I went to a concert last night in Brooklyn where everyone attending was white and everyone serving was black.
Nine Inch Nails, Barclay’s Center
I took the subway home. 
I walked a few blocks. 
And thought about that some more.
Enduring Racism
Category Archives: new york city
“But, mom, they’re all drug addicts.”
He looked calm and sensible in his slim black jacket, a cigarette held idly up. “But, mom, they’re all drug addicts.” 
He was quiet after that, listening, looking at his fingers. I wondered who he was talking about. Siblings? reality TV?
 But I was late for work.
Newark Pastoral
The train has stopped. 
There are no announcements. The signs inform us that the 18% who drop out need 100% of our help and that you will go to jail if you resell your guns. 
A wide-eyed woman searches her phone for another song while a bearded fat devil licks cheesy-fry grease from his fingers and a gaunt man, new accounting textbooks on his knees, speaks too loudly into his phone, declaring his price and promising to be there soon. 
The train has stopped.
And You Thought Your Job Was Hard
There aren’t many jobs more difficult than construction. 
And while these guys are only ten stories above ground, the challenge and risk are in no way diminished. Look at the worker, in the upper left hand of this sequence, scaling down the girder. 
There is a video for each of these sequences. Just click on any of the pictures above.
Systematic Rape: Extract from “The Ark”
I remember my second year at university. All of my friends wanted to go down to the field and initiate the freshmen, cover them with whipped cream and blue dye, make them do stupid things, just humiliate them and get them horribly drunk. I looked at these people – my friends, good friends – and they were practically foaming at the mouth, intimidating these kids.I don’t know. It was like rape.
Dazed and Confused (Linklater, 1993)
These kids were only a year younger than us, just a year, but we had had it done to us, and so it was our turn. It was our turn to be bullies. That’s what we were trained to do. We called it a rite of passage or some bullshit about growing up, but it was just rape. And it doesn’t stop there. It’s in everything we do, in school, at work, buying groceries, getting on a plane, walking in the street.
Occupy Wall Street
We learn to accept it. We learn to give it back. Worse than that, we learn to derive pleasure from giving it back. We feel justified in giving it back.That’s why I don’t have faith in us. We’re more infantile than when we were kids.
People Watching on the Subway
Las Vegas is probably the best place for people watching. 
But the New York subway system is a close second.
                           That’s right. No signal.
The Compass Rose – Irish Theater Festival in New York
In a big city known for big-name theater, it is a pleasure to find something of quality not so hyped.Â
The Compass Rose, a simple story of lost love, is set in a bar and staged in the very same – Ryan’s Daughter Pub on the Upper East Side 
The characters, a pair of ex-lovers, walk back and forth through the audience as they attempt to decipher their past.
It is visceral theater, well worth the $18; the house ale, at $5, is a fair price too.
The MTA’s Sunday Subway Delays
New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority can make life miserable for passengers.
It offers a dubious weekend service, detouring and canceling trains, making inefficiency feel like persecution. 
Sometimes all you can do is hang on. Â 
Zuccotti Park – Occupied by Others
Occupy Wall Street launched its campaign two years ago in Zuccotti Park.
Two years later, it is now occupied by World Trade Center construction workers – at least for their lunch break. Â 
Remembering 9/11: Excerpt from “All In”
It was that plane – that was it – vanishing, a plane into a building and then that smoke billowing out, that sideways hole, and the other, turning as it hit, nose out perfectly and fireballs, screaming on the ground and crap everywhere and watching and watching, the building coming down, its radio antennae like a hat, a boy’s hat, and puffing out, all of it sinking, the dust of it, bits sticking up. 
And then everyone saying childish things because that’s all they had and listening and waiting for better angles and thinking it might mean something, to give it meaning, something like this, this thing, impossible and obvious, and not doing anything, just watching, footage, pictures, and thinking that it must be something. 9-11. A phone number, nothing. * (*From All In)