From the Field

ALCHEMIST OF LIGHT from ICON Magazine Jan. 2012 by Thom Nickels

2012-01-01T19:54:00.000-08:00

Walking to Warren Muller’s chandelier art studio from the opposite end of the Girard Avenue area of Northern Liberties is a bit like stepping into a an old celluloid redux of The Matrix.

The open sky, while slightly reminiscent of Colorado, meets a very bland sort of industrial highway. There are no sidewalks here, although a dead railroad track snakes in and out of various abandoned lots. The feeling of desolation is oddly comforting—the words industrially romantic come to mind-- and the tall fence meant to block access to a scrap yard only halfway succeeds: passersby over the years have dug out peep holes for a glimpse into a hidden terrain of debris mountains composed of waste material from consumer society.

Muller’s studio, Bahdeebahou, is highlighted by a Dadaist outdoor sculpture that looks like an image from a dream. The studio’s immense Basilica-like doors open into an equally immense space that at first feels too empty. Inside the studio, more than likely you’ll be met by the resident Feng Shui guardians, Elbe and Bella, two Chihauhuas who will run towards you but stop just before reaching your feet. Like an animated Hallmark greeting, the dogs will get you to follow them to Muller, who may be anywhere inside the labyrinthine cave working on his latest chandelier.

Muller’s chandeliers are made from scrap metal, trashed buggy wheels, old vinegar bottles, toy trains, found objects, family heirlooms, dolls, toy ships, imperfect crystals or plastic fish that look like the stuffed specimens in a fisherman’s dens. If the range here seems impossibly wide, that’s because it is.
If you want ample proof of this, take a trip to Bahdeebahou yourself where you’ll see any number of working projects in suspended animation.

A signature Muller chandelier can cost upwards of $25,000. When a client asks Muller if he can make a chandelier from a box of old family heirlooms-- which may include anything from an old set of antique hobby horse heads to an assortment of Victorian era tops—Muller is careful to say that he’ll do what he can, although there are no guarantees that he will ‘use their stuff.”

Muller chandeliers are in private homes, offices and restaurants the world over. This summer he completed a chandelier for the Chandelier Museum in the South of France, a near three year project that necessitated spending time in France with his assistant Rebecca. The fact that the French have heard of his work and treated him like a celebrity—giving him a house to live in while he worked on the project, as well as access to scrap yards, thousands of imperfect crystals from the Museum, and a special dinner in his honor---stands in stark contrast to his relative, muted celebrity in Philadelphia, a city that many artists in fact—from Henry Tanner to Thomas Eakins—have felt less than appreciated in.

“I decided to do the French chandelier in a traditional shape, sort of a cone, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, in order to relate to what they do naturally,” Muller told me over lunch in a Northern Liberties Piazza eatery. “When they looked at it when I was finished they said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a chandelier.’ But it’s very chaotic what I did. The piece contains beautiful Cupids, beautiful bronze, arms; it’s very complex, very French. The imperfect crystals they offered me were perfect. I had a bottomless pit of French crystals, so we embellished the whole thing.”

Muller says he named the chandelier after the owner’s mother, who told him afterwards that she was excited about seeing her past revived and brought into a whole new realm.

For a Boulder, Colorado couple he was asked to do his take on a traditional chandelier but when he showed them the piece he was told that the chandelier “wasn’t girlie enough.”

At the time, Muller scratched his head and asked himself, “What’s girlie?” Perhaps in a perverse way it was the legacy of Boulder’s Jon Benet Ramsey that inspired him to apply a quick fix-- the addition of “some draped glitzy things”—that eventually won the approval of the couple. “Oh Yeah, that’s much better,” they told him.

The art world has caught on to the Muller mystique. Hilary Jay, of the Design Center at Philadelphia University, notes that Muller’s work reaches beyond aesthetic appreciation, “to become culturally reflective and intellectually inspiring. He keeps good company today---contemporary artists and designers such as lighting designer Ingo Maurer, the Dutch collective droog, Marcel Wanders, Philippe Starck, all who create works that conjure a dream and a wink.”

“In a way that architect Frank Gehry has reshaped our expectations of buildings, Muller has exploded notions of the look and function of lighting….Suddenly lamps are fun. And space is transformed,” writes Museum of Modern Art (former) Director of Education, Philip Yenawine.

