Gone Vistas on Gone Days

Valley Stream!

I grew up in Valley Stream!

"They call this place Valley Stream. What a joke. One little jail after another with 10 feet of grass between them. Valley Stream, I hate it here. If we get enough money we can go... some place far away from here. Someplace nice, not Valley Stream."

And... here is a great story. I now live in Chelsea, in NYC. Shirley Stoler (Martha Beck in that scene) lived around the corner from me, on 8th Avenue. I used to bump into her all the time. I had a nice conversation with her one day in a store. She was a lovely woman. Sadly, she passed away in 1999.

Museum of the Moving Image

SCREENING and LIVE EVENT, West Side Story

 Bert Michaels ("Snowboy"), Harvey Evans ("Mouthpiece"), Eddie Verso ("Juano"), and David Bean ("Tiger") will be at the Museum of the Moving Image on Sunday 4/28 to participate in a book signing of: Our Story: Jets and Sharks Then and Now.

Harvey Evans and Bert Michaels

the twitter tooth challenge!

Paris, Artists Were Here

Camille Pissarro, Boulevard de Rochechouart

Touques

Rouen

The Frick Museum

Today I went here:

The Impressionist Line from Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec: Drawings and Prints from the Clark

"This exhibition presents a selection of nineteenth-century French drawings and prints from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sheets by Millet, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other masters are on view." 

 

Center for Jewish History

Today I went here:


Passages through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War

"Passages through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War tells a story that might surprise even history buffs: The Civil War was a crucible for American Jews, laying the groundwork for their integration and Americanization on a large scale. It enabled the full participation of Jews in American life – militarily, politically, economically and socially – and set the stage for massive Jewish immigration decades later."

Brothers Edward Jonas (Union Soldier) and Charles H. Jonas (Confederate Soldier)

Beer, Art and Revolution: Jewish Life in Munich, 1806 - the Present 

"Before the Nazi regime, however, Jews were instrumental in shaping the traditions and character of Germany’s third largest city, from Löwenbräu beer to the top purveyor of Lederhosen and Dirndl to the city’s champion soccer club. Like Jews across Germany, they considered themselves as much Germans as Jews, but they could add a third identity to their hyphenated existence - Bavarian."

Hyde Park on Hudson

visit the home of Franklin D Roosevelt

Words so Exquiste

The Divine Comedy Entry 2: The Inferno, Canto 1: Dante enters Hell. 

The following canto is from Clive James’s new translation of The Divine Comedy,

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found

Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way
Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound
I still make shows how hard it is to say
How harsh and bitter that place felt to me—
Merely to think of it renews the fear—
So bad that death by only a degree
Could possibly be worse. As you shall hear,
It led to good things too, eventually,
But there and then I saw no sign of those,
And can’t say even now how I had come
To be there, stunned and following my nose
Away from the straight path. And then, still numb
From pressure on the heart, still in a daze,
I stumbled on the threshold of a hill
Where trees no longer grew. Lifting my gaze,
I saw its shoulders edged with overspill
From our sure guide, the sun, whose soothing rays
At least a little melted what that night
Of dread had done to harden my heart’s lake—
And like someone who crawls, half dead with fright,
Out of the sea, and breathes, and turns to take
A long look at the water, so my soul,
Still thinking of escape from the dark wood
I had escaped, looked back to see it whole,
The force field no one ever has withstood
And stayed alive.

pieces of Jack Kerouac

Dave Moore's website

in the NYDailyNews

Best Hair Height Ever

Oh, what I would give for hair with glorious height like this. And Ellnet finishes off the look!

Maggie Cassidy

and the "real" Maggie:

“Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:--the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:--the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:--the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?--she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. . . . She didn't let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didn't mention . . . the dog. Across the big world darkness I've come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God--but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didn't know she loved me--I didn't understand.” 

- Jack Kerouac, Maggie Cassidy