"The Poe House at Odd Angles," by Wyatt Doyle. Click here.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
New work by Moby Pomerance!
"12 years since I last played in front of an audience, and it seems I’ve developed something new. Apparently, to a bystander, it’s almost indistinguishable from watching someone have a stroke."
Moby Pomerance, "The Gitter Cranicals: 3. Stage Fright Is a Strange Kind of Thing."
Click here or on the title to read it in full.
Need to catch up?
To read Part 1, click here.
For Part 2, click here.
Moby Pomerance, "The Gitter Cranicals: 3. Stage Fright Is a Strange Kind of Thing."
Click here or on the title to read it in full.
Need to catch up?
To read Part 1, click here.
For Part 2, click here.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Friday, October 17, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
New photos by Wyatt Doyle
"The Poe House at Odd Angles," by Wyatt Doyle.
Click here to view the full series.
copyright © 2008 Wyatt Doyle
Click here to view the full series.
copyright © 2008 Wyatt Doyle
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Ray Bradbury at The Egyptian!
This week, the legendary Ray Bradbury joins forces with another venerable Los Angeles institution, The American Cinematheque, for Dandelion Wine: Two Evenings with Ray Bradbury.
On Friday the 10th at 7:30 pm, The Egyptian Theater screens the 1983 Walt Disney production of Ray’s novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, to be introduced by Bradbury in-person. While Bradbury had harsh words for the adaptation (and its director, Jack Clayton) at the time of the film’s release, time seems to have softened the writer’s initial disappointment. And while the movie takes some misguided narrative liberties with its source material, it still manages to capture Bradbury’s idyllic small-town atmosphere with particular effectiveness—aided considerably by an ensemble of performers whose work is always worth watching, including Jonathan Pryce, Jason Robards, Royal Dano and Pam Grier.
The following evening, Saturday the 11th, The Egyptian offers a double feature hosted by Bradbury, starting with John Huston’s film of Moby Dick, from a screenplay by Bradbury. Moby Dick proved to be a pivotal event for the writer, tremendously impacting both his life and professional career, while inspiring his subsequent work—both directly and indirectly—for the rest of his life. His experience working with Huston on the project echoes through Bradbury’s short stories (“Banshee”), novels (Green Shadows, White Whale), plays (The Anthem Sprinters), non-fiction (Zen in the Art of Writing), and now in Subterranean Press’s recently-published edition of Bradbury’s original screenplay.
Moby Dick is followed by The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, based on Bradbury’s short story “The Foghorn.” Though the unexpected melancholy that makes the original tale so memorable is in short supply in this dinosaur-stomps-New-York adaptation by director Eugene Lourie, the titular Beast—a “rhedosaur” painstakingly animated by Bradbury’s pal Ray Harryhausen—is a masterful creation that serves as an enduring testament both to the lifelong friends’ shared love of dinosaurs, and to their unparalleled gift for breathing life into creatures of the imagination.
Dandelion Wine: Two Evenings with Ray Bradbury, The American Cinematheque at The Egyptian Theater, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. Tickets available at the Theater box office.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Open Letter to a Mayor
As of next week, I will have spent one third of my life in New York City. A little bit more, but I’m not going to get into decimals.
Still, I don’t call myself a New Yorker. Home will always be Lansdowne, PA. In the National League the Phillies will always be my team over the Mets. Philadelphia is the metropolis associated with my formative memories, and I wasn’t in New York for the Bad Old Days so much on everybody’s mind nowadays.
But I do love this town, and I do love New Yorkers. Heck, I married one.
Beyond the worn-out stereotypes of street hustlers, "dem-dese-dose" knuckleheads, black-clad culture vultures and whiny neurotics, there’s a warmth, a deep sense of humor, a genuine value placed on art and talent, an openness to foreign cultures, an incredible work ethic and a profound understanding of community forged by two decades of blight and tempered to such steel that the following two decades of oppressive development and quick-buck gentrification haven’t been able to fully displace it.
