Philly the day I arrived 25 years ago

Twenty-five years ago to the day I arrived in Philadelphia, having been hired as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As I flew in a Piedmont Airlines jet over the city, I looked below me and saw huge plumes of black smoke rising up from a neighborhood west of the west bank of the Schuylkill River. What the hell is going on? What is this city I've come to? The mayor and police had firebombed the MOVE house on Osage Avenue. Welcome to Philly, Al. Now, a quarter century later, I live on Osage Avenue.

Olde City after the storm

salt o' earth Philly-style

I've long been a big fan of journalist Murray Dubin. No one knows more about Philly than Murray. He was recently at the Writers House and this link will take you to links to both audio and video recordings of the event. A Philadelphia native and Temple grad, Murray's publications include South Philadelphia: mummers, memories, and the Melrose Diner (1996, Temple University Press) and Living Under South Street : Photographs of South Philadelphia by Jonathan Elderfield (2003, Kehrer Verlag). Along with freelancing, he is currently co-authoring a book with Dan Biddle on America's "first" Civil Rights movement, the effort by free blacks in the North to secure true freedom for themselves in the 1800s by advocating ending discrimination in employment, transportation, education and on the baseball playing fields.

local milk & honey

Milk & Honey Market on Baltimore Avenue - not looking its best on a recent forlorn evening after closing time. But you get a sense of the location. Corner of a once very busy street here in West Philly. Every time someone attempts such a venture here, I feel the need to support them. Turns out, in this case, that the support is worthy: they've found fabulous organic suppliers and it's always a treat to go there. Here's a little review I put up on Yelp.

civic read

--from a profile (really, a snappy Q&A) of me done by the Philadelphia Inquirer in January 2007.

Frank over here

Frank Sherlock read from his poetry recently at the Writers House. Here is a video recording. Frank is the author of Over Here (Factory School 2009) and the co-author of Ready-To-Eat Individual (Lavender Ink 2008), a collaborative work with the Poet Laureate of Dumaine Street, Brett Evans. A duet with CAConrad entitled The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems is forthcoming from Factory School in fall 2009.

choosing to live in the city

From the Daily Pennsylvanian, March 20, 2009. Click on the image above for a larger view. Oh, yes, and I'm also the quote of the day. Back in July '07 I wrote a little bit about how I got to West Philly in '98 and provided a link to a Philadelphia Business News article about it.

visiting the kiss on V-Day

On Valentine's Day, Jane and I paid a visit to the great Arensberg rooms at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and stood for a long while in front of Brancusi's "The Kiss" (1908). If you glance at it, it seems (by this point) a cliche. But that tiredness is of our own making. Stay with it long enough and its revolutionary qualities come back at you. They did for us indeed. I took this photo with my iPhone (the lowest-quality aspect of that otherwise beautiful device), so forgive me.

freedom is a light

Linh Dinh snapped this photo yesterday, during a long jaunt around Philadelphia with two visiting Chinese poet-scholars. Zhimin Li gave a reading at KWH the other night as part of the Writers without Borders series.

incident

Shout out to... the 40 or so schoolchildren on the public school bus that drove by our polling place on Tuesday.

West Philly, 47th and Pine. About 150 of us were standing there, the line going nowhere: all three voting machines were "broken." How could this be? Geez, don't these people at least check the night before to make sure the machines are working? This is an important election. Pennsylvania is a swing state. C'mon! I, deeming myself ever ready for such crises, dial The Committe of 70, the Election Commission, WNYC/NPR which is sending out reporters to all problem spots. We're monotonally told: "The voting-machine repairman has been called and is apparently on his way." The Obama volunteers got us coffee and donuts but a few impatient people began peeling away, needing to get to work, feed families breakfast, get little ones off to school. A few tempers flared. Then the bus. As it neared, we realized there was something a little different. The kids had seen us, had run to the windows on the sidewalk side, were reaching out ecstatically with arms and heads and were chanting loudly and in unison: O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A! Cheering on the adults, whose spirits had so easily flagged. Vote for us! Do it for us! And the bus, which had paused at the stop sign, soon rumbled onward. We smiled huge smiles at each other, shook our heads at the Meaning of the day, munched our donuts, and readied ourselves for the long wait for the repairman.

eros, c'est la vie

Anne d'Harnoncourt died suddenly last weekend (after coming home from minor surgery). She'd been the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1982 and was admired by pretty much everyone.

Many readers of this blog will know of the great, great Arensberg collection of early 20th-century modernist work (sculpture in particular) and thus of the amazing Marcel Duchamp pieces in those rooms at the PMA. Anne d'Harnoncourt was an expert on Duchamp and a tireless promoter of his work and centrality to modernism's strong (and postmodernism's obsessive) anti-art impulse.

NPR has made available a 9-minute interview with d'Harnoncourt conducted by Terry Gross for Fresh Air. Here it is.

artblog goes to new PMA building

Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon, a few years back, decided it was time to go wholly into the work they loved - reviewing art and advocating for local artists and arts organizations. They created "artblog" and it thrives.

Their most recent entries have to do with the new addition to the Philadelphia Museum of Art - the new Perelman Building, which is located across a section of the Ben Franklin Parkway circle connecting BFP to Kelly Drive.