In Bahdeebahdu, I spotted a number of pieces waiting for the right buyer. Muller, who produces about 20 chandeliers a year, works during down time cycles when sales are low, though whatever he makes is eventually sold. “I’m always prepared for downtime,” he says. “Downtime is the time when I make things without a request. A lot of the pieces in my studio are pieces I made just because no one was asking me. I have so much stuff that I collect. And I am always adding things. Eventually someone needs it for whatever reason.”

His “Marcel du Lamp,” a chandelier based on themes by Duchamp, hung in the studio for months before being spotted by one of the guests at a wedding (the Bahdeebahdu space can be rented out for private functions). Muller, in fact, had given up trying to sell the piece and had already decided that he was going to keep it when the wedding guest put in his bid. Shortly after this another buyer came forward but it was too late. Muller, who has learned to work with this sort of ebb and flow, says, “In my old age I’ve learned to be patient---things take the time they take; just because you can imagine them now, you also have to give things the life that they need to evolve.”

The Hung like a Horse Chandelier demonstrates just that. Anything but discreet, it is half Robert Mapplethorpe, half Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse. “Cute” is a word a group of modern Catholic nuns used to describe it. “The nuns became my friends. There’s a homeless shelter in the neighborhood that we’ve taken on as a project. We’ve done a few events here to raise money for the shelter that the nuns started,” Muller told me, while I tried imagining the good sisters, some in habits and some in chic stretch pant suits, inspecting the horse’s thick neon- lighted projectile.

Bahdeebahdu’s fundraising events for the shelter became so popular that they were moved to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where at one party there was a concurrent show of “provocative nudes.” Muller says that his initial reaction was to worry how the nuns would process this but, thanks perhaps to a path having already been cleared by the Art World’s Sister Wendy, he adds that “the nuns were just fine.”

Born in the Bronx to Eastern European Jewish parents, Muller recalls his childhood as a sort of Frederico Fellini-driven “museum in the streets,” full of color, noise and activity.

“My parents died in 1976, just six months apart. They had a dry cleaning business so we always had a storefront. I have an estranged sister a few years older than me. I tried to interest her in me, but that didn’t work. So you go and make your own family,” he said.

From the Bronx he went to the Hartford Art School and then he traveled to the island of Paros in Greece where he enrolled in The Aegean School of Fine Arts. On the island he met a photographer from Philadelphia who invited him to come to the city and enroll in the Philadelphia College of Art. After this he got involved in documentary filmmaking and the world of dance, leaving Philadelphia often to travel and live in San Francisco, New York, and Berlin. Still, he always managed to find his way back to the Quaker City as if under the spell of a dragging vortex. “I’ve been working here so long, you know, but the city ignores you—in spite of this I go about my business,” he says.

Not to worry: As long as you’re known in Paris, who cares about Terry Gross, Marty Moss-Coane and Radio Times, or winning a Best of Philly award?

In 2006, The New York Times featured Muller and his interior designer partner, Rj Thornburg, in a piece about the couple’s Pocono Mountain retreat, a three bedroom, 1,800-square-foot house on three acres of hills, fields and woods. Muller told The Times: “In the country, we take a lot of walks. There’s space to breathe, and plenty of room for imagining our dreams and goals…” The couple currently divides their time between the studio and the traditional farmhouse setting. In the studio there is a fully equipped kitchen and enough space for living accommodations although the average customer would never suspect that the studio is also doubles as a home away from home.

Muller and Thornburg met 13 years ago through interior designer Floss Barber. Barber was in Muller’s studio and suggested he come along to a luncheon interview. “You might be interested in meeting him,” she said. Muller took the bait and says he wound up having appetizers, a drink and dinner. “I stayed and stayed and stayed. I felt this rapport with him.”

Thornburg, as it turns out, got the job with Barber and worked with her for about a year before opening his own shop across the street from Muller’s old studio in Old City. The two later decided to go into business together and opened a studio on Cherry Street, where they sold chandeliers and furniture by designers.

