Gone Joints

Letter to the Editor

A letter that I wrote is published in today's NYDailyNews:

A classic
Manhattan: Here is a better question for the teacher who gave homework about slaves to teach math: “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”
Marjorie Levine

Lost and Found

I found my ticket stub to a Barbra Streisand concert at Madison Square Garden in 1994. I must have loved her. I would not pay that price today to see her...

Remembrance of Things Past

Swann's Way: breathtaking in scope, imaginative, inspiring and intoxicating. The novel is staggering and is indeed a "string of pearls" for those who wish to become part of the select few who take the time to read this monumental achievement. It will stay with you forever.

 “For a long time, I went to bed early.”

 "Due to Swann’s visit, the narrator is deprived of his mother’s goodnight kiss, but she spends the night reading to him. This memory is the only one he has of Combray, until years later the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea inspires a nostalgic incident ofinvoluntary memory. He remembers having a similar snack as a child with his invalid aunt Leonie, and it leads to more memories of Combray."

Illiers-Combray:

"To think that I have wasted years of my life that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!"

Edgar Degas

Cirque Fernando was located at 63 Boulevard Rochechouart, 

at the corner of rue des Martyrs.

Miss La La around 1880. She was part of the Troupe Kaira.

Degas’s ‘Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando,’ at the Morgan

from the NYTimes

Marcel Proust

MARCEL PROUST AT ILLIERS-COMBRAY from Architectural Digest

IN SEARCH OF MONSIEUR PROUST from France Today

Illiers, the country town overlooked by a church steeple where Proust spent time as a child 

L'église Saint-Augustin, Proust's view from the next residence

9 Boulevard Malesherbes

45 Rue de Courcelles

102 Boulevard Haussmann

44 Rue de l'Amiral Hamelin

The Morgan Library & Museum

about Degas, Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando at The Morgan Library and Museum: 

"For several successive evenings in January 1879, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) attended performances at the Cirque Fernando by one of the most famous circus performers of his time, an aerialist known as Miss La La. For her extraordinary act, Miss La La was slowly hoisted nearly seventy feet into the circus's domed roof, suspended solely from a rope clenched between her teeth."

"Degas produced a number of studies of the performer and the circus building—drawings, pastels, and an oil sketch—before creating his celebrated painting, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando. The exhibition brings together for the first time Degas's remarkable painting, on loan from the National Gallery, London, and nearly all of the related preparatory works. Also on view will be images of the Cirque Fernando by Degas's contemporaries, photographs of Miss La La and her troupe, and posters and other printed material."


Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary

Marcel Proust and his mother and brother Robert, ca. 1895.

"Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most influential and ambitious literary works of all time. The Morgan celebrates the 1913 publication of the first of its seven volumes, Swann's Way, with a fascinating selection of the author's notebooks, preliminary drafts, galley-proofs, and other documents from the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The works on display will provide unique insight into Proust's creative process and the birth of his masterpiece. Also on view will be period postcards with depictions of Illiers, which served as the inspiration for Proust's fictional town Combray, and Paris. Several letters between Proust and his mother, Jeanne, from the Morgan's collection, will be included."

Drawing Surrealism

"Bringing together more than 160 works on paper by such iconic artists as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, and Joan Miró, this is the first major exhibition to explore the central role of drawing in surrealism, one of the most important movements in twentieth-century art. Once considered a minor medium, drawing became a predominant means of expression and innovation among surrealist artists in the first half of the twentieth century, resulting in a rich array of graphic techniques including automatic drawing, collage, decalcomania, exquisite corpse, and frottage. 

Drawing Surrealism will offer multiple new perspectives on the emergence, evolution, and influence of this revolutionary movement. It will also explore the international impact of surrealist drawing by featuring important works on paper by over seventy artists from fifteen different countries, from Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America, and Japan."

The year? 2013

A time travel odyssey within the NYC subway:

From the Past

Pillars of the Past

Kerouac Was Here

Samuel S. Cox statue in Tompkins Square Park:

then:

and now:

his footprints were here:

looking west on East 7th Street:

looking east on East 7th Street:

Time Travel

coming soon! Get ready to time travel!

This little store is a gem and quite a novelty!

I will show you soon what is directly below that subway entrance. 

The Shield of Gardol

I love these

Elfreth's Alley

Madison, WI

Staunton, VA