Gotham City Soul

Gil Scott-Heron in Manhattan, 2012, from the cover of his 1971 studio debut album Pieces of a Man. Walking down Lispenard Street a week or so ago, enjoying the perfect blue-sky, just crisp September Sunday, I caught this portrait of Gil Scott-Heron. Wondered why the unknown artist who created the image chose that spot to showcase the man who told us the revolution will not be televised . The fact that the Arab Spring uprisings were not only televised but thrown worldwide on the Internet notwithstanding (and to be fair, Scott-Heron was making a different point, and a fresh one in 1970 on his live debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox ), there was no revolution, no uprising going on here in Tribeca yesterday. Just a steady stream of tourists buying knock-off designer purses and other goods and trinkets on Canal Street, a lot of sky-high real estate that the 99 percent can't afford, and aside from the denizens of Chinatown and the African street vendors on Broadway and Li...

For most of us the name Sleepy Hollow brings forth images from Washington Irving’s 1819 legend of the hapless schoolteacher Ichabod Crane, who is chased one night by a terrifying headless horseman and mysteriously disappears, never to be heard from again. But there is another picture of the Dutch enclave Irving lovingly paints, one of a bucolic place where life moves slowly and tradition holds sway: “I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud,” writes Irving early in the story, “for it is in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great State of New-York, that population, manners, and customs, remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved.” Situated on the east bank of the Hudson River about 25 miles north of New York City, today’s Sleepy Hollow has preserved, in the tradition of Irving’s embosomed hamlets, what...

We all know someone like this. It’s the person you don’t want to stop and talk to when you see him or her on the street, yet has done nothing morally or ethically wrong to justify your ignoring that individual. It could be anybody, from any background, and the reasons for not wanting to spend any time with that person are varied: They invade your space when you talk. They are loud. They are terminally depressing. They are always on a soapbox. They tell the same story over and over again. They are hard to understand. They bore you to tears. They try your patience. Yet they are not bad people, and you feel they deserve your attention if they ask for it. In my case, it was a man who is mentally disabled in some way, and since I’m not a psychiatrist I wouldn’t begin to know how. He talks slow and with a slur. He shuffles when he walks. His movements are stiff. But he’s a decent fellow, as far as I know. When I see him, which is not often, I stop to chat for a moment or two. Not because...

"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 somewhat newly discovered audio fragment of the French folk song “Au ...

“Dear kith and kin, I'm writing with information and invitations related to the documentary film project I have embarked upon about our mutual DeWolf ancestors and the slave trade.” From a letter by Katrina Browne to 200 family members and descendants of Rhode Island slave trader Mark Anthony DeWolf Although Traces of the Trade debuted in 2006, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in last year, and aired on PBS's POV series , we never felt the noise around it was big enough. Over the past few years the North has had to take its sorrowful, yet rightful place as a key player in slavery in America (the New-York Historical Society's fantastic two-year exhibition “Slavery in New York” , brought  home the unalterable fact that New York City was a slave capital for two centuries). Still, we often look to the South.  We think that it can't be told enough, the story of how the American colonies, and then our entire nation was at one time or another completely ...

On my way to the Upper West Side from Chelsea, hop in a taxi, and the good looking, smiling Bangladeshi cab driver starts asking me questions, particularly about my mother. So I oblige him: Yes she is still alive. She lives in South Jersey. Yes she lives alone, but I visit her often. Yes she is loved by her neighbors. Somewhere around midtown in the 40s or 50s he tells me how he is a singer. The cab is nothing, just a thing to do. He is a singer and has recorded. His most popular songs are songs about mother. Aha! Now I know why all the questions. He tells me that he can make people cry with his songs about his mother. Then he asks if he can sing me one. I am a captive audience—am I going to tell this happy man no? So he sings, gesturing hands that should rightfully be on the steering wheel, but okay, we're in snail's pace afternoon midtown traffic. He translates his song, which likely was in Bengali, but I'm not sure. After that he sings a second song. I'm enjoying t...

A cab driver who is the spitting image of Albert Einstein, wild hair and all. He doesn't say a word when I get in, just speeds me along to my destination all to the soundtrack of some neo-new-wave-hypno-tune playi ng in a loop on his radio. At one point, he picked his nose in contemplation, which only lent a sort of authenticity to him. The spell was broken when he drove past my stop, and said "Awww shit! I got so caught up in the music I missed your stop!" in the deepest New York accent you ever want to hear. (Just got the back of his head and a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror because unlike my more brave friends, I didn't want to ask him to pose for me. I figured he probably gets the Al Einstein conversation all of the time.)

It's really amazing how quickly Ash Wednesday rolls up. It seems like an eyeblink from Christmas. Easter palms are burned and ashes are marked in a cross on my forehead to remind me from whence I came. I don't mind being reminded on this one day, in this one way. There is a strange comfort in the familiarity of it all. Last year I wrote about Lent , and what I planned to do for it. Only one person sort of took me up on my offer for free writing and editing services during the Lenten season, so I thank that person for allowing me to fulfill a bit of my Lenten promise. Happily, that turned into my doing much more volunteer writing, helping me hone my skills. Right now I'm so damn busy writing—freelance and otherwise—that I can't repeat that offer. But, as I said last year, I prefer to  do something instead of give up something. Sacrifice works for others; I won't knock it. But I think that Lent should also be a time of healing and nurturing and love. 40 ...

Every year that Martin Luther King's birthday arrives I am reminded of our national penchant for putting Dr. King into a more and more profound and iconic deep freeze. This may upset some reading this, but I’m a big fan of a moratorium on the “I Have a Dream” speech, an idea first put forth by Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a Baptist minister and the author of the 2000 book I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. , a book that dares to reveal Dr. King as multi-dimensional, a human being who made mistakes, but whose herculean and ultimately selfless effort to help the poor, downtrodden, and disenfranchised of the Earth far outweighed his personal flaws.  It’s not the speech—a speech that was actually first given on June 23, 1963, in Detroit during a memorial for race riots that had occurred in that city in 1863 and 1894— two months before his famous oration during the March on Washington. It’s the co-opting ...