“Wink,” a 135-page art book on Muller’s work put together by the artist’s friends, is a lavish work of art in the style of Taschen Books. “I invited people to write essays about me,” Muller says. The result is an all-inclusive look at every aspect of the artist’s life. “Wink” includes photo kaldeiscopes of Muller’s work, personal shots of him and Thornburg at home in the Pocono’s (including a party shot of both men in drag). Childhood photos of Muller-- his big ears and proud pompadour reminiscent of Howdy Doody—show up in the middle section.

Thom Nickels

The United States of Sexecution

2011-12-31T06:08:00.000-08:00

THE UNITED STATES OF SEXECUTION ---The following is a satire and should be read as such. It is not meant to
cast aspersions on legitmate cases of clergy sex abuse. In our day and age,
however, almost as many people "abuse" the system as use it "correctly."
We have witnessed this in the number of sex abuse cases that have been
been dismissed. ---
Call it serendipity, but last year when DA Seth Williams and a grand jury charged 2 priests, a former priest and a Catholic school teacher with molesting young boys, I was thinking of suing the Archdiocese myself.

Events are really on the upswing for the abused. We now have total control of the media and public sympathy, and it’s about time.

How can we lose? After all, the latest Philly charges included the first time that a high ranking church administrator had been charged with failing to protect children from abusive priests. Philadelphia is filled with lawyers ready to take on any imaginable case. And I think I have a case.

Though never touched by a priest in the intimate way we read about in the press, I have suffered flashbacks from the suggestive comments and winks from priests and monks over the years. These crippling memories have affected my capacity to have a long term relationship, as well as produced chronic headaches, not to mention public fainting spells and a compulsion to proposition strangers.

My ten million dollar suit will track down those Norbertine seminarians who hosted a retreat I made at the Daylesford Abbey in Paoli while still a teen.

That little group of lithe (and mostly) blond seminarians (in shades) seemed to have “that look.” That look was more “Hollywood” than monastic. I recall how one young monk, in a pair of bikini briefs, applied suntan lotion to his skin in a particularly provocative way. Periodically he’d take off his sunglasses and throw me a look, his eyes traveling the length of my body (I was also in a swimsuit) and then seeming to stop at my you-know-what. Then he’d put his sunglasses back on.

I felt a definite vibe, believe you me!

That night in the Norbertine guest house, I was unable to sleep. I even broke out into a cold sweat as my young, vulnerable Catholic soul seemed on the verge of collapse. I mean, how dare that monk in shades look at me like that? Who does he think he’s fooling?

I am also suing the estate of the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. Why?
Don’t forget, these were the heady Vatican II years when even respected voices like Merton were taking chances. Merton, author of The Seven Story Mountain, had converted to Catholicism from agnosticism years before, and had become the Gary Synder of western monasticism. In his private hermitage on the spacious grounds of the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky, he met with world leaders, theologians and even arranged wine and cheese picnics with Joan Baez.

I read Merton like crazy as a kid, and believed in his sincerity, only to find out later when his diaries were published that he had had an affair with a Louisville nurse while still a monk. You can’t tell me that the seeds of Merton’s earthly, rebellious philosophy weren’t planted somewhere in his writings so that they could be picked up and disseminated interiorly by some vulnerable kid like me!

That’s why when I read that Merton used to meet this hot nurse when he went into town to see his doctor I knew I had another case. I’ve engaged in a lifetime of sneaking around and I know that I picked this up like a virus from Merton’s writings. In Merton’s journals (published after his death in 1969), he even describes how the affair plunged him into a hellish spiritual state. And that’s what happened to me, thanks to that blond Norbertine monk in shades who kept looking at my you-know-what.

I know that monk wanted to yank me into the monastery barn; he just didn’t do it because I was always with my peers from grammar school. But Merton was so sneaky he would sleuth past his brother monks late at night to use the abbey phone to call his hottie. Even though he eventually left the nurse behind, the damage has been done.

And it’s been done to me.

I think I also have a case against several Philly gay priests (even a monk on sabbatical who took a year off toe explore the city’s gay nightlife), but before I file these cases that I’m preparing my case against Mt. Savior Benedictine monetary in Elmira, New York, where I went to discern whether I had a late vocation when I was in my early twenties.

