an aging sixpenny nail. The upstairs bathroom quickly filled with water and began seeping through the gaps in the floor’s tile grout. The ceiling of my kitchen, on the first floor, starting leaking in spots where [...]
I just got back from Uncle Dick's funeral service out in Cortez, Colorado. I didn't know Dick alive, but I got to know him pretty well during his memorial service, and then later staying at his house while Cheryl’s mother tied up some of his personal affairs. From all traces Dick was an authentic man’s man; he grew wheat and [...]
Writing you from the 'monsen memorial public library' in Naknek, Alaska. Fantastic little joint--the librarian is a long black-haired tlingit (pronounced 'klink-it') woman who just let me use her computer. there are about five other patrons in the stacks, among them, a longshoreman whom i know named 'al'. Outside, the fine smell of salty air and wet tundra is fighting [...]
The first time I saw Billy Brooks he was riding around Ojo Sarco, a sparse village of yellow adobe huts and longhouses grouped on either side of a ravine. It was 1971. Billy was on a tall horse the color of city mud and surrounded by varmints waving rifles like the banditos in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre". Among them [...]
Continued from Part One It's tough playing to a half-empty house, but there is some consolation if the house you're playing holds 60,000 people. It's been a beautiful day in Oakland, and now, in the cool blue dusk, the crowd upfront is getting seriously pumped. As usual, Oasis are immobile. Arthurs is, for reasons no one can fathom, the recipient [...]
We arrived at Giants Stadium. There are four huge spiraling ramps through which the stadium's population of 80,000 enter and exit. They wind their way from the ground level up to the top, a huge cement coil faintly reminiscent of the Guggenheim Museum, though with a more prison vibe. My friend explained that it was a tradition for all the [...]
This story ends with a blind Chinese Bibliophile. But it begins in a moment of weakness, when I capitulated to the temptations at hand and called a realtor who specialized in barnes and farm houses and asked to look at a few. The rolling hills and open skies of Western New York had me in their spell, and I, in [...]
On this past Tuesday, November 7th, just about every living room in America was its own small war room. Phones rang, people screamed at the television, and moods soared and plummeted (it is an absolute certainty that every single person who cared about the election experienced, on that particular night, at least one gigantic mood swing). Off all these war [...]
When U.S. soldiers came back from Vietnam they claimed to have been greeted at airports by hippies who spat at them and called them baby-killers. Recently historians have done research on this, the results of which have been: no evidence to support the spitting allegations, nothing, not one incident, zip. They forgot to talk to me. Not that I hunked [...]
Michael Chabon told us that The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (246-6080) was offended by this piece when it was first published in Civilization Magazine (Harper's reprinted it, too, and you can find it and a lot of other Chabon related stuff on his website, http://home.earthlink.net/~mchabon/). This seemed sufficiently peculiar that we called them up to ask why. But no [...]
In 1992, I attended a reading in celebration of the publication by Leon Forrest of his fifth novel, the 1,135-page "Divine Days," at the long since closed Brentano's on 53rd Street in Hyde Park, Chicago. I took along my former girlfriend, a quiet, awkward jazz DJ with whom I'd had trouble separating. The crowd that night was made up of [...]
The good old days: when you could look to farthest downtown Manhattan and see nothing but open sky and the grand old buildings of another age; when urban blight—the abandoned or bustling warehouses and factories, the vacant lots, the decaying piers, the alleys, the child’s endless treasure-trove of it all—was as romantic and magical as any enchanted woods in a [...]
"America. Boom. America. Boom. Boeki Centaa. Boom." During my time in Japan, I had grown quite used to not understanding what the hell people were trying to tell me. But this was a new one. Usually you can decipher the broken English of the Japanese by taking an abstract view of the words and changing a few L's and R's [...]
"I LOVE THAT MAN A BITCH!" SHOUTS LIAM GALLAGHER. HE JUMPS OUT OF HIS CHAIR and paces around the room in a small tight circle. "If anyone stepped on his toes, I'd cut them off!" Liam sits down, and his voice becomes grave and somber. "I'd do time for 'im. I luv 'im. Me and 'im are cool. But..." and [...]
I said my good-byes to Oasis in the lobby of a posh hotel in San Francisco. Elevators ascended to the skies in clear glass tubes and businessmen in dark suits marched in and out while the boys lay around on the overstuffed couches, profoundly hung over, trying to rouse themselves for the sound check for that night's show, the second [...]
Brisbane. I was back. I had enjoyed three eventful years in downtown Manhattan before deciding to spend the last months of 2001 on hiatus with my parents in Brisbane, Australia. Since moving to New York in 1998, I'd joked with friends at home that it was the Island of Dog Years -- every four weeks seemed stuffed to capacity with [...]
First came the hugging and the crying and the storytelling. We're all alive and it's groovy. Long live the marketing department! Long live the company! We'll rebuild! Then came the fatness. Working in an office, in a cubicle, is the surest way to obesity. You scorch your eyes looking at the Internet all day, sipping a mocha with whipped cream. [...]
Mr. Chancellor at the Algonquin bar in New York, before Amsterdam’s influence set in. I am much embarrassed to reveal that in 60 years I have never tried pot. I remember about 30 years ago being at a supper party in Rome when the person next to me at table passed me what I thought was a lit cigarette. I [...]
I am not an American citizen and my only knowledge of New York City had been through TV series and movies. But three years ago I decided to save a few bucks and visit. From the moment I took the cab from JFK airport, I felt like I was coming back home. It was strange: the landscape seemed familiar. Friends [...]
As the son of an Iranian father and a Jewish mother my sense of sorrow concerning the disaster of September 11 does not tend toward patriotism. In fact, I am repelled by it. I speak as a first-hand victim of American patriotism in 1979, the year 66 U.S. diplomats were taken hostage in Iran. The underbelly of American patriotism is [...]
Several weeks have passed since I rushed around among cities on the West coast doing readings for the Salinger book, and still the event that stands out most vividly came from the end of the very first night, at the House of Nanking in San Francisco, one of my favorite restaurants anywhere and certainly one of the best Chinese food [...]
I've disliked living on Long Island for about as long as I can remember. Now I hate it. It started as child, thrust into a culture that coddled me. My friends never understood why I, as a music student, craved visits to the city. To them, Long Island offered everything Manhattan did with added bonuses: sprawling houses, trees, yacht clubs, [...]
My neighbors don't have window shades. They are a man and woman in middle age, childless, quiet, and coping. At night, they shudder in the light of the TV which is always on in their bedroom, reruns of Kojak or The Lucy Show or Dick Van Dyke. Often, he's sprawled in bed, surfing the channels, while she's staring at some [...]
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
