Gotham City Soul

Germany might have been my birthplace, and America my homeland, but Haiti, a place to which I've never been (but one day hope to go) has a deep place in my heart. I don't know why—only God knows why, but I am connected, through my friends Michael and Michelle, and spiritually in ways yet to be discovered. Timouns means children in Kreyol. Through an organization called Save the Children, I sponsor a child named Wilner Derval, who lives in a village in Maïssade Haiti in the Central Plateau about an 8 hours drive (over rugged terrain) from the capital of Port-au-Prince. I chose Save the Children because they have no religious affiliations. They also checked out well with the Better Business Bureau. The money I send goes to building a solid educational system in the countryside, paying for schools, teachers, and teacher training. It occurred to me that although I do correspond with Wilner, who is 14, I don't do it nearly enough. All I have is a photo, which they...

Today I'd like to give you a shortlist of books, films, and one event that I think are worth investigating. I haven’t read all of the books, or seen all of the movies: What they hav e in common is that they’ ve caught my attention. I’m hoping I’ll be able to write about all of them in more detail. But for now, without further ado: On Sunday, January 20 from 3 to 5 pm WNYC Radio and Civic Frame are cohosting a public conversation at the Brooklyn Museum called “Embracing the Radical King: Prophetic or Passé ?” In the press release it is described as “a critical examination and reclamation of a more complex Dr. King, featuring poetry, a montage of archival King photos and audio, and public conversation about some of his underemphasized , but no less defining, positions. Using Dr. King’s own words as a guide, WNYC Host Brian Lehrer and CivicFrame President April Yvonne Garrett will lead an interactive panel discussion in which esteemed public intellectuals and the audience will h...

Today is All Souls Day in the Roman Catholic Church. It is also the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, and the first day of Fet Gede or the Vodou Feast of the Sacred Dead, which is what I want to write about. But before I do, I want to talk about something I saw on Halloween, which was supposed to be yesterday’s entry. Oh well, I get sidetracked sometimes. So I switched on the Today show on Halloween, mostly to see what kind of goofy get ups the cast were wearing this year (the Munsters, with Al Roker as Grandpa Munster), and there was a segment called “The Supernatural: Fact vs. Fiction” . Natalie Morales (Eddie Munster) was interviewing a ghost hunter (I didn’t get her name), and she couldn’t have been more discomfited. The fact or fiction statements were really pretty worn thin, I mean who doesn’t know that the Amityville Horror sprung from a true-life crime? It was as if the writers for the show tried to pick the most inoffensive, chewed over material they could find so as not to in a...