Gotham City Soul

In an attempt to provide an antidote to some of the syrupy (and fake) nonsense that goes on at Christmas time, and to provide some dark humor for those out there who dread the holidays, I'm leaving our regularly scheduled program to bring you Santa-dote . Last year I wrote about St. Nicholas Day, and how it has a dark side (if you check that link out, take some time for David Sedaris's " Si x to Eight Black Men") . This year Santa Claus, who is a direct American descendant of St. Nicholas, gets a bit of a drubbing. I have nothing against Santa, just think that if you look at him from a certain perspective, he can seem frightening, absurd, or just damn funny. I had this conversation with my mom the other day where we were sort of taking issue with old Santa Claus. She said that nowadays they've got him running around Germany, amok, which would be fine with her, if he weren't an American invention . German kids are supposed to get their gifts from the Kristkin...

We lost a great lady and an amazing soul. The singer, musician, and activist Odetta died yesterday evening at Lenox Hill hospital in New York City. She was 77. I didn't find out about it until this morning, when I opened my e mail and saw messages from several folks who knew her well, particularly her manager of 12 years, Doug Yeager. It was he, prompted by David Lander, a regular writer for American Legacy, who set up an interview with this grand dame of folk music, and made it possible for us to include her in the pages of our magazine. I approached the telephone interview with excitement and a bit of trepidation—Odetta's gorgeous voice was a regular presence in our house when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. She had performed at the 1963 March on Washington, singing “Freedom Trilogy”; marched in 1965 with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and some 25,000 others from Selma to Montgomery; and protested against the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. The tradi...

"Emerson needed more musicians, preferably cheap and loud. What about that middle-aged black man with the melodious whistle and hearty laugh he’d seen performing for coins at the Hudson River ferryboat terminal? Johnson listened to the proposition of the neatly dressed young man and said, “Why, sure . . . how much did you say you would pay?” “Twenty cents a song,” said Emerson, “and you can work all afternoon.” “Well, suh , just show me where you want me to go,” said Johnson, throwing in one of his hearty laughs for free. Emerson had his second recording artist." --From Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919, by Tim Brooks. One could make a case that the American music industry was born when the inventor Thomas Edison first devised a way to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders in 1877, famously consigning his own voice to posterity (it should be noted that a recently uncovered audio fragment of the French folk song “Au Clair de Lune...

. . .and I will be compelled to say more in my magazine. I don't have the eloquence of others, and my words will doubtless be lost in the millions of other words written. I cried for days after 9-11, tears of grief, my heart was broken. As of last Tuesday I cry for joy, my heart finally healed. (For my honored ancestors, my father Miles Peterson; grandparents Ransom Peterson, Annie Peterson, nee Johnson, and Fannie Mae; my great-grandparents Fletcher and Polly Johnson; Silver and Susiann Peterson; my great-great grandparents Amos and Saleta Battle, and all of my ancestors from Africa, and all over the world)

(pin-yin:shi shi zao ying xiong) Heroes (leaders) are made over turbulent times. I've been way too caught up in everything to blog. I'll be back soon, I promise

I pay rent instead of a mortgage, and can only afford to live in Manhattan because I was lucky enough to get into a rent stabilized apartment. Without that apartment, I would not be able to afford to live here. My salary has remained the same for years. Yet I pay the same increasingly higher prices for everything that everyone else on Main Street U.S.A. does. The one thing I don’t have to worry about is gas prices—I don’t own a car. I don’t need one in this city because it has a terrific public transportation system. I also don’t have children. But that doesn ’t mean I don’t have financial responsibilities to children, and other people in my life. I do. When I take vacations, they are modest ones. I don’t have closets full of clothes like Carrie on Sex in the City . I don’t have a giant apartment like the folks on Seinfeld and Friends . My apartment is 450 square feet at the most. It is in a fifth floor walk up. It is comfortable, but there is nothing luxurious about it. There are onl...