The past two Mayors of New York like to take credit for the city’s current state as a safe, well-functioning metropolis.
Don’t believe them.
In many ways, Rudy Giuliani was the beneficiary of the crack epidemic and the community groundwork laid by his predecessor, the much-maligned David Dinkins who, while not necessarily cut out to be Mayor, was an intelligent man with some good ideas who understood the city.
Giuliani inherited a generation that had witnessed first-hand the destruction of individuals, families and communities to drug scourge and survived it. He made a brutal show of ‘taming’ a city that wanted nothing more than to move up and move on.
Let me relay a story as told to me by a friend years ago. It was early ’95 and my friend, an editor, was working late at a post-production office with five other people. A guy with a gun got in (a delivery had been made and a door left open) and held everybody up. As the police filled out the report, the cop told him, “Used to be we’d have to fill out five incident reports cause there’s five of you got robbed. Now we fill out one. You wonder why crime’s down in New York?”
The brilliance of streamlined paperwork and “broken windows” policing was that by creating the feeling that New York City was safer, it attracted investment and tourists, which created jobs, which people gladly took.
Unfortunately, Giuliani proceeded to put the screws to the very communities upon whose backs he stood, cutting after-school programs' funding and opening the door to development and jacked-up rents designed to swap out the city’s struggling working people with rich white kids for whom the city became an urban theme park in which they could play dress-up and throw around their cash, a phenomenon that exploded out of control under Bloomberg (I know, I sound like such an old grouch...try spending ten minutes on Ludlow St. or Bedford Ave on a Friday night. You’ll turn into an old grouch too.)
By the time he left office, the only people in the city who liked Giuliani were the kind of outer-borough Italian-Americans who still pine for Mussolini (a similarly effective public servant). Yeah, that includes 9/11. This city got through that because of the greatness of our firemen, our cops, our steelworkers, our OEM and our citizens. (Yes, I understand that those city services were paid for by commercial tax revenue. No, I don’t want to chase business out of NYC.)
Then in swoops Mike Bloomberg on the Gospel of Wealth to save the city’s stalled economy. Now he wants to stick around to help us through the current crisis, which is a direct result of the unsustainable nature of the prosperity that saved us then. (There’s some forward thinking.)
The common euphemism is that ‘he has the trust of the business community.’
Read that as, ‘rich white people feel assured that he’s looking out for them.’
I’d like to share a couple of brief stories that illustrate why, in my opinion, we don’t need Bloomberg (never mind that he wants an absurd one-time repeal of term limits without putting it up for a public referendum. Does that make him an Oligarch or a Plutocrat?)
The Blackout of ’03:
Early evening. Edna and I were riding our bikes over to our friend Jeff’s place in Carroll Gardens to grill the steaks that would have rotted in our freezer.
I think it was at the intersection where Flatbush, Lafayette and Fulton all kind of come together near BAM in downtown Brooklyn (an unwieldy intersection even with functioning traffic lights), a group of black teenagers had stationed themselves at each intersection, taking cues from a man in the middle with a stopwatch and a whistle (and a baseball bat, just in case) who timed out the intervals by which the traffic was kept flowing. There wasn't a cop in sight.
Voluntary human traffic lights. A far cry from the looting and riots of ’77.
You can’t attribute that to a Mayor.
Then there was the transit strike, when Mayor Mike refused to even sit down with union leaders, labeling them criminals for daring to stand up for themselves against a notoriously corrupt and dodgy private agency.
And what were they striking for? One of the items on the agenda was the relaxation of the MTA’s dress code, which officially forbade employees to wear dreadlocks, facial hair or traditional headgear as per their culture or religion. If you’ve ever seen the Rastafarian or Sikh conductors, you’d know that they take a great deal of pride in their appearance and present themselves professionally.
Name another organization that places those kinds of rigid cultural restrictions on one’s appearance. I’ll help you out: the Taliban.
