“There wasn’t any funeral,” Jimmy the Weasel says, “We buried him.”

by

There was a time in my life, back when I was in my thirties when I was a crime reporter. Perhaps you are familiar with them from the movies: they are always two steps ahead of the cops, they put their lives at risk, and they are awakened at their crummy apartment at 6 a.m. by the lead detective, with whom they were in the army.

“Got anything to drink in this dump?”, the detective says.

Then the detective and the reporter toss back a scotch and the reporter does not worry one bit about not having any cheese or nuts in the house to go with it.

This was never me. It violated Wadler’s first and most important rule of journalism: Never put yourself in a situation in which people might shoot at you.

Read more

A Great Day in West Harlem

by

Many of you were here for this event (and many actually organized it with true Tiemann tenacity), and some weren’t here but were in the utter vanguard of this ferocious tenants’ rights organization. We and you all were saluted on Saturday, on the event of the 35th annual West Harlem Coalition Anti-Gentrification Street Festival, with the unveiling of the street sign co-naming Tiemann Place as “Tom DeMott Way”!

Read more

Fiesta

by

For a long time I used to get up early on the day of the Annual Anti-Gentrification Street Festival. I’d join the crew that set up traffic barricades on Claremont, Broadway and Riverside and lug tables from International House—the dorm for foreign students on Claremont—down to Tiemann Place. I’ve tended to flake off lately though. My nephew Jamie and his gen seemed to have taken on the job after my brother Tom died—retiring elders like me. Yet this September I’d been more involved in prep since we’d arranged with our Councilman’s office and the DOT to schedule the “unveiling” of an official sign co-naming Tiemann Place “Tom DeMott Way” on Festival day.

Thanks to a prompt I could not refuse from an Irishwoman, Anah Klate, on September 16th I was up and out on the street by mid-morn (as grey went blue).

Read more

Emily Rose

by

This photo graces the cover of Bruce Jackson’s new book of essays, Ephemera 1995-2022. Don’t be fooled by the self-diminishing title. Jackson’s dog earned her paper monument…

Read more

Men in Sand

by

Unlike Andrew Holleran’s previous beautiful, vital fictions gracing gay men’s stories over the decades — Nights in Aruba, The Beauty of Men, Dancer from the Dance — Kingdom of Sand is an unfortunate late coming wrawl of self-indulgent sadness.

Read more

Breakdown

by

The rich take a plane or hire a car,
but our power is only waiting hour
after hour at the cancelled
bus station, waiting for the backup bus
to heave its way down from Tampa,
while the driver in cigarette-
stained undershirts waits with us,
repeating over and over, he “didn’t
f-up.”

Read more

Honey

by
My father died at the age of eighty. One of the last things he did in his life was to call his fifty-eight-year-old son-in-law “honey.” One afternoon in the early 1930’s, when I bloodied my head by pitching over a wall at the bottom of a hill and believed that the mere sight of my own blood was the tragic meaning of life, I heard my father offer to murder his future son-in-law. His son-in-law is my brother-in-law, whose name is Paul. These two grown men rose above me and knew that a human life is murder. They weren’t fighting about Paul’s love for my sister. They were fighting with each other because one strong man, a factory worker, was laid off from his work, and the other strong man, the driver of a coal truck, was laid off from his work. They were both determined to live their lives, and so they glared at each other and said they were going to live, come hell or high water. High water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite along a river. My father died a good death. To die a good death means to live one’s life. I don’t say a good life.
I say a life.

Read more

With Resolve, Paul

by

Sisters and Brothers,

Here’s an early musical warm-up for the Labor Day Weekend.

Yes, the United Auto Workers union, led by their new president, Shawn Fain, has edged closed to a strike against the Big Three automakers upon contract expiration on 14 September. And with that in mind, here is a “Rockin’ Solidarity,” originally arranged Dave ‘Redd’ Welsh circa 1985. It’s packed with spirit, and it features Reed Fromer on piano and a vocal chorus from the Freedom Song Network.

The updated and highly relevant images were posted just a couple of days ago by Saul Schniderman, editor of his great weekly, Friday’s Labor Folklore. Enjoy these 3 minutes and 22 seconds of solidarity:

“Little Women,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and America’s Progress

by

The absolute favorite books of my childhood were strictly for boys, written by Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers and its numerous sequels, which I devoured, or by James Fenimore Cooper, the author of The Last of the Mohicans and its own sequels, which likewise I devoured. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, was, by contrast, strictly for girls. I knew this because, unlike the works of Dumas and Cooper, which sat on my own shelves, Little Women sat on my sister’s shelves, together with other works by Alcott. But there was no bar to my taking a peak, and the illustrations enticed me, and the pages turned, and somehow I devoured Little Women, too.

Read more