Category Archives: Essay Categories
The Locus Delicti and other gems…
Those who’ve read this amazing story will recall that Daddy rented a house for Peaches Heenan and her mother Caroline to inhabit in Cold Spring, NY in early April 1926 so that he and his child bride could qualify for a marriage license in Putnam County, just out of reach of the child welfare authorities […]
Also posted in Call Me Daddy: Essays
Sauce for the Goose
Throngs filled the corridors of New York’s City Hall on the morning of July 8, 1835 seeking admission to the courtroom where Aaron Burr’s nephew, Justice Ogden Edwards, was conducting a trial that had attracted tremendous attention. Word of the strange action for damages for breach of a marriage promise, brought by a so-called gentleman […]
Also posted in Faves, Sauce for the Goose
I’ll Take the Portobello
Famously mad for most of his adult life, scholars have long attributed George III’s apparent mental illness to repeated bouts of porphyria. Frequent incapacitations blackened his 60-year reign, and the ardent efforts of the royal physicians with what today seem dubious remedies probably only worsened the sovereign’s health. Towards the end of his life, legend […]
Also posted in Found Objects
Hevel Havolim: A Vanity Plate
Down the Taconic Parkway we flew, my wife and I late one recent Monday morning, she at the wheel, the stillness of upstate weekday field and forest, beauty all around. It’s hard to believe that such quiet exists so near to New York City, such greenery and access, the Parkway an IV from heaven so […]
Also posted in A Walker in the City: Flaneur Pieces
Satan’s Utensil, or “My Palm is My Pilot…”
Charles Saatchi, Donny Deutsch: name any flog-master you care to. In my opinion they’re second best, though, compared to the holy ones, those who bedeck Williamsburg’s streets with the word of G-d. Suddenly last summer, out for a bike jaunt, my mind did a double take as I stopped to answer a cell-phone call. Plastered […]
Also posted in Yiddish Land + Jewish Themes
In the Distance…
Walking down West 79th Street the one morning many weeks ago, on the way to session, I’d little on my mind except my own troubles: my sense of distance from other human beings, my lack of relationship skills… Cold and damp, the air seemed to enhance my ennui, albeit a pleasant one in the midst […]
Also posted in A Walker in the City: Flaneur Pieces
Casting Call
New Orleans, apres le deluge, but it was my first visit ever at the start of December: two days and three nights of enchantment and wonder in this living, breathing palimpsest of its many pasts. Slowly, I inhaled the atmosphere, the street names, Desire Iberville, Elysian Fields: so redolent to a newcomer, a sudden lover […]
Also posted in Faves, New Orleans
When You Learn How to Do It, Please Let me Know…
Stepping out of Yonah Shimmel’s Knish Factory the other day, down on Houston and Forsyth, a giant belch escaped my gorgle, in studied satisfaction with my late-day pit stop. Yonah’s is the only restaurant that I frequent with a working dumbwaiter. Its greasy tables and unwashed floor only add to the taste of the diet-busting […]
Also posted in A Walker in the City: Flaneur Pieces
Stella, STELLA KOWALSKI!!!
For a decade and a half I suffered from nerve twinges and occasional numbness in my right arm and shoulder. Nothing seemed to help. One sorry attempt at homeopathy years ago brought only yellow pee from ingesting great gobs of Vitamin B-something. But having just turned 55, and sensing more than ever my body falling […]
Also posted in A Walker in the City: Flaneur Pieces
Something Borrowed, Something Blue
Emma Cunningham’s cell in the Tombs was far from the least comfortable accomodation in that storied Demotic edifice. With comfortable furniture and many meals brought in, there she schemed and plotted out a critical path to gain revenge and recompense for the wrongs done her by Harvey Burdell. My sweet prison cage at Green-Wood probably […]
Also posted in Butchery on Bond Street: Essays
