An essay commissioned by the Queensland Performing Arts Center magazine, Australia (2019):

01
New York at 8am: I throw open the windows. Cars and cabs are already lined up at the gas station and I swear I can smell the urine on the sidewalk eleven stories below.

02
There is a young black woman singing, headphones on; really singing; beautiful voice – on an uptown 6 train. The car is packed. Packed. She faces the door, watches her reflection in the glass, and sings. Suddenly, she stops: “I’m sorry for the noise!” she yells loudly enough to quiet the entire car. All the passengers around her shake their heads, shrug: No, not noise.

“I’ve heard way worse,” a man next to me says.

03
I see Malik panhandling on 14th Street. We first met four years ago, the day after he’d been let out of prison. He’s been in halfway houses, ‘three quarter’ houses, homeless shelters, and I don’t know where else since. I have taken dozens of street portraits of him over the years; I always give him some money, clothes, food, Metro card, whatever I’ve got on me. Now he’s moving to Georgia. One of his kids lives there – he thinks.

“What about you? You gonna stay here or you gonna go?” he asks.

“I’m gonna stay.”

Malik shakes my hand and pulls me in for a hug.  “You stay strong in New York, nigga’! Stay strong!”

04
I have a dream about Oliver, the first since he died: I see him opening the door to the Read the rest of this post »

The Landmarks That Made New York a Cultural Capital – NYT “T” Magazine
Where art, hip-hop, AIDS activism, break dancing — and the enduring notion that New York City is the center of the world — were born, and born anew.

By Bill Hayes – April 17, 2018

ONE OF THE realities of living in New York is that you cannot become too attached to specific places any more than you can become attached to certain people in your life: the waitress you chat with every weekend, the parking garage guy, the newsstand vendor from whom you buy a paper. Often, they disappear, and you may never learn why. Why was that building torn down? Why did that bar close overnight? Whatever happened to the bartender? And what about Mohammed? He was here yesterday.

Place is as crucial to the architecture of memory as it is to dreaming, and like those New Yorkers who seem to disappear, spaces themselves carry their own memories here. Departed landmarks like CBGB or the Mudd Club are not so much addresses in downtown Manhattan as they are touchstones in the collective consciousness, occasionally reminding us of what was and of how much has changed — not least, ourselves. CBGB is where a 16-year-old Adam Horovitz — soon to be known as Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys — opened for punk legends Bad Brains in 1982; the Mudd Club is where, a few years earlier, Talking Heads, performing just days after the release of “Fear of Music,” coolly name-checked both spots in the iconic song “Life During Wartime.” (“This ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB / I ain’t got time for that now.”) Moments like these still haunt the city — half recalled, half imagined — even now thatRead the rest of this post »

I took many pictures of Oliver Sacks during our life together — and not just because I adored him. He was an irresistible subject for a photographer, with his bushy beard, sparkling bespectacled eyes, expressive hands, gaptoothed smile and the athletic build of someone who could easily swim long distances, even into his 80s.

The last picture I took of him, however, captures something quite different. His eyes do not meet mine, his head rests on a propped hand, and he is completely absorbed in a Bach piece he’d been learning to play.

I made a print and showed it to him a couple of days later. He didn’t find it especially flattering, but he liked it. It reminded him of the engraving of an elderly Beethoven in the “Oxford Companion to Music” from 1938. He knew that book practically by heart — a favorite aunt had given it to him as a boy — and he could describe the illustration and its caption with perfect recall: Beethoven’s room is “untidy,” he told me, “and there sits the aged composer, ‘very ill, but indomitable.’ ”

I nodded, his words echoing in my head: very ill, but indomitable — yes.

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Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1919 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art

I SLIPPED away from work on a recent Monday to take my two nieces to the Garry Winogrand photography exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I doubt there’s a better way to play hooky in New York right now.

When you go — not if, but when (and soon, by the way; the show closes Sept. 21) — I suggest you bring a thesaurus. Because it wasn’t long before we found words failing us. An image of an acrobat caught midleap on a Manhattan street, for instance, struck the three of us as the epitome of “amazing.” So did another photo. Then another. Upon seeing the first few dozen of the more than 175 prints on view we pledged that we would not use that word to describe every single photo. Beautiful, incredible, joyful, strange, very sad — we made it as far as the second room before we were back to the A’s.

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(Originally published in the NY Times)

I started writing this essay five years ago, and then I stopped. That I was not able to finish the piece did not strike me at the time as ironic but as further proof that whatever I once had in me — juice, talent, will — was gone. In any case, completing it would have made moot the very point I was attempting to make: Not writing can be good for one’s writing; indeed, it can make one a better writer.

I hadn’t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep: It’s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out. Nor did I feel blocked at first. Lines would come to me then slip away, like a dog that loses interest in how you are petting it and seeks another hand. This goes both ways. When I lost interest in them, the lines gradually stopped coming. Before I knew it, two years had passed with scarcely a word.

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Illustration: Oscar Bolton Green

MY 30-year-long subscription to The New Yorker ran out a few months ago — pure absent-mindedness on my part — and since then I buy a copy each week at the smoke shop around the corner from my apartment.

It makes no sense financially. I could save 73 percent off the cover price if I renewed for just a year; even more for two. But I’ve found I enjoy the benefits that come with my $6.99 a week, beginning with Ali, the shop’s manager.

Ali had formerly known me as a customer who occasionally came in late at night for a single vanilla Häagen-Dazs bar and asked for a book of matches. The asking part is important. He once told me about a customer who reached over the counter for a book of matches from the box next to the register:

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