Like most New Yorkers I’m obsessed with real estate. It’s part of the DNA of this city. In Aspen they talk about ski reports. In L.A., it’s traffic and weather. In New York it’s real estate. We talk about the rulings on increases for rent-stabilized apartments. We drop into open houses in our co-op buildings “just to check out” our neighbor’s apartments. We pour over the articles that predict the rise, or fall, in apartment values they way suburbanites lust over yard and garden plans. And we follow the controversies surround gentrification of neighborhoods like reports from war fronts.
Read More
Ticking Clocks and Calendars
TIME! Time is the hidden element in all storytelling. When I was a child I watched a lot of old movies on TV — old monster films with Boris Karloff, musicals with Fred Astaire or Ruby Keeler, comedies with Claudette Colbert or Rosalind Russell, mysteries with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and so many more… A lot of classic Hollywood films, of all genres, relied on obvious indicators of time to condense or elongate time in the storyline. The pages of a calendar flying by, the branches of a tree quickly rolling through the seasons or the words “Ten Years
Read More
Brutes and Brains
Some monsters are brutes — formidable muscles with very little in the brain department. They are fearsome creatures because they cannot reason. Like a hungry shark, they are all appetite and no manners. Their thinking is straight ahead — hunt, kill, eat, sleep and repeat. Monsters with minds are much scarier. A brute cannot plan more than a few moves into the future, a monster with a powerful brain and no moral compass is often one step ahead of a human. We are easily distracted. Love, lust, greed, ambition, and everything else under the sun, pull and push us
Read More
Lyrics on Trial
I read a disturbing article in The New York Times back on March 26 and it has been resonating with me ever since. It discussed the phenomenon of rap song lyrics as evidence in criminal trials. The song lyrics quoted in court were always violent and often misogynistic — definitely not my kind of music — but I found myself siding with the defense against the use of song lyrics as evidence of guilt. Songs — like poetry and fiction — are made up. They may be confessional, or appear to be confessional, but they are not confessions. I’m not
Read More
Street Fairs and Crowd Scenes
It’s street fair season in New York! For me, that means bargain hunting for cute reading glasses and a peculiar laboratory for the study of crowd scenes. I’ll start with the glasses. I lose things. Expensive pens, sunglasses, umbrellas and — most of all — reading glasses have a way or walking away from me so I have multiple pairs and buy ‘em cheap. I keep reading glasses all over my apartment, in every possible jacket pocket, purse, bag etc. When I travel I carry multiple pairs. This caused some consternation on one of my trips through airport security. The
Read More
Abracadabra — Magical Words
As a “certified” — or perhaps certifiable — word lover, I’m enchanted with magical words of all kinds. Using the right word at the right time is a kind of magic. It makes the story sing, creates a memorable bit of dialog, becomes a lyric that echoes in your imagination, or morphs into a meme with hash-tags and cat videos that go viral. Right now, I’m concerned with MAGICAL words — the incantations of alchemy and the dictionary of unseen power. Sometimes the power of the word(s) is obvious. We all know OPEN SESAME. It’s the phrase that opened the
Read More
Charlotte and Real Spiders
I don’t remember confusing Charlotte of E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” with real spiders as a child but, apparently, there’s some confusion out there between anthropomorphized creatures and the real deal in children’s lit. (See link below to Smithsonian article on the subject.) The animals in children’s storybooks and works of fiction not for kids, including George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and Art Speigelman’s “Maus,” are obvious surrogates for people. But I can see where some kids might get confused. Maybe it’s the live action, hyper-realistic and yet completely fanciful depictions of animals in current kid’s movies? I can’t
Read More
Words Words Words
I don’t know about all writers, but some writers — including me — periodically fall in love with WORDS. When I “discover” a charming or inspiring word, I’ve been known to post it on the corkboard above my desk or tape it to the mirror in the bathroom. Sometimes the words grow into entire stories. A conversation about Krampus with a German friend introduced me to the truly nightmarish creature “Nachtgrap” (night grab) which led directly to a modern fairy tale in which the old woman in a cottage in the woods assures a small girl that monsters do
Read More
