Bad News Muse

This image was part of my old portfolio, the one I submitted to the School of Visual Arts in 1983. I was nominated for a four-year, full paid scholarship based in part on this work. However this photograph is difficult for me to look at.

I met Kelly in the ninth grade at Truman High School in the Bronx, I think we had a last period science class together and for a short while, he was also on the track team with me. Yep, my fat Jewish ass was once on a state championship high school track team.

Go ahead and laugh because I soon discovered drugs and cutting class and soon enough Kelly and I became reacquainted and after awhile, friends.

Kelly's life was difficult. He moved from to the Bronx from New Jersey where he had some serious run-ins with the law. He could easily turn violent despite his seemingly humble origins. And again, we were friends and I felt safe.

As I became more involved with photography Kelly would be my muse every once in awhile. He posed for the shot above at the Morris Park Avenue subway station in the Bronx. I remember quite clearly asking him to give me a "jail house look" for this picture. Who knew that would become reality?

Sometime after my own home life became a living hell I figured out how I could pay for college on my own. I started attending Bronx Community College in the Winter of 1984. On one hand it was one of the worst things I ever did in my life as the school was the wrong place for me and I stayed there for too long working the whole while. On the other hand, it might have saved my life.

In the first weeks of my first semester I would get off the bus along Jerome Avenue in the Bronx at about 183rd Street and each morning. I would pass drug dealers offering "road runner", "one", and "one and two". I never heard anything about the stuff and so I just ignored the dealers. Then by the springtime I heard "crack" and "one and two" and I began to understand but didn't think too much of it. I was going to school from 8:00 am until the late afternoon and working a full-time shift at a high-end film and print processing plant in midtown saving money in hopes of paying for the next semester and that month's rent.

Once my spring vacation rolled around I found that many of the people I used to smoke pot and drink beer with in the North Bronx were now smoking crack too. Things changed very quickly during my first semester of college and I don't doubt that if I hadn't gone to that horrible school, I too would have become a crackhead.

Kelly and I stopped hanging out altogether when I moved to another part of the Bronx. I only heard stories about him and others from then on.

Then came the bad news. Kelly murdered someone. He now serves a life sentence.

Going through my old photos I came across the one below. Behind Kelly and his girlfriend is the person he would later kill. (Seated in the center with his back to the camera).

Hard pictures to look at.

When Does It End

When will my emotions stop my physical self from being seizing up? When will I get over being terrorized?

It happens whenever I travel from New Jersey into New York on the PATH subway line into the former World Trade Center station. The train turns 360 degrees around what is known as 'the tub' , a concrete foundation shaped like a tub that keeps the Hudson River from flowing into where the foundation for the Twin Towers were. True to form of New York City's resilience and grit, the buildings are gone and all but the Tub remain. The PATH train moves as it always has around the perimeter of the tub - - only now it's like a toy train running around a large open and grey hallow. I find it most disturbing and morbid. I wish they would install think black curtains so this view would be blocked.

Although I would like to see view of the tub obscured, I'm not to sure what to make of the random postcard, tourist souvenir and lighting fixture I come across bearing an image of the World Trade Center.

I watched a preview this weekend of Oliver Stone's new movie on my computer. I so wanted to just enjoy seeing Nicholas Cage play a working class Noo Yawka - - a role I enjoyed seeing him do in Bring Out The Dead - - but all I could do was bawl.

I thought about the movie, the event it portrays and events that have followed and hope that everyone can just agree that the continued violence that has ensued must cease.

Brooklyn Landmark

It seems as though nearly every city has one. A landmark that can be seen where you are that's way up high that points in a certain direction and helps guide and point people in a particular direction.

Paris has its tower as Washington DC has is monument. Manhattan has the Empire State and Brooklyn, well sometimes there's the Williamsburg Savings Bank Clock Tower.

I grew up in The Bronx and rarely went out to Brooklyn, unless it was to get laid or got to an all-night party. Most of the time these adventures would take my into the Fort Greene and the then not so nice to go Park Slope. I always knew if I could find my way back to that clock tower I then find a place to get a bagel to settle my stomach for the two-hour IRT 4 to the 2 to the 5 train back to Baychester station in the Bronx.

Although I don't get as lost in Brooklyn as I used to, I still have a fondness for the ugly clock tower. I think it reminds me that Brooklyn was once the nation's fourth largest city before it merged with New York City and that in some ways it's still a city onto its own.