Arriving at dinner time via taxi and Greyhound bus, I was met at Mt. Savior’s door by a Friar Tuck type who offered me a beer (it was a feast day), and who then invited me to eat, drink and be merry. Sounds innocent, right? Well, the monk, who was the monastery farmer, announced to a couple brother monks (and to me, presumably) how earlier he had milked a cow in the field and got a little bit… horny.
“Did he say what I thought he said?” I asked myself then. After all, I knew that Vatican II had opened windows, but barn doors? His comment got me thinking about sex, and so later that night I lost control and came onto another lay visitor, a guy around my age who happened to be sleeping in the next room. Knowing that the guy was next door behind paper thin walls made it difficult to sleep. The sound of him tossing on the noisy mattress didn’t help either. Soon I was convinced he was sending me erotic signals via wall taps and loud breathing. Talk about insanity! This led me to unspeakable acts right out of Portnoy’s Complaint.
.
“It’s Friar Tuck’s fault,” I said out loud. “He planted the seed with his cow story.”

I’ll be suing for psychological distress because later that night, as I coasted off to sleep, something invisible—a spirit?--grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me several inches down on the cot in a violent, spasmodic jerk. Then in my mind I heard a loudspeaker like directive: “You don’t do that in here?”

I cried out in fear, but didn’t ask “do what?” because I knew. And I didn’t argue, trying to point out that I had met Friar Tuck who greeted me not with “Peace be to you,” but, “I just milked a cow and got horny.”

Yes, put Friar Tuck in jail for life and throw away the key!

I was hit with a double whammy at Mt. Savior when a lay person in the lavatory stuck the tip of his construction boot under my stall and tapped like Gene Kelly in Angels Have Dirty Faces. I was so shaken up at this point I didn’t do anything.

I know there’s a lawyer somewhere who will help me find this guy in construction boots. He needs to be held accountable. I will find him, even if it takes a lifetime.

Friends also think I have a case against a Center City priest from a big parish who said he was an accountant when we met through a dating service. But when we met on the steps of the Art Museum, he told me that he was a local pastor. Once again I felt the house of cards known as Holy Mother Church crumble down all around me, causing me weeks of untold anguish, sprees of shoplifting and untold torment. This all came about when I told him I wouldn’t French kiss him. What injured me even more was his outrageous invitation to Easter services the following week, as if nothing had happened.

While I can’t nail them all to a cross and throw away the key, I can surely find a lawyer who can get me some bucks, so help me God.

Mama Doesn't Live Here Anymore by Arlene Ostapowicz

2011-12-19T08:05:00.000-08:00

Mama doesn't live here anymore
She's moved onto another place
If you decide to give her a call
don't be surprised if the operator
said, "Line disconnected, resident
doesn't live here."
If you need a helping hand, a shoulder
to lean on, then you will
Remember: Mama doesn't live here
anymore

It's Christmastime
& remembering all the
Christmas' past & all the
funny jolly brown trees--
Let's give Mama a tree
& pay her a visit
& then with a tear & an
empty absence
You remember all the caring
& sharing
Which is No More
For Mama Doesn't Live Here
Anymore

ICON MAGAZINE, December 2011; THE LAST WORD--Philadelphia Mormon Temple, Occupy Philadelphia, "Devised" Theater Work; Drugs and Rehab

2011-12-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

THE LAST WORD

By Thom Nickels

Philadelphia’s Mormon Temple
When it comes to church or temple architecture, Mormons have it all over Catholics and mega-church Protestants, whose modern churches frequently overemphasize cold, hard lines and utility.

The proposed Mormon temple at 18th and Vine Streets near the Philadelphia Parkway won’t be a utilitarian warehouse. The design is one of many temple designs currently in use throughout the Mormon world. The Philadelphia temple will be the Church’s 77th and it will have two spires, one hosting an image of the Angel Moroni, the angel whom, according to Mormon belief, appeared to Mormon founder Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York, sometime after Smith asked God which church he should join.

The angel directed Smith to dig in a certain spot where he would find golden plates containing a new scripture. The translated plates became the Book of Mormon, also the name of the current Broadway hit.

