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Day 24. Widespread looting in Baghdad. I had been gearing up for three weeks for the antiwar demonstration in D.C., but as it approached I became uncomfortably aware of several things. First of all, none of my friends were going, in fact, most had not even heard about the demonstration. Secondly, I did not like the prospect of having to [...]
On the Wall Reading Series at Cornelia St. Cafe welcomes Mr. Beller's Neighborhood Readers include: Elizabeth Frankenberger Debbie Nathan Gerald Howard and Annie Bruno WEDNESDAY APRIL 23 6:30pm Cornelia St. Cafe 29 Cornelia St. (for directions, go to www.corneliastreetcafe.com)
The pictures on this page are 360 panoramic images. If you do not have Quicktime (and you'll know if there are no pictures visible even after a minute), Download it here. These are not static pictures. You can move them left and right, up and down. To move the image: Hold down mouse button and drag mouse in desired direction. [...]
Yesterday, after visiting my family in my small hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, I took the train back to New York City, my chosen home. Though it was a weekday, the platform was congested with people. Some stood naively about and others, like myself, train-savvy, were waiting in the place where the train's opening doors would stop, poised to board ahead [...]
Day 14. U.S. troops four miles from Baghdad. It was 9 PM and I was out of Breathe Right strips. If I don't have Breathe Right strips I can't sleep soundly, so I put on my coat and my orange button that has a photograph of a very sweet looking little Iraqi girl and the words, "Stop the War on [...]
Photographs by Alexej Steinhardt and Thomas Beller Click here for more information about the 360 One VR When not in use however, the attachment comes with a plastic jar that screws over the mirror ball, to protect it. The plastic jar makes it look downright lethal, weird, and mad-scientistish, and I was a little concerned about wandering around the streets [...]
Day three 1,300 cruise missiles and bombs hit Baghdad. At work I have to use the freight elevator to bring my bicycle into the office. The elevator’s operated by an older Eastern European man with a deeply lined face and thinning hair. He dresses in the company uniform and a pair of beaten Air Jordans. It’s always seemed to me [...]
The late great comic Bill Hicks once said, famously, apropos the first gulf war: "I find myself in the unenviable position of being for the war -- but against the troops." Nobody that I've heard has come up with a similar corker this time around, a line which can sum up the personal confusion and official hypocrisy so succinctly. There [...]
I took a taxi to the peace rally. My driver was a Puerto Rican guy playing loud salsa music. There was no partition. Some post cards were taped to his dash. He sat in the driver's seat with pride of ownership. It was his cab, I was his guest. He had the window down and an elbow out the window, [...]
At about quarter to five this past Thursday I got into a cab at 56th and Broadway; my destination was the Port Authority and the Short Line Bus to my home in Orange County. It was a rainy, miserable day and I was damned glad to get the cab. My driver was relievedly Haitian -- one checks these days. As [...]
The staff of Murder Ink are always answering questions. People want book recomendations. They want to know when their favorite author has another title coming out. Sometimes they bring in a stack of books and ask how much money they can get for them. But the most frequently asked question, always over the phone, goes something like this: "Yo. Can [...]
I first came to Williamsburg in 1992 , to visit a painter friend’s studio. He would travel there every day from the Upper West Side, a long but worthwhile trip because the studio space was so cheap. Back then, the crowd of people that got off with us at the Bedford Avenue L stop disappeared quickly and mysteriously, and we [...]
Tuesday night some friends and I were sitting on a bench in Union Square, talking about the new game shows and dating shows and how there were so many hyped-up programs these days that were really just Candid Camera remakes. If you live long enough you see everything twice. Then we kind of ran out of material and fell into [...]
Late last year, the young Chinese couple who ran the Szechuan D'Or restaurant on East 40th Street were murdered. The incident sparked fear that the crime which had riddled Chinatown was moving uptown. Police launched a citywide campaign to wipe it out. The crackdown played havoc with established vice in Chinatown. Youth gangs, foot soldiers of neighborhood crime, were forced [...]
On Saturday, February 15th, I woke up at my usual time, and as I pattered around the apartment, I glanced out of my window to check the weather. It was bleak, only twenty-five degrees, with blistering winds, and on 47th Street there were at least twenty police vehicles lining the sidewalks. I started to pick up the sounds around me, [...]
