I loved when the City section used to be part of the New York Times each Sunday. The Sunday paper hasn’t been as enjoyable since the section was killed in 2009. I have browser bookmarks and actual clippings of some of my fave articles from the old section. One was this 2008 article on the […]
Watched and enjoyed D.A. Pennebaker’s classic documentary “Dont Look Back” (sic) chronicling Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of the UK. I was delighted to be reminded of the key part that British rocker Alan Price, ex of The Animals, played in the film. In Price’s honor, today I’m listening to my treasured old LP of his […]
#fridayreads Sleeping Beauty, a 1973 Lew Archer novel by Ross MacDonald. Set in a foggy LA, an oil spill is raging offshore and a woman rescuing seabirds has gone missing.
There is a special category of artifacts about New York City that express the near-boundless possibilities of the metropolis. One is E.B. White’s essay, Here is New York. Another is the short film Manhatta made by photographer Paul Strand and precisionist painter Charles Sheeler. The images are the artists’ while the words are borrowed from Walt Whitman. When you have 11 minutes give yourself a gift–watch this and listen to the modern score by the Cinematic Orchestra that was included in this version until it was taken off the Internet due to copyright issues. To me the film is all about the boundless possibility of Gotham, and living in a New World promised land, like Blake’s Jerusalem. It has great symbolic weight. The denizens of the city arrive on its shore and stride into the future. My heart soars every time I watch it. H/t to web site Music of Sound from New Zealand for bringing the Cinematic Orchestra’s score to my attention. The version on here now has no musical score.
“A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities.” Bret Victor’s Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design grabbed me from that line. The illustrated essay is a timely reflection on the utility of our hands and how humans interact with tools and technology. If you’ve enjoyed reading such books as Henry Petroski’s The […]
Gotta love a story like this: Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues was mired at bankrupt publisher Key Porter, then rescued by Patrick Crean at Thomas Allen Publishers, and now has vaulted to win Canada’s Giller Prize. Picador will be bringing it out in the U.S. A foundling to a prize-winner! This is what I’ve always loved […]
Cool b&w photo of Lady Liberty’s torch in Madison Square Park, before its placement atop the full statue in New York Harbor. This very period, the 1880s, is chronicled in Jack Finney’s great NY time travel novel, Time and Again. The 125th anniversary of the Statue’s dedication in New York City is upon us now.
In 2008 I edited and published NBA referee Bob Delaney’s first book, Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob. Co-written with Dave Scheiber, it was named a USA TODAY Best Book of the Year. While relating the dangerous undercover assignment that led to multiple indictments and convictions of organized crime figures, the book also chronicled how the assignment led to undiagnosed post-traumatic stress for Bob. This was in the 1970s, before PTSD was a familiar term in our lexicon. Bob’s path through treatment to healing has now led to his second book, Surviving the Shadows: A Journey of Hope into Post-Traumatic Stress, which I represented with Bob’s longtime agent, Uwe Stender, placing it with Sourcebooks. In a new op-ed Bob writes that vet-to-vet, first responder-to-first responder, peer-to-peer therapy is an effective bulwark against post-traumatic stress and full-blown PTSD. This is just one of many promising treatments described in the new book. I’m so proud of Bob, now retired from the NBA, for working with medical professionals, veterans’ groups, and law enforcement and first responder associations to promulgate these treatments for survivors of stress and trauma.