So as usual, I was looking around on the Internet, for what, I do not remember when I came upon the book Lights and Shadows of New York Life or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City written by James Dabney McCabe and published in 1872 or thereabouts. I looked up the author and his biography was so boring I stopped reading it and decided not to bore you with any of it here. The only thing you might bear in mi nd is that he was a Southerner, and a Confederate sympathizer before he moved North. I’m much enamored of the title, which gives off a certain mysterious energy. The excerpt I’ve included here is essentially a complaint that never goes out of style--that the city is too damn expensive. I’ve included the amounts of things in today’s dollars (converted on this calculator for a greater understanding of McCabe's frustration. I came to the realization that if I had my 2008 salary back in 1872, I’d be rich. But that ’s not how this works. I converted my salary today to 1872 ...

It is a clear Sunday morning in the summer of 1828 and skiffs filled with people both black and white make their way across the East River from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan Island. The white people are churchgoers, on their way to services. The black men rowing them will also worship. The African-Americans guide the skiffs into slips and the white families disembark, making their way to Henry Street, where lies St. Augustine's, a brand-new Episcopal church. They take their places in the pews that fill the nave. Meanwhile the blacks climb up two treacherously narrow staircases to a pair of small rooms behind the pipe organ at the back of the church. It is dark and stiflingly hot where the Africans stand packed together. These rooms made up the church's slave gallery, one of two that remain in the United States today. (The other is in Boston's South Church.) For decades the church's staff and its parishioners knew what the spaces had been, but not until 1999 did they decid...

I've backtracked five years to give a short chronicle of black people and their migration up the island of Manhattan. This is swiped from Ame rican Legacy , for which I wrote this article in 2003 called "At Rest". And so they were buried. After two centuries of lying forgotten in the ground, and another dozen years being studied, squabbled over, and finally, honored, 419 wooden caskets, decorated with traditional West African symbols and village scenes were lowered into crypts in a small plot of land next to 290 Broadway, all that remains, in any practical sense, of an African burial ground, the oldest known cemetery of its kind in the United States. As I walked along Reade Street toward Broadway on my way to the reinterment ceremony in October 2003, I in all likelihood walked near more graves, all located under downtown buildings. The original burial ground spread across five to six acres of lower Manhattan that is today bounded by Duane Street and City Hall Park o...

So a very close friend of mine, who also grew up in Jersey, and whom I met during götterdämmerung of Hoboken in it's gentrification days of the 1980s and early 1990s (it was a bloodbath) was visiting from Los Angeles, where he moved five years ago. He got caught off-guard by the changing landscape here on Manhattan Island and wrote a truly gloomy poem about it. He was closely followed by another dear friend, who has lived in Chelsea for the past 15 years, who sent me an article in The New York Times about the death of Bohemia, which I will not even bother to link to, because I'm tired of all of the weeping and moaning and gnashing of teeth. Not because it isn't warranted, but because I think we should be capable of something else. Anything else. Even fiddling while Rome burns is a more attractive alternative than bemoaning our fates and the fate of our beloved city and doing nothing. That said, I think what galls me most is that people only really get involved when it...

I've talked about this here at Gotham City Soul myself and I must say I'm even tired of hearing myself complain about it, this thing I will call the luxury malling of Manhattan. It's been ugly, gentrification, the pushing out of minorities, the working poor, and others to make way for mostly rich or well-off white people. Churches closed, mom and pop shops run out by high rents, building destabilized and converted to condos, other buildings knocked down so that greedy developers with no vision and no clear love for New York City besides its real estate value can erect flimsy glass and metal boxes with no aesthetic value whatsoever. But something I read the other day has stopped me in my tracks, and I've decided I've done enough fussing for now. There's just too much bad news in the world to keep adding to it. The article to which I'm referring was in the local newspaper The Villager. It is about Florent Morellet , who, for 23 years owned the magical Fl...

The East River part has been slowly, slowly, getting a facelift, to the tune of millions of dollars, all well-deserved. Of all the parks in the city, it is my favorite, not just because of its proximity to my house (Thompkins Square Park, another favorite, is closer), but because it's so . . . normal. There are no testerone-fueled packs of extreme cyclists ready to mow everyone down like in Central Park. The landscape doesn't feel inaccessible, like Bryant Park (when it wasn't being overrun by fashion week or some such). Sure it has been worn down in places, but that's been worked on to wonderful effect. The promenade is being rebuilt and we have access to the river again. Here's something I wrote about the park some years back. It is a good park, the East River Park, measured not in acres, but in the sounds that it produces. First there are the obvious sounds. The big noise of Latin men playing the games of their childhood; Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans,...