The Philadelphia temple spires will reach over 200 feet in height, providing an impressive point of reference in a sky-scape filled with crosses and steeples. The 68,000 square foot building will house a visitors’ center, a family history center, a financial service office for LDS communicants and an employment services office. Renderings of the proposed structure show an eclectic mix of Greek classicism and federalist 18th and 19th century styles, the antithesis of the work of current architectural legends Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid.
The Philadelphia design is one of the more basic temple templates, chosen from a wide range of styles in use throughout the world. The two spire temple is in fact one of the more recognizable Mormon temple styles and will blend harmoniously with the Parkway’s neoclassical structures.

Other Mormon Temple styles, such as the so called Bountiful, Front Tier, Native American Grecian or even the ultra-Disneyland-conjuring six spire temple in San Diego, have become impressive city landmarks. One of the reasons why Mormon temples become instant landmarks is because they are commonly built in isolated but high visibility sections of the city, such as near freeways. While the Center City location doesn’t afford quite the isolation of a freeway ramp, the temple’s Parkway presence will have a landmark feel nevertheless. The signature capstone, of course, will be the towering gilded fiberglass Angel Morni, trumpet in hand, which promises to compete with the cross atop the Catholic Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul. This juxtaposition promises to be as theologically jarring as the mix of minarets and crosses now popping up all over Western Europe.

Like Islam, Orthodox Judaism or Eastern Orthodoxy, Mormons don’t want to fit in as just another denomination. The design of Mormon temples tends to reflect this view. One will always find traditional elements in Temple design; a. Mormon Temple will always be recognizable as a Mormon Temple despite occasional flourishes into modernism. Mormons, in fact, seem to have a sense that too far a stretch into modernism might threaten a reinterpretation of the faith. Can a religion be altered through architecture? If it can be done through its liturgical celebrations, bricks and mortar may prove to be a powerful influence.

The temple in Mexico City, for instance, is still recognizable as “Mormon” underneath its modern Mayan design, a far cry from, say, the multi-million dollar Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, which seems to twist post-Conciliar Catholicism into a discombobulated box wreck, an appropriate symbol perhaps for a Church in crises.

Critics say that the Philadelphia Temple design contains elements of the confectionary, as if buildings built today must never hearken back to another age.

Hidden City Philadelphia, for instance, found nothing attractive about the structure.

“No one wants to discuss the appalling design of the 70 million dollar temple—if we ignore it, it just might disappear, folks seem to say—but it points up real tension in the decision about the role of new buildings. Should they blend in or boldly pronounce the values of our day?”

But what are the values of our day? Hidden City’s criticism seems to suggest that religions update their values as the culture “progresses.” After all, in a world where Yoga instructors, dog parks and weekly therapist appointments are king, how can there be anything of value in a big, gilded fiberglass angel?

The temple architect, B. Jeffrey Stebar of Perkins + Will, an Atlanta firm, is also a Mormon bishop in the Jonesboro Georgia Stake. The firm is generally noted for its Prairie-style modernism, except of course when it comes to the design of temples.

Mormon temples historically have had a heavy granite look, a carryover from the days of anti-Mormon prejudice when temples, such as the one in Nauvoo, Ill., were burned to the ground in 1848 shortly after being abandoned by Mormons heading west to Salt Lake City. Mormon Temples, according to Paul Anderson, a curator of a show on Mormon architecture at BYU, “aim for a delicate harmony between the Church’s desire to appear reassuringly Christian, while at the same time proudly advertising its separation from Catholic and Protestant dogma.”

Salt Lake City’s Mormon Temple, perhaps the most famous in the world, was finished in 1893 (it was designed by Brigham Young’s brother-in-law). A little known fact is that before its completion Church leaders made sure that it was astrologically aligned. Earlier temple designs also contain symbols you’re unlikely to find in modern temples. Besides the absence of crosses, older temple models are filled with Masonic handshakes, moon phases, suns, Big Dipper Constellations, and Inverted Pentagrams. Critics of Mormonism love to point out that such symbols are proof that the religion is from ‘the dark side,’ but sometimes, as has often been said, a symbol is just a symbol.

