Next stop?

Tuesday 2/22/22

    Walking through Moynihan Train Hall, I heard an announcement for an Amtrak train to Richmond, Virginia:

• 3:22p | 3:22p - Newark, NJ (NWK)

• 3:34p | 3:36p - Metropark, NJ (MET)

• 3:58p | 4:00p - Trenton, NJ (TRE)

• 4:27p | 4:30p - Philadelphia, PA (PHL)

• 4:54p | 4:57p - Wilmington, DE (WIL)

• 5:25p | 5:25p - Aberdeen, MD (ABE)

• 5:50p | 5:52p - Baltimore, MD (BAL)

• 6:04p | 6:06p - BWI Marshall Airport, MD (BWI)

• 6:19p | 6:20p - New Carrollton, MD (NCR)

• 6:35p | 7:10p - Washington, DC (WAS)

• 7:27p | 7:27p - Alexandria, VA (ALX)

• 7:45p | 7:45p - Woodbridge, VA (WDB)

• 7:57p | 7:57p - Quantico, VA (QAN)

• 8:22p | 8:22p - Fredericksburg, VA (FBG)

• 9:04p | 9:04p - Ashland, VA (ASD)

• 9:21p | 9:26p - Richmond, VA (RVR)

Hearing Quantico and (especially) Fredericksburg made me perk up.

An old house

 In northeastern Flushing, not every house is new. Walking along Bayside Avenue, I passed by a house which caught my attention: not a brick box

A little web research tells me 145-38 Bayside Avenue is a 2 story frame detached home constructed in 1910. I guess that’s a mansard roof on a victorian style house. Every detail about it is interesting, not a cookie-cutter nothingness.

Accordions

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/arts/music/accordion-repair-francisco-luis-ramirez.html?referringSource=articleShare

Bill Virdon, Quiet Manager of Four M.L.B. Teams, Dies at 90

 As a player, mainly for the Pirates, he was an outstanding center fielder and hit a catalytic ground ball in the 1960 World Series against the Yankees.

Catalytic

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/sports/baseball/bill-virdon-dead.html

Traffic roundabouts

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/climate/roundabouts-climate-emissions-driving.html?referringSource=articleShare

Mort Sahl

 

Iconoclast, if anything. Unpredictable.

Before Sahl, who died at 94 on Tuesday, intellectual arguments and controversial stances were off-limits to stand-ups seeking mass acceptance.

Not Rosie the Riveter

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/us/betty-reid-soskin-100.html?referringSource=articleShare

George Wein

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/arts/music/george-wein-dead.html?referringSource=articleShare

Gilbert Seltzer, Soldier in the World War II ‘Ghost Army,’ Dies at 106

 Mr. Seltzer was one of 1,100 soldiers attached to the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, which pulled off elegant strategic cons on German forces, ingeniously creating the illusion that American troops were where they weren’t.

Others included the designer Bill Blass and the photographer Art Kane

A great day in Harlem: a classic photo, a snippet of music history, snapped by Art Kane, on August 12, 1958.

Design a fake tank? Bill Blass. He was a big name in design years ago, and during the Second World War put his art to work.

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

 A century ago, the Battle of Blair Mountain raged. It is all but forgotten. It should be remembered.

Advertising characters mythology

 

Ellen Havre Weis, Whose Museum Put Pop Into Mythology

Ms. Weis’s intent was to link our conceptions of these pop-culture figures to the human need to mythologize; she asserted that our Fates, Furies and giants were not left behind in Greece or Egypt, but rather transposed to our own culture. The Jolly Green Giant was her selling point when describing the museum to its leadership and the public — he was, she said, a character straight out of “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

Ms. Weis took inspiration from “Mythologies” (1957), a collection of essays by the French intellectual Ronald Barthes, which asserted that social values reflected archetypes and tropes from ancient myths.

Pen dipped in an inkwell of acid

 

Michael M. Thomas, an acerbic columnist and novelist who wrote chiefly about money and how people got it, what they did with it and what it did to them — people he dismissed as “social climbers, stock market papermongers, real estate shills and assorted other virtuosos of hype and blather” — died on Aug. 7 in Brooklyn. He was 85. 