What the Mayor failed to understand or respect is that what keeps the subways and buses running isn’t the record profits of the MTA or the compensation packages of its executives, but the dedication and competence of its men and women in the tunnels and on the streets.
As we head into tough times (I’ve been having tough times for the last seven years so welcome to Andyland, everybody), what this city needs is a Mayor who can galvanize and inspire its communities and the people and families who hold them together. Giuliani antagonized them. Bloomberg has, at best, tolerated them. In the coming years, that's not going to be enough. These community leaders have been squeezed and screwed-over for funding for four decades. Unlike our Mayor, they've demonstrated that they know how to accomplish things without a fat bankroll.
A quick word about the schools: the corporatization of the Board of Ed may raise test scores but it’s not saving schools. I know several dedicated and talented people who have been so disgusted and fed up with the current teachers’ contract and the us-against-them mentality between teachers and administration fostered by it that they’ve turned their backs on teaching. You can’t meet the challenges of engaging and educating city kids without administrative support – as it is, the principals are cast in the antiquated theory of management that holds that their job is to pressure the teachers into increased productivity. Teaching human beings isn't making widgets. That’s not ‘accountability.’ It’s idiocy.
(Edna likes to point out that the gentry of our deeply gentrified neighborhood, while rallying around getting landmark status for the Domino Sugar Factory, all put their kids on buses and send them to charter or private schools, but none of them rallies for the local public schools.)
Yes, Bloomberg’s had a positive effect on many other aspects of the city government, and any successor with a brain would naturally keep them in place and build on the work he’s done. Hell, I think Ray Kelly’s done an overall good job with the NYPD, flagrant disregard for civil liberties during the RNC notwithstanding. I mean, I can understand protecting us from terrorists, but I don't get why they seem so determined to protect us from satirists and bicyclists... (The differences between the shooting of Sean Bell and that of Amadou Diallo and the abuse of Abner Louima are worth examining in a post of their own.)
Bloomberg's apparent infatuation with London disturbs me. There you have a city of highly centralized wealth and deeply stratified classes in which four of its youth were significantly disenfranchised as to blow themselves up in crowded subway cars. Hardly a model. Kids with a future don't turn to extremism.
This city needs to stop selling out its communities and put them to work.
The “business community” needs to understand that a healthy and prosperous working population is what will keep this city a safe place for their children to spend their money, stagger down the streets and piss on the doorsteps of people like myself before passing out in their own vomit. Fun!
Now that easy riches and cushy jobs don’t await the ivy-league i-bankers who’ve been helping to inflate rents, perhaps this city will become safe for the middle class again.
To all of those new New Yorkers worried about the equity they stand to lose in the condos they bought at the height of a bubble market should property values come back to Earth, ask yourself: did you buy here to make a profit, or to make a home? This isn't just a place for the young and fabulous to sew their wild oats, or a pit-stop on the way to their first million, this is a place where people live.
As the glitter is swept away and the tarnish beneath shined, this city’s best -- if not wealthiest -- years could be ahead of us yet.
Still, I don’t call myself a New Yorker. Home will always be Lansdowne, PA. In the National League the Phillies will always be my team over the Mets. Philadelphia is the metropolis associated with my formative memories, and I wasn’t in New York for the Bad Old Days so much on everybody’s mind nowadays.
But I do love this town, and I do love New Yorkers. Heck, I married one.
Beyond the worn-out stereotypes of street hustlers, "dem-dese-dose" knuckleheads, black-clad culture vultures and whiny neurotics, there’s a warmth, a deep sense of humor, a genuine value placed on art and talent, an openness to foreign cultures, an incredible work ethic and a profound understanding of community forged by two decades of blight and tempered to such steel that the following two decades of oppressive development and quick-buck gentrification haven’t been able to fully displace it.
The past two Mayors of New York like to take credit for the city’s current state as a safe, well-functioning metropolis.
Don’t believe them.