***

OCCUPY PHILADELPHIA
When I first visited the Occupy Philadelphia City Hall site, what struck me was the similarity to protest gatherings in the Sixties and Seventies. When I was a conscientious objector doing alternate service in a Boston hospital during the Vietnam War, frequent peace rallies, teach-ins and speeches in Harvard Yard became a staple of life. During the Vietnam War Moratorium in 1969, for instance, physicians, nurses and employees of Tufts-New England Medical Center sponsored a Draft Card burning. The hospital’s sponsorship of this radical act barely raised an eyebrow then. Today it would be unthinkable for a large metropolitan hospital to sponsor such a rally, but in those days many were convinced that the country was on the brink of a second Revolution.

Almost 45 years later, the country may indeed be closer to that revolution.

The Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, which has become an international movement, targets corporate destruction of the economy and financial abuses by banks and other financial institutions. Many of the protestors in the United States call for the dissolution of the Fed, that non-governmental agency posing as a governmental agency, whose job it is to distribute huge amounts of fiat currency to banks (at zero cost) who then lend that cash to the public at huge rates of interest.

Abolishing the Fed is a fine goal if only because U.S. money, which is no longer backed by the gold standard, currently runs the risk of becoming as worthless as German currency in the 1920s Weimar Republic. At that time, an unchecked Germany kept adding zeros to its currency until the fiat bills had no value whatsoever.
Is the message of Occupy Philadelphia getting out?

Marty Moss- Coane featured two Occupy Philadelphia participants on her radio show, Radio Times last month. Unfortunately, the show’s guests spoke in gross generalities and were a far cry from the articulate voices of most people living at the site. “Things are bad and they have to change; we have to do something” was the main refrain of the two guests. Perhaps, when all is said and done, it was the seductive sound of one guest’s Valley Girl accent that got her invited on the show.

This begs the question: what about the corporate media?

Unchecked media consolidation works to snuff out or not report news pertinent to a vital democracy. Significant stories that should be given top coverage are given little or no coverage when one or two news sources control everything.

During my visits to City Hall, I found that few occupiers had a sense of urgency when it came to the power of the corporate media. Some had never even heard of the film, Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which addresses this issue.

Two young male Occupiers challenged me on this issue. “We get coverage all the time,” one said. “We are all over the world. It’s huge!” Yes it is huge, but what you’re getting is media coverage based on the oddity of the encampment, a kind of ‘Let’s see what the freaks are up to today” rather than a serious examination of the issues being raised.

The average American who walked through City Hall last month probably didn’t stop to read the literature on the many tables there, but instead fixated on the deteriorating condition of the tents, how the occupiers were dressed, or even the smell of certain individuals. In the minds of most passersby this was enough to dismiss the entire movement as illegitimate. Making snap judgments based on appearances is a minor American pastime.

“The spoiled brats who make up the bulk of these whiners show what this so called movement is all about,” one Philly.com reader commented. “A jobs fair to these lazy slobs is like a cross to a vampire,” said another.

The middle class did this to Vietnam War protestors in the 1970s, calling them dirty long haired bums and dismissing their protests until the implosion of The Pentagon Papers brought the illegality of that war to a head. Overnight the tables turned; grandmothers everywhere confessed: “The hippies were right all along!”

In every political group there are extremists who obfuscate primary issues with satellite baggage.

At City Hall I heard soapbox talks on Vegan lifestyles and how everyone should give up the killing of animals; pleas for the formation of a new political party (no mention was made of the need for a Constitutional Convention, however). There were also plenty of Trotskyite socialists walking around addressing one another as “comrade” and praising the works of Karl Marx. One Trotskyite even dressed in a fur hat and faux Soviet uniform while others stuck to wearing armbands over long trench coats. Perhaps it was all an October-Halloween thing, but then again maybe the “dress up” Trotskyites were suffering from some kind of post-adolescent stress disorder.

Despite this costuming faux pas, Occupy Philadelphia deserves every Philadelphian’s support.

‘DEVISED’ WORK IN THE THEATER Writing a successful play is no easy task. When I was asked to write a play for a friend several years ago, I had no idea the project would take me into the dizzying orbit of “devised” or collaborative work. Until then, the idea of writing a play was pretty much a solitary endeavor, like novelist Thomas Wolfe writing on legal pads in longhand, or Jean-Paul Sartre making notes for his play No Exit while sitting alone in the Café Flores.

The play eventually took on a life of its own, involving not only the necessary addition of a dramaturge but editorial input from a long list of characters. In the end, it was much like a play written by committee.