He was being treated in a hospital for complications of arthritis and died of a bacterial infection, his wife, Tamara Glenny, said.

Mr. Thomas, who was the scion of an old-line family and who inhabited the upper echelons of Manhattan society, had three distinct careers: assistant curator of European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, investment banker at Lehman Brothers and, finally, writer. While he loved art history and immersed himself for a time in the world of high finance, it was with his pen — dipped, some said, in an inkwell of acid — that he found his groove.

What if Highways Were Electric? Germany Is Testing the Idea.

Electric trucks: NYT article, 8/5/2021

Figuring out how to make trucks emissions free is a crucial part of the fight against climate change and dirty air. Long-haul diesel trucks produce a disproportionate share of greenhouse gases and other pollutants because they spend so much time on the road. But the industry is divided.

A rare figure in the literary world

 Roberto Calasso. 

Much of Mr. Calasso’s writing stemmed from his lifelong preoccupation with ancient myths and their meaning, and with uncovering the common allegories and narrative threads across cultures, eras and civilizations. Fluent in five modern languages and proficient in three ancient ones, including Sanskrit, which he taught himself, Mr. Calasso was fascinated by the question of how humans create meaning through shared stories.

Calasso carved out a new space as an intellectual, retelling myth as true, certainly as true as science,” Tim Parks, who worked with Mr. Calasso on the English translation of “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,” said in an interview. “His implication is always that we are as subject as our ancestors were to the forces that find their names in Zeus or Venus or Yahweh or Shiva.”

The fourth most-cited 20th century psychologist

Albert Bandura, leading psychologist of aggression

Richard C. Lewontin, Eminent Geneticist With a Sharp Pen, Dies at 92

 

Richard C. Lewontin, widely considered one of the most brilliant geneticists of the modern era and a prolific, elegant and often caustic writer who condemned the facile use of genetics and evolutionary biology to “explain” human nature, died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 92.

Dr. Lewontin was a pioneer in the study of genetic variation among humans and other animals. Applying insights from mathematics and molecular biology, he radically advanced scientists’ understanding of the mechanisms of evolutionary change and overturned longstanding assumptions about differences among individuals, races and species.

A gleeful gadfly, he tirelessly attacked shibboleths about the primacy of DNA over nurture, culture and history in shaping complex behaviors.

Dr. Lewontin spent the bulk of his career at Harvard University. Many of his students and colleagues regarded him with an awe that tipped toward reverence, describing him as equally gifted at abstruse quantitative research, popular writing and public speaking; a Renaissance scholar who spoke fluent French, wrote treatises in Italian, worked with Buckminster Fuller on his geodesic domes and played chamber music on the clarinet with his pianist wife, Mary Jane. He was also a volunteer firefighter and a self-described Marxist who chopped his own wood.

“If it is not unusual, then what is the point?”

Jacques Barzaghi, a Former Fixture Beside Jerry Brown, Dies at 82?

Richard Rubenstein, 97, Dies; Theologian Challenged Ideas of God

 Richard L. Rubenstein, the leading Jewish voice in the theological groundswell of the 1960s known as the “Death of God” movement, who argued that the Holocaust had invalidated the idea of an omnipotent, benevolent deity who safeguards Jews as the chosen people, died on May 16 in Bridgeport, Conn. He was 97.

“To see any purpose in the death camps,” he continued, “the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, anti-human explosion in all history as a meaningful expression of God’s purposes. The idea is simply too obscene for me to accept.”

While he contended that the God of traditional beliefs did not exist, Dr. Rubenstein never renounced a belief in a God and attended synagogue every Sabbath, his daughter said. He saw God as “the Lord of all creation” who left human beings to make their own moral choices, said Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar who studied with Dr. Rubenstein for his doctorate at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

“God is the ocean and we are the waves,” was a favorite metaphor of Dr. Rubenstein’s.

“That doesn’t make human life meaningless,” Professor Berenbaum said. “It gives us the opportunity to create meaning.”