In many ways, Rudy Giuliani was the beneficiary of the crack epidemic and the community groundwork laid by his predecessor, the much-maligned David Dinkins who, while not necessarily cut out to be Mayor, was an intelligent man with some good ideas who understood the city.
Giuliani inherited a generation that had witnessed first-hand the destruction of individuals, families and communities to drug scourge and survived it. He made a brutal show of ‘taming’ a city that wanted nothing more than to move up and move on.
Let me relay a story as told to me by a friend years ago. It was early ’95 and my friend, an editor, was working late at a post-production office with five other people. A guy with a gun got in (a delivery had been made and a door left open) and held everybody up. As the police filled out the report, the cop told him, “Used to be we’d have to fill out five incident reports cause there’s five of you got robbed. Now we fill out one. You wonder why crime’s down in New York?”
The brilliance of streamlined paperwork and “broken windows” policing was that by creating the feeling that New York City was safer, it attracted investment and tourists, which created jobs, which people gladly took.
Unfortunately, Giuliani proceeded to put the screws to the very communities upon whose backs he stood, cutting after-school programs' funding and opening the door to development and jacked-up rents designed to swap out the city’s struggling working people with rich white kids for whom the city became an urban theme park in which they could play dress-up and throw around their cash, a phenomenon that exploded out of control under Bloomberg (I know, I sound like such an old grouch...try spending ten minutes on Ludlow St. or Bedford Ave on a Friday night. You’ll turn into an old grouch too.)
By the time he left office, the only people in the city who liked Giuliani were the kind of outer-borough Italian-Americans who still pine for Mussolini (a similarly effective public servant). Yeah, that includes 9/11. This city got through that because of the greatness of our firemen, our cops, our steelworkers, our OEM and our citizens. (Yes, I understand that those city services were paid for by commercial tax revenue. No, I don’t want to chase business out of NYC.)
Then in swoops Mike Bloomberg on the Gospel of Wealth to save the city’s stalled economy. Now he wants to stick around to help us through the current crisis, which is a direct result of the unsustainable nature of the prosperity that saved us then. (There’s some forward thinking.)
The common euphemism is that ‘he has the trust of the business community.’
Read that as, ‘rich white people feel assured that he’s looking out for them.’
I’d like to share a couple of brief stories that illustrate why, in my opinion, we don’t need Bloomberg (never mind that he wants an absurd one-time repeal of term limits without putting it up for a public referendum. Does that make him an Oligarch or a Plutocrat?)
The Blackout of ’03:
Early evening. Edna and I were riding our bikes over to our friend Jeff’s place in Carroll Gardens to grill the steaks that would have rotted in our freezer.
I think it was at the intersection where Flatbush, Lafayette and Fulton all kind of come together near BAM in downtown Brooklyn (an unwieldy intersection even with functioning traffic lights), a group of black teenagers had stationed themselves at each intersection, taking cues from a man in the middle with a stopwatch and a whistle (and a baseball bat, just in case) who timed out the intervals by which the traffic was kept flowing. There wasn't a cop in sight.
Voluntary human traffic lights. A far cry from the looting and riots of ’77.
You can’t attribute that to a Mayor.
Then there was the transit strike, when Mayor Mike refused to even sit down with union leaders, labeling them criminals for daring to stand up for themselves against a notoriously corrupt and dodgy private agency.
And what were they striking for? One of the items on the agenda was the relaxation of the MTA’s dress code, which officially forbade employees to wear dreadlocks, facial hair or traditional headgear as per their culture or religion. If you’ve ever seen the Rastafarian or Sikh conductors, you’d know that they take a great deal of pride in their appearance and present themselves professionally.
Name another organization that places those kinds of rigid cultural restrictions on one’s appearance. I’ll help you out: the Taliban.
What the Mayor failed to understand or respect is that what keeps the subways and buses running isn’t the record profits of the MTA or the compensation packages of its executives, but the dedication and competence of its men and women in the tunnels and on the streets.