What's wrong with these two headlines? How long does it take to do the right thing? Mandela off US terrorism watch lists Mugabe's Thugs Shout: "Let's kill the baby"

So here is the thing: June 12 marks the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision on Loving et Ux. v. Virginia . In 1958 two Virginia residents, a black woman named Mildred Jeter and a white man named Richard Loving married in the District of Columbia because it was against the law in the state of Virginia for a white person to marry anyone from any other race except the white race. They were charged with violating the law by the state of Virginia. They plead guilty to the charge and were sentenced to one year in jail. They received a suspended sentence if they promised to leave the state and not return together for 25 years. They decided that they weren't going to accept something so inherently absurd and something so clearly an affront to their rights as human beings, and their case wound up in front of the Supreme Court, which overturned the convictions and ruled unanimously for the couple, the opinion, delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren stated, in part: "Marr...

"How much would you pay for a drug that takes you all the way out of your head—and into the mind and memories of another?" About a month ago or so, I had the pleasure of attending a reading by Michel Marriott, a technology reporter for The New York Times. His new book The Skull Cage Key was recently published by Bolden Books, a division of Agate Publishing. I'm more a fan of the horror genre than speculative fiction, The Good House by Tananarive Due being the last novel of that ilk that I have read. Due is someone who is often compared to Stephen King. I love Stephen King's works. I like Tananarive Due's books a bit better. Michel's debut novel, which I hope to heaven is made into a movie, is right up there with King and Due. I tore through The Skull Cage Key in one weekend and then was mad at myself for not going a little slower to make it last longer. Michel if you're reading this, I hope you have a sequel in you. I think the thing that caught my at...

I was walking home yesterday and it was a time of the evening when many Muslims in New York City pray to Mecca. We have a mosque in the East Village, the Madina Masjid , located on First Avenue and 11 th Street. The mosque was founded in 1976 by Bengali immigrants, some of whom ran restaurants on "Indian Row" on 6 th Street. On a marquee-like sign you can see that Allah is the true God but that Judaism and Christianity are also part of the true faiths. Listed along with Abraham and a few other prophets, including Muhammad, is Jesus. All this is in large green and red letters. On top of the mosque is a minaret—turquoise with gold leaf. As I walked up First Avenue toward 12 th Street I could see some Muslim men making their way toward the mosque, chatting, greeting each other. I turned the corner and walked down 12 th Street toward home and was surprised by the sight of a large skateboard ramp that had been erected in a public yard adjacent to a yard the members of the m...

I've mostly been quiet on this blog (for me) about the Presidential race, not because I don't have some very strong opinions, but because I was trying not to add to the deafening chatter. Also, this blog is supposed to provide an antidote to the insanity of humans at their worst. It's no small effort to get up in the morning to the news of the world and not just throw up my hands and say the hell with it—why bother writing my small thing in the face of so much that is truly awful? I have no answer beyond because . Because if one person finds relief or inspiration then I've done my job. The Quran (yes, that Quran!) says "If you kill one person, it's as if you kill all of humanity." I'm going to take comfort in the idea that if I help one person, then it's as if I helped all of humanity. Not because I have delusions of grandeur, but because I am such a puny thing in the face of this world, the universe, and beyond. From time to time, though, I will ...

"Brutal subordination of the slaves was also a central tactic in controlling low-status whites who, if not thrown the bone of white supremacy, might have questioned the vastly unequal distribution of wealth and power among whites, which Southern grandees enjoyed and protected with guile and force." " . . . if threats, economic oppression, and political neutering didn't work, denial of education and brute force had to be used to reassure lower-class whites that their central psychological prop in a hardscrabble world—their superiority over black people in all realms of life—would be protected at all costs." Diane McWhorter in the foreward to Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Freedom Riders by Eric Etheridge

It's not about whose team wins any more: www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/opinion/04friedman.html

Mostly I've been gone because I've been on vacation and moving my office at the same time. But a large part of my not writing any entries is that I've been rendered nearly wordless by some things I've seen lately (I know as a U.S. citizen I shouldn't be one to throw stones, but does anybody care about the Olympic host's involvement in the Darfur crisis, on the wrong side of the disaster ie they're supporting the genocide)? I feel for the Tibetans, but can anybody show the Sudan some damn love? I see Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson together on a public service announcement and wonder if their plea to save the environment is genuine or another political put on. Yes, I'm a little beyond annoyed and since this blog is supposed to be about putting positive thoughts out there and solutions, I've said nothing until now. I'll be back in a day or two with my usual gotham-related tales, just needed to break my silence and say I'm back. Vacation was good ...