Sophie Rivera, Photographer of Latin New York, Dies at 82

 

Sophie Rivera a photographer who won acclaim making luminous portraits of Puerto Rican New Yorkers and other city dwellers before turning the camera on herself, died on May 22 in the Bronx. She was 82.

Her husband, Dr. Martin Hurwitz, a psychiatrist, said the cause was a neurodegenerative disease. She lived in Upper Manhattan and had been in a hospice facility in the Bronx.

Ms. Rivera, who was of Puerto Rican descent, began making portraits of her neighbors in the late 1970s, asking passers-by in front of her Morningside Heights apartment building if they were Puerto Rican. If they said yes, she invited them to be photographed.

The images she made were majestic four-by-four-foot prints of everyday New Yorkers of all ages. They were time-stamped by their hair styles and clothing as citizens of the 1970s and ’80s, but they were made eternal by their direct gazes, formal poses and the nimbus of light with which Ms. Rivera surrounded them.

Josep Almudéver, 101, Dies; Last Known Veteran of International Brigades

MADRID — Josep Almudéver, the last known survivor of the International Brigades who volunteered to fight in Spain’s Civil War in the hope that they could stop Fascism …

History proves they were right.

“Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter. I was a photographer. I have pictures. I have proof.”

Faye Schulman Dies; Fought Nazis With a Rifle and a Camera

Harvey Schlossberg, Cop With a Ph.D. in Defusing a Crisis, Dies at 85

 Harvey Schlossberg, a former New York City traffic cop with a doctorate in psychology who choreographed what became a model law enforcement strategy for safely ending standoffs with hostage takers, died on May 21 in Brooklyn. He was 85.

His death, at a hospital, was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest, said his wife, Dr. Antoinette Collarini Schlossberg.

The need for a standard protocol for hostage situations became more pressing in 1971 after the botched rescue of guards during the Attica prison riots in upstate New York. The next year, captives were taken in a Brooklyn bank robbery (the inspiration behind the 1975 Al Pacino film “Dog Day Afternoon”) and Israeli athletes were seized and massacred by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics.

In a pioneering training film he made for the New York Police Department in 1973, Harvey Schlossberg said that in a hostage situation, police officers “all believed, ‘If you gave me the right gun with the right bullet, I can put everybody out.’”

Dr. Schlossberg was originally assigned as a traffic officer in the accident investigation unit. But one day Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy was perusing a printout of personnel and serendipitously discovered a hidden asset: an officer with a doctorate in psychology. Dr. Schlossberg was soon transferred to the Medical Bureau to perform emotional testing that would determine the well-being of prospective and current police officers. He was promoted to director of psychological services in 1974.

He went on to coach thousands of officers in hostage negotiating. One was a Boston police sergeant, William Bratton, who would rise through the ranks to lead the police departments in Boston, Los Angeles and New York City.

Dr. Schlossberg’s hostage-negotiating strategies accounted for all sorts of eventualities. He would advise, for example, against summoning a spouse or a priest to the scene of a crisis — a Hollywood tactic, he said, that often backfired because the hostage-taker’s rage might be rooted in family tension to begin with.

“It’s important to remember what an outsider Harvey was in the N.Y.P.D. In a top-down, paramilitary, predominantly Irish police culture of command and control, in walked an iconoclastic Jewish intellectual pacifist, a beat cop with a Ph.D. in psychology.”

Eric Carle, Author of ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar,’ Dies at 91

 “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” Mr. Carle’s best-known book, has sold more than 55 million copies around the world since it was first published in 1969, its mere 224 words translated into more than 70 languages. It is one of more than 70 books that Mr. Carle published over his career, selling more than 170 million copies, according to his publisher, Penguin Random House.

NY Times obit

My sons and grandson both liked it. Wonderful book.

Subway Swabbers Find a Microbe Jungle — And Thousands of New Species

 

NYTimes story

For centuries, naturalists have mapped the world’s flora and fauna. They have assembled atlases of migratory birds and cold-water fishes, sketched out the geography of carnivorous animals and alpine plants.

