City of Strangers, Author at My Site

Mastodon City of Strangers, Author at My Site

Original Beats: Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke

City of Strangers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbY6KXPg6wY&feature=player_embedded Often overshadowed by the Beat triumvurate of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac, Herbert Huncke and Gregory Corso were nonetheless integral to the Beat f...

Jerry Rio’s Urban Eye: Times Square

City of Strangers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ome6yVU2fTE Over the holidays, reader Jerry Rio sent me this charming doc about changing mid-90's New York: The Urban Eye. This 'video time-capsule' was made in 1995, when market forces, an...

Looking back: New York in the ’70s

City of Strangers

What always interested me about NY when I first came here in the late '80s was how, like London, it was essentially a working class city. The working classes lived in the heart of the city, and constituted a great deal of it...

Pilgrims

City of Strangers

An excerpt from a novel I met Dupont at the Bar X, a totally anonymous-looking place with tinted windows wedged in-between a McDonald’s and a pizzeria. I might never have noticed it had it not been for the neon Bud sign i...

Looking Back On KISS

City of Strangers

I hadn’t thought about Kiss for years, until I saw the 1979 Tomorrow Show Interview with Tom Snyder. Like most of the kids of my generation, I came to Kiss young, at eleven or twelve, in my case through the Destroyer al...

Gil Scott Heron RIP

City of Strangers

I discovered Gil Scott Heron the summer of 1991, after I returned to Montreal following a riotous five months in NYC. It was the first time I'd lived in the city, and I felt like I'd caught the tail end of an era. In one s...

Looking Back at the South Bronx

City Of Strangers

Photo by straatis I've been to the South Bronx, exactly once, in 1991. In those days I used to walk all over the city, into areas that I wouldn't go now. I was young, possibly a little naive (or possibly not) and figur...

A Walk Through the East Village on May Day, 2011

City of Strangers

Went to the East Village Sunday, MayDay, to see if they still have the May Day events in Tompkins Square Park. The events/protests were a big fixture in the early 90's and though I hadn't thought of them in years, I wanted...

Letter From Santee

City Of Strangers

If we ever colonize Mars, our settlements will look a lot like Santee Town Center. The heart of Santee, CA, on San Diego’s eastern edge, is a series of interlocking strip malls, the big box monster kind, abutted with...