The clock tower sits at odd location. There are no other tall buildings around it, but below tons of traffic as Flatbush, Third and Atlantic Avenues collide with one another. There's also a very large subway station below and a Long Island Rail Road terminal too. It's a real hub.

Part of the reason for all the activity is that it's where several residential neighborhoods merge; a revitalized Fort Greene, the well-to-do Park Slope, the working class and up and coming Prospect Heights and working class South Slope. It's very residential around the clock tower with many stores catering to household needs. And although the area is jammed with car traffic, people still flock to this hub.

A very wealthy Brooklynite who tore up a nearby neighborhood and turned it into a most banal business park wants to build tall office buildings around the clock tower and bring the New Jersey Nets basketball team, which he owns into a new arena to be built across the street from the tower. This project calls for the tearing down of new and recently renovated housing stock. Naturally many in the area are up in arms working to defend Brooklyn.

Hey, is this thing on?

He Threatened Me Here

"I will have your ass," were the words that made up one of the last complete sentences Leonard Lief said to me.

It was the spring of 1990 and then New York Governor Mario Cuomo was looking to up tuition to the City university of New York by $750 per semester and slash the budget by $12 million. It was a serious issue to poor students like myself. Without parents to support me or a bank account to withdraw funds from, low cost tuition meant the world to me. I was earning less than $8,000 a year working $6.00 an hour telemarketing jobs. I was in and out of housing court facing eviction for a $400 month studio in the Bronx. I often waited around after school events to gather leftover food to bring home... It was all too clear I needed the City University to get my poor ass out of poverty and I would do all that I could to protect the only college I could afford.

The year before similar tuition hikes and budget cuts were proposed and we protested successfully to stave those off but Cuomo was damaged politically during a presidential election year for it. In 1990 he wasn't going to stand by idlely. We knew if we protested the cops would be called in so we tried to come up with a plan that didn't call for the taking over of administrative buildings.

We were witness to a cop riot at John Jay College in Manhattan two nights before. Students were injured as cops attacked them. Students threw glass bottles back. The police union had photos of injured and bloodied cops from that riot they would use for future promotional materials calling for pay raises.

Faced with these realities we targeted the Lehman College Library. Our aim was to quietly take over the building and keep it open for 24 hours each day until the end of final exams. Once students were inside we would sit and have conversations with them and use the Library's phones to call state legislators, the media and so on.

Our attack worked. A small group of us showered, put on clean clothes and scheduled a meeting with President Leonard Lief. Lief and the time had already served 22 years as the school's first and only president. Old, stick'n of whisky or rye, mean and outwardly belligerent to students he agreed to meet with us. We put forward our demands to have complete access to the Library when the call came into his office during our meeting. "Hundreds of students have entered the Library with chains. They appear ready to take over the building." The building became ours for two weeks.




On the first evening of our occupation Lief came into the Library and asked to speak to students inside the Library. Uncharacteristically he spoke as if he wasn't too drunk and praised us for our behavior.

Then he asked to speak to me to the side of everyone else. He is a big man. Maybe six foot six with broad shoulders and mean looking face. Yes he was an old drunk, but that didn't mean he wasn't scary looking. He looked down at me with his toes touching mine, "If anything happens here I will have your ass." He then walked away.

My wife asked me, "Did you think they would name the Library after you?".

Well maybe if I win the lottery they will change their minds.

OMG!

I was slow on the up-take and haven't quite caught up to it all yet. I thought it was going to be a quite afternoon at my favorite coffee shop catching up on Flicker happenings and email and the day turned into something else.

On my last day of a vacation in Jamaica The Gothamist not only published a photograph of mine as their Image Of The Day, but they went ahead and wrote what amounted to a profile of much of my work in my Flickr Photostream. It must have been a slow news day.

When I opened my email I noticed right away that for every hour two people were naming me as a Flickr. The views of my images were mounting too. Although the pace of things has slowed, requests to make prints have been coming in now.

It's been overwhelming as not only not used to this kind of attention and level admiration I feel obligated to examine each person's photostream, make comments and decide if I should reciprocate by making them a contact too. Needless to say the number of my Flickr contacts has swelled.

Now my friends and wife are asking me to set up an actually gallery exhibition.

It's all still a bit much, but it's part of the process of rediscovering my love of photography and taking photographs.