The beers cost seven dollars and the DJ had A.D.D. He kept stopping the tracks midway through, throwing the girls off. There were two rooms, and opposite the bar in each room was a stage. The stage in the front room had a baby-blue wooden banister cordoning it off from the bar, and a sign in magic marker on poster [...]
Jason knew that some kind of incident was imminent the moment the tattooed monster crossed the threshold into the small space in front of the counter. The other customers shrank away as the monster ordered his food. He was overconfident, full of bluster, and trying desperately to project toughness and hardness. Even though it was a laughable display it was [...]
One of the sayings where I work is that we see them all. Creaky old dope fiends with nine lives and wrecked veins, skinny young Africans with silky French accents, and lots of distracted crack smokers with rattling lungs. We also see the occasional sweet matronly mami from Puerto Rico or a doe-eyed young innocent from Harlem. But for the [...]
There are some guys whose pattern is to realize a supposed deep love once they know a woman doesn’t want them. Maybe that explains me and Cristina. Maybe guys like me can't love at all, so we mask our loveless souls with occasional dream loves, pure in their unobtainability. We safely suffer limited devotions at the alters of impossible bitches. [...]
The cold wreaked transformation: bone chilling and serious, the kind that keeps people home, yet here we were, all of us, shivering, waving signs, gleeful. Maybe half a million, and if the media says otherwise don’t believe it. Half a million! Could we really stop a war? At times like this, people change. I saw possible proof by the curb. [...]
I took two of my kids to see the new Adam Sandler picture, “Little Nicky,” and there it was again, behind Sandler as he sniffed some flowers: Tom’s Restaurant at 112th and Broadway. When I was at Columbia College, in the gray and bankrupt and crumbling 1970s, my friends and I had a joke that someday, older and successful, we’d [...]
Your books were a little bit strange, and that ended up working in your favor since none of us wanted them at first glance. Stuff about yoga and spiritual exercise, something about linguistics, and a medieval text. There were five of them in the bag, complete with your credit card receipt from the Barnes & Noble, with a couple of [...]
I went to Penn Station to snap a picture or two and perhaps in the process imbibe a feeling for my grandmother, Bubby, who went there ten years ago (this month) to catch a train... 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. [...]
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 should be warm, with comfortable [...]
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 pass through 47th Street, making [...]
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 a couple of paper towels [...]
"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 all, that they're almost comletely [...]
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 celebrity and his boring wife [...]
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 immigrant cultures and palimpsestic history--an [...]
A guy with his earlobes stretched around bingo chips and a bullring through his septum pulled a box of nose studs from the glass case. “How do they stay in?” I asked. “It’s a coil and it rests against the outside of your nostril,” he said, making a swirling motion with his finger. I chose the smallest silver stud, trying [...]
I've been dating a Mid-western man for the past two months. Well, it's actually been one month that I've been dating him, and one month that he's been away in Florida "visiting his mother." This man happens to be the oldest I have ever dated--41--ten years my senior. Perfect, I thought. Older, more mature, has his act together, money in [...]
Along about now, dozens of shaggy guys prowl the streets of New York, looking for a new barber, wondering where and from whose hands their next haircut and a shave are going to come now that the State Barber Shop has closed and Giorgio Campli retired. George left for Italy a few weeks back. There, he’ll live off his social [...]
Quality of life during my ten-year stay in London Terrace Gardens (the ten-building brick behemoth spanning an entire square block at Ninth avenue and 23rd Street) was greatly enhanced by the presence of elevator men. These were resourceful men, mostly of Hispanic descent who grew up in Chelsea, who kept watch over the building, picked up your UPS packages, and [...]
Paul Simon did not wear a tux. He sat by the fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center, a photographer by his side, and another guy, a journalist? Several people wandered up to him. He seemed very approachable, as though he wanted to chat in the pleasant evening light. He wore a tweed jacket and a blue baseball cap. His [...]
In 1991, I was a student at New York University, working at a bookstore, and this woman came up to me out of nowhere and basically asked me to come audition for her film. She was a casting director for this PBS Masterpiece Theater thing. The part was for a quote-unquote "little person." I'm four foot six, and they were [...]
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