This morning I walked out of my building and down the street toward Avenue A when I saw something that made me stop. Written in colored chalk on the sidewalk in front of a building a few feet from my own was this: Josephine Carlisi Age 31 Lived at 502 East 12 Street Died March 25, 1911 Triangle Factory Fire Who wrote this? It was clear by the date why it was written. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was a horrifying event; immigrant seamstresses, many of them teenagers were trapped in a blazing building with almost no way out but to jump. And many did jump from the eighth ninth floors of the building and died right in front of witnesses. The reasons for the senseless death of 146 young men and women (most of whom lived in my neighborhood and the Lower East Side ) were typical. The factory, located in the Asch Building (now the Brown Building) on Washington Place and Greene Streets—today a posh neighborhood—was a sweatshop—unsanitary, unsafe, rarely, if ever inspected, where indivi...

This morning I got an e mail newsletter from my friend and health counselor Sacha Jones telling me that over the next few years, New York City is going to be planting a million trees. That's great news on its own, but it gets better: We get to help decide where! Go directly here if you want to cut to the chase and put in your vote. I did; it took me about a minute. Wouldn't it be nice to have a new tree on your block? Not to mention the extra pollution and CO2 filtering effect and the oxygen . And the birds. Red-tailed hawks and even a Great horned owl have been spotted in nearby Tompkin's Square Park. And the shade! And the spring buds. And standing under a tree in the rain. Perhaps I'm feeling even more passionate about trees than usual because a tornado took down a huge maple tree in front of my childhood home (and still my home) in South Jersey a couple of weeks ago. If you'd like more information you can visit the Million Trees Project. If anyone out the...

It seems that my job is keeping me away from Gotham City Soul, and that Friday's are for abbreviated blogs that lift the spirit. I have so many many things to write about, and when I can arrange my time, I'll be giving you more history, and culture and soul than you'll probably want to read. Until then, this morning Cousin Taroue Brooks sent this video, the song "Sun Moon Child is by Imani Uzuri, created by Pierre Bennu. Lovely.

Time for a little levity. It's Friday and I need to laugh. Yesterday I was on youtube taking a break, looking for something to make me laugh, and I typed in the Little Rascals. I don't think I've laughed so hard or so much in a long time, and it's been a long time since I watched Spanky, Stymie, and the rest of the gang cutting up. Decades later and they are still fresh! Yeah, there is the occasional stereotype that could be offensive taken out of context. But honestly, the natural fun the kids get up to, and the interracial cast, with black actors like Matthew "Stymie" Beard (who got paid the highest when he was on the show) taking center stage makes these pretty ahead of their time. Take a look at the clip from the episode "The Kid from Borneo" then tell me you didn't laugh until your stomach hurt. I've just a clip (the full episode was pulled off by a company that allegedly holds a copyright on the clips I used to have here), but t...

In the wake of the Boko Haram atrocities, I returned to this blog entry, one of a few I've written about nations in Africa and their people. It was worth looking at it again, because I think that recognizing how we are more alike than different is a way to giving a damn. I also think we need to see good and positive and downright wonderful things about the 47 plus 6 island nations and its people. And I needed to remind myself not to wait until a movie is made or a memoir written to pay attention. This was written eight years ago, but I still resonates with me. In January of last year [2007] I caught a cab home from work. As we drove along I listened to the talk show the cab driver had tuned into on the radio, it was one of those call-in shows, and the subject was homeland security. I don't remember exactly what was said, because I really wasn't listening too hard. But the driver was. After a few minutes of the men on the radio prattling on about whether our governme...