Now, an enormous international team of researchers has added a new volume to the collection: an atlas of microorganisms that can be found in the world’s subways. It contains data collected by more than 900 scientists and volunteers in 60 cities on six continents, from Stockholm to Shanghai, Sacramento to Sydney.

“We had a coordinated phalanx of people with swabs and masks, collecting genetic material from cities around the world,” said Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine who led the research.

Although each city had its own unique microbial profile, there was a “core urban microbiome” that all of the cities shared, they found. The scientists, members of the international MetaSUB consortium, also discovered more than 10,000 previously unidentified species of viruses and bacteria. They published the findings in the journal Cell on Wednesday.

Jerome Kagan, Who Tied Temperament to Biology, Dies at 92

 

Prof. Jerome Kagan, a Harvard psychologist whose research into temperament found that shy infants often grow up to be anxious and fearful adults because of their biological nature as well as the way they were nurtured, died on May 10 in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 92.

Prof. Daniel Gilbert, another Harvard psychologist and author, described Professor Kagan in an email as “one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century.”

“His research was not only original and groundbreaking,” he added, “but also prescient, foreshadowing the coming merger of psychology and biology in its attempt to link behavior to the brain.”

But he also concluded that properly run educational remedial programs were valuable because, except for the tiny number with acute brain damage, a vast majority of children, regardless of race or class, had the ability to master the intellectual skills that schools require as long as the students were instilled with confidence that they could succeed.

Professor Kagan acknowledged that as an ideological liberal he had originally believed that all individuals were capable of achieving similar goals if afforded the same opportunities. “I was so resistant to awarding biology much influence,” he wrote.

Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96

 How many librarians get an NYT obituary?

A Reference librarian at the Library of Congress 

Her learnedness became so comprehensive that she opened up new worlds to Mr. Asimov, the pre-eminent popular science writer of his day, and Mr. Sagan, the astronomer who introduced millions of television viewers to the wonders of the universe.

Constance Carter, a longtime colleague, visited Ms. Freitag last year just before the Covid-19 pandemic shut down nursing homes, then lost touch. She finally looked her up on Google this spring and came across the obituary.

In a way, Ms. Freitag was her own analog version of Google, providing answers to a wide array of queries from writers and researchers in astonishing depth and detail decades before computers and the internet transformed the research process.

On an astronomy-focused cruise in 1980, she had dinner with Mr. Asimov and others. He was famous for writing limericks, and on the spot he dashed off a racy one for her:

Said a certain young damsel named Ruth:
“I sit here enjoying my youth!
Between Isaac and Peter
What need for a heater?
I’m burning with love! That’s the truth!”

Bob Koester, Revered Figure in Jazz and Blues, Dies at 88

NYT obituary, 5/15/2021

Mr. Koester was a pivotal figure in Chicago and beyond, releasing early efforts by Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Dawkins, Magic Sam and numerous other jazz and blues musicians. He captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene of the 1960s on records like “Hoodoo Man Blues,” a much admired album by the singer and harmonica player Junior Wells, featuring the guitarist Buddy Guy, that was recorded in 1965.

He founded the influential Chicago blues and jazz label Delmark Records and was also the proprietor of an equally influential record store where players and fans mingled as they sought out new and vintage sounds.

“Shakey Walter Horton and Ransom Knowling would hang out there, and Sunnyland Slim and Homesick James were always dropping by,” the harmonica player and bandleader Charlie Musselwhite, who was a clerk at the store in the mid-1960s, told The Times in 2009, rattling off the names of some fellow blues musicians. “You never knew what fascinating characters would wander in, so I always felt like I was in the eye of the storm there.”

Spencer Silver, an Inventor of Post-it Notes, Is Dead at 80

 He created the adhesive that lets the small, square notes stick to surfaces. They became one of the most ubiquitous office products ever conceived.

NYTimes obit, 5/13/21

Really one of the most consequential inventions of the modern  age. Seemingly insignificant, but important.

Soli Sorabjee, Eminent Indian Jurist and Jazz Lover, Dies at 91

NY Times obit

 Soli Sorabjee was 18 when he walked into a record store in Bombay, as Mumbai was then called, and asked for a recording of the Hungarian Dances by Brahms. At home, he took a listen.