As we head into tough times (I’ve been having tough times for the last seven years so welcome to Andyland, everybody), what this city needs is a Mayor who can galvanize and inspire its communities and the people and families who hold them together. Giuliani antagonized them. Bloomberg has, at best, tolerated them. In the coming years, that's not going to be enough. These community leaders have been squeezed and screwed-over for funding for four decades. Unlike our Mayor, they've demonstrated that they know how to accomplish things without a fat bankroll.
A quick word about the schools: the corporatization of the Board of Ed may raise test scores but it’s not saving schools. I know several dedicated and talented people who have been so disgusted and fed up with the current teachers’ contract and the us-against-them mentality between teachers and administration fostered by it that they’ve turned their backs on teaching. You can’t meet the challenges of engaging and educating city kids without administrative support – as it is, the principals are cast in the antiquated theory of management that holds that their job is to pressure the teachers into increased productivity. Teaching human beings isn't making widgets. That’s not ‘accountability.’ It’s idiocy.
(Edna likes to point out that the gentry of our deeply gentrified neighborhood, while rallying around getting landmark status for the Domino Sugar Factory, all put their kids on buses and send them to charter or private schools, but none of them rallies for the local public schools.)
Yes, Bloomberg’s had a positive effect on many other aspects of the city government, and any successor with a brain would naturally keep them in place and build on the work he’s done. Hell, I think Ray Kelly’s done an overall good job with the NYPD, flagrant disregard for civil liberties during the RNC notwithstanding. I mean, I can understand protecting us from terrorists, but I don't get why they seem so determined to protect us from satirists and bicyclists... (The differences between the shooting of Sean Bell and that of Amadou Diallo and the abuse of Abner Louima are worth examining in a post of their own.)
Bloomberg's apparent infatuation with London disturbs me. There you have a city of highly centralized wealth and deeply stratified classes in which four of its youth were significantly disenfranchised as to blow themselves up in crowded subway cars. Hardly a model. Kids with a future don't turn to extremism.
This city needs to stop selling out its communities and put them to work.
The “business community” needs to understand that a healthy and prosperous working population is what will keep this city a safe place for their children to spend their money, stagger down the streets and piss on the doorsteps of people like myself before passing out in their own vomit. Fun!
Now that easy riches and cushy jobs don’t await the ivy-league i-bankers who’ve been helping to inflate rents, perhaps this city will become safe for the middle class again.
To all of those new New Yorkers worried about the equity they stand to lose in the condos they bought at the height of a bubble market should property values come back to Earth, ask yourself: did you buy here to make a profit, or to make a home? This isn't just a place for the young and fabulous to sew their wild oats, or a pit-stop on the way to their first million, this is a place where people live.
As the glitter is swept away and the tarnish beneath shined, this city’s best -- if not wealthiest -- years could be ahead of us yet.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Georgina Spelvin reads in San Francisco!
From the Mark Your Calendars Dept.:
This Friday, October 10th, our friend Georgina Spelvin will be making an extremely rare San Francisco appearance to publicize her self-published autobiography, The Devil Made Me Do It.
Good Vibrations is hosting the event, and she'll be reading from her book and signing copies. If it's anything like her recent Hollywood reading at Book Soup, it should be quite an evening.
Good Vibrations is located at 2504 San Pablo Ave., and things are scheduled to begin at 6:30 Friday evening.
Tell her New Texture sent you!
This Friday, October 10th, our friend Georgina Spelvin will be making an extremely rare San Francisco appearance to publicize her self-published autobiography, The Devil Made Me Do It.
Good Vibrations is hosting the event, and she'll be reading from her book and signing copies. If it's anything like her recent Hollywood reading at Book Soup, it should be quite an evening.
Good Vibrations is located at 2504 San Pablo Ave., and things are scheduled to begin at 6:30 Friday evening.
Tell her New Texture sent you!
Monday, October 6, 2008
Friday, October 3, 2008
Thursday, October 2, 2008
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