In Country

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There are three new buildings being raised right around our co-op, primarily by workers who come in every day from the West Bank or Gaza.  A few days ago I spoke to one of them in the little grocery store.  Tall, shy, a teenager, he could speak only Arabic and comes over the border every day.   From Gaza, he comes through the Erez crossing.

But I won’t be seeing him for a while.  The crossing was destroyed yesterday when hundreds of nearby residents were slaughtered in their shelters. 

The demonstrations were cancelled last night – most of the pilots, the soldiers, the navy, the doctors – were in the sites of the catastrophe, trying to clean up the remains of the slaughter, to treat survivors, to find some of the terrorists who may still be around.

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The mainstream media completely missed the story when reporting on Trump’s visit to the South Carolina gun store

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Candidate Trump’s stop at a gun store in South Carolina on Monday wasn’t just an offhand visit: His eight SUV convoy doesn’t do anything without advance planning days or even weeks ahead of any event Trump attends or location he visits. He made a decision to stop at Palmetto State Armory in Summerville, South Carolina, because he knew that that specific gun store was where the racist shooter in Jacksonville, Florida bought the guns he used to kill three Black people at a Dollar General store in late August.

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

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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.

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A Great Day in West Harlem

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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”!

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Fiesta

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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).

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Emily Rose

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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…

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Men in Sand

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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.

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