“I found it nothing like Brahms at all,” he told a television interviewer. “So many different sounds.” But he liked the tune on the presumably unlabeled or mislabeled record and played it again, and then a third time. “It happened to be ‘Tiger Rag’ by the Benny Goodman Trio,” he said. “The bug had bitten.”

Mr. Sorabjee became a passionate and lifelong jazz fan — as well as one of India’s leading jurists, a two-time attorney general, a constitutional expert and a champion of free speech.

Olympia Dukakis, Oscar Winner for ‘Moonstruck,’ Dies at 89

NY Times obit

Ms. Dukakis was 56 and an East Coast stage veteran of three decades when she starred in John Patrick Shanley’s “Moonstruck” (1987), a romantic comedy about a young Italian-American widow, Loretta Castorini (played by Cher), whose life is turned upside down when she falls in love with her fiancé’s brother (Nicolas Cage). Ms. Dukakis stole scene after scene as Rose, Loretta’s sardonic mother, who saw the world clearly and advised accordingly.

Moonstruck is a perennial favorite of mine.

Jacques d’Amboise, Charismatic Star of City Ballet, Is Dead at 86

 

NY Times obit

Barry Lewis, Beloved Guide to New York City, Dies at 75

 Loved his walking tours with David Hartman. His website, BarryLewis.org

The architectural historian Barry Lewis at the New York Public Library in the 1980s. Though his knowledge of architecture and design was vast, he had a disdain for pretentiousness and jargon, academic or otherwise. Credit...Chuck Fishman

 

He would describe the pastiched Tudor Revival buildings of Tudor City on Manhattan’s East Side as vaudeville; he likened the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village, with its bright red brick cladding, rather risqué for the period, to a woman dressed only in her underwear — a punk structure for its time.

“He was the quintessential New Yorker,” Mr. Hartman said, as vibrant as the city he loved. Their series, which began as a one-off, “A Walk Down 42nd Street,” seen on the New York PBS station WNET in 1998, was so popular that they made 10 more, traveling from Brooklyn to Harlem. The shows were seen on PBS stations all over the country.

They never scripted their episodes. “No matter what I said,” Mr. Hartman recalled in an interview, “he just took off like a bumble bee. It was a joy.”

 Probably where my idea of walking NYC neighborhoods came from; he was inspiring, and funny. 

Barry Stephen Lewis was born on July 4, 1945, in Manhattan, at the old Polyclinic Hospital on 50th Street, across from the old Madison Square Garden. He grew up in Woodhaven, Queens, a neighborhood he described as “the Italian/Irish/German/Polish/Greek/Jewish New York version of any Thornton Wilder town in Ohio.” His father, Larry, was the proprietor of Lewis of Woodhaven, a department store that was a fixture on Jamaica Avenue. A family business, it was started by his grandfather, Louis Lewis, in 1937. His mother, Frances (Distler) Lewis, worked alongside her husband.

The store sold everything from pots and pans to silk flowers and underwear. Neighborhood denizens always asked Barry and his brother, known together as “the Lewis kids,” “if the store carried a certain whatsit,” Barry once wrote.

New Yorkers at the Inauguration Festivities

 Gaga, JLo, a couple who used to live in DC and now live in Westchester, cool. My favorite was Ella.

Ella's eyebrows!

A new dawn in America

 Our national nightmare is finally over. Science and art matter again (or still).

Amanda Gorman Captures the Moment, in Verse 

The youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history read “The Hill We Climb,” which she finished after the riot at the Capitol. “I’m not going to in any way gloss over what we’ve seen,” she says.

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

It can never be permanently defeated.

 

When day comes, we ask ourselves:

Where can we find light

In this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry, a sea we must wade.

Reading lines that echoed the theme of the inauguration, “America United,” she spoke of the possibility of unity and reconciliation.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.

Somehow, we do it.

Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed

A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

 

Catie Lazarus, Comedian With a Lot of Questions, Dies at 44

 I had never heard of her (which she probably would have remarked on). Saw her obituary today.

On her live show “Employee of the Month,” she got laughs by interrogating writers, artists, politicians, intellectuals and her fellow comics.

“I started hosting this show because I couldn’t quite figure out how to break in,” Ms. Lazarus told The New York Times in 2015. “I wanted to hear from people who, for the most part, love what they do and have carved out a niche for themselves. It wasn’t just about how they broke in, but what they continue to find worth struggling for, worth the heartache and the rejection and the economic toil and other types of losses that go along with it.”

Without being flip, this is the sort of detail I enjoy seeing about people, and often see in obits of people I knew nothing about: 

Catherine Simone Avnet Lazarus was born on April, 26, 1976, in Washington. Her father was a public policy lawyer who had been associate director of the White House domestic policy staff in the Carter administration. Her mother, Rosalind (Avnet) Lazarus, was a federal government lawyer. A great-great-great-grandfather was Simon Lazarus, founder of the Lazarus & Company department store chain, which later became Macy’s Inc.

What travels?

 Life changed in March of 2020. A pandemic changed how we live our lives, what we do, how we live every day. I stopped taking buses and trains, favorite modes of transportation. I left my home in Flushing for long periods, escaping to our little corner of the Catskills. I stopped going out to restaurants. I wore masks all the time, washed my hands often, cleaned incessantly, and kept my social distance from everyone. I stayed healthy. No one I know got the virus, though that was the exception locally and nationally. I fumed at the temerity and stupidity of people who refused to believe that the virus was real. Of course, those idiots had an example in the man with the fake tan and blonde hair and triple chins who kept ranting about law and order as he broke the law and threatened social order. Now, he is a loser, and soon will leave the public sphere (though he will rant and rave so the mainstream media he purports to hate will give him free coverage). At least responsible adults will be in charge of our wounded nation, and once again science will reign. Perhaps next year I will again travel. 

Deb Price, a First as a Columnist on Gay Life, Dies at 62

 I had never heard of her until I read her New York Times obituary. Now I know what an impact Deb Price made.

Ms. Price was working in the Washington bureau of The Detroit News, when she proposed a column from the gay perspective.

“I found the courage to ask for the column that I’d always wanted to read,” she said in a 1993 speech in New York to what is now called The Association of L.G.B.T.Q. Journalists.

“I wanted to be entertained, not offended,” she said. “Talked to, not about. Informed, not maligned. Inspired, not demoralized.”

Her publisher, Bob Giles, agreed and announced the column in a front-page letter to readers.

In her first column, Ms. Price asked how she should introduce Ms. Murdoch (girlfriend? lover?). Some readers were disgusted and offered their own choice suggestions of what Ms. Price could call Ms. Murdoch.

Mr. Giles said at the time that such bigotry only hardened his resolve to continue the column.

Ms. Price took the attacks in stride. “If there weren’t hostility and if there weren’t misunderstandings about gay people,” she told The Associated Press, “there would be no point in doing this column.”

Camilla Wicks, Dazzling Violinist From a Young Age, Dies at 92

 Hers is not one of the oft-repeated names of virtuosi.

She was a rare female soloist in a male-dominated era, but cut back on performing to raise her children. Howard Taubman, reviewing the violinist Camilla Wicks’s New York debut at Town Hall in The New York Times in 1942, had to admit that she had “a certain flair for the fiddle.” He was especially impressed by her handling of difficult passages in the Paganini D major Concerto, a work requiring an abundance of technical skill. By the way, Ms. Wicks at the time was, as the review’s opening sentence noted, “a pretty, flaxen-haired lass of thirteen and a half.”

With that attitude, it’s easy to understand why.

Dick Allen, 78, Dies; Baseball Slugger Withstood Bigotry

 Withstood is not the half of it . Had he been white, he would have been recognized as a great player. I once saw him hit a home run at Shea Stadium with one hand.

Erroll Garner

 

I don’t know why he isn’t more highly regarded, more famous. The influence of Art Tatum and Fats Waller on him are palpable. His talent was monumental.