A visit to Philadelphia’s Adrienne Theater this summer exposed me to the subject of “devised” work. “Devised work” in the theater is the latest avant- garde infection. I use the word infection because devised work’s general philosophy is to establish creative teams of people involved in the writing of a play, from stage lighting directors, actors, directors, director’s assistants or anybody else who feels that they have something valuable to contribute. The collective consciousness in these creative teams is all about creating the best play possible.

A noteworthy champion of “devised” work is David Dower, Associate Artistic Director at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage. At a panel discussion recently, Mr. Dower proclaimed, “The future of theater will be made by devised work,” and that “the days of one writer sitting alone in a room, submitting the play to the theater,” are over.

Good-bye Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet; hello creative teams a la Hollywood screenwriting board rooms.

Arena Theater, for instance, has a new “devised” policy of only accepting plays from playwrights whom they “engage” with, meaning, if you are a playwright outside you don’t stand much of a chance.

Michele Volansky of Philadelphia’s PlayPenn wrote about Mr. Dower recently in PlayPenn’s newsletter and voiced a ‘wait and see” view about devised work, giving it the benefit of the doubt while also wondering about some of its more radical expressions, like the super nova avant gard play without a written text.

“Nothing remains that I can access,” Ms. Volansky posits about text less plays. “Pig Iron and New Paradise Laboratories in Philadelphia have social relevance but none of them exist outside the memory and personal experience of those who witnessed them personally.”

“For a play to endure,” she adds, “you have to have a text.”

Cutting edge!

***

DRUGS AND REHAB

Septa’s 15 trolley, which I ride almost every day from my house in Fishtown, becomes at various times what some people call the Methadone Express. Users en route to two major methadone clinics along Girard Avenue often nod off in their seats and scream rather than talk when having conversations with friends. Many have a glazed look in their eyes, recalling Wolf Rilla’s 1960 film, Village of the Damned.
Withdraw from methadone can be more difficult than withdraw from heroin. That’s why when methadone clinics put patients on a withdraw program they usually drop the intake by about 5 mg. per visit until the patient is down to nothing. After treatment there are still problems because most patients experience withdraw symptoms and have difficulty sleeping. This situation often becomes so intolerable that most go back to methadone or street drugs.
Suboxone, or the “rich man’s methadone,” is no panacea either because in order for it to work an addict must keep taking it. It also causes no permanent changes in a user’s brain, so relapses are common.
These vicious cycles prove that heroin is the most devastating drug
on the planet.
Without a desire to change, an addict will never be cured of his/her addiction. Heroin, for most addicts, is a lifetime sentence. This is true whether one stays on the drug or opts to transition to methadone or Suboxone. A near- lifetime of maintenance is still required. Maintaining sobriety for an addict then becomes much like a career endeavor, often replacing vocational or professional goals.
One tragedy of Philadelphia’s immense heroin problem is its impact on the city’s homeless population.
Addicts today are able to spend 30 days in rehab (at the state’s expense) where they go through extensive rehabilitative programs. Residents are able to eat three meals a day. While there are currently sensible limits on how often an addict on public welfare can use free rehab facilities, the future looks dim for poor people opting to get clean for the first time.
With the barrage of federal and state cutbacks happening at every level, the time is approaching when all 30-day free rehabs will be a thing of the past. The logic behind these cuts, aside from obvious cost cutting factors, is the fact that politicians are beginning to take aim at how addicts use free government rehab as a means to get clean in order to get a bigger high once rehab is over.
Cycling out and entering another free rehab after more drug use has become a sort of urban dance for addicts who can never get clean.
Future government cuts would eliminate rehab for people on welfare, increasing the number of addicts with no place to go.
There are so called recovery houses, of course, but often these places are merely money making operations. Recovery house are post-rehab community living arrangements with house managers and established rules for residents. They are not drug rehabilitative facilities per se but protected environments that prepare an addict for reentry into the real world.
Some houses are as liberal as 1960s San Francisco communes, where members come and go at whim and are rarely tested or searched for drugs. These houses are in the business of “recovery” only to make money. Addicts are evicted for non-payment of rent while injurious behavior related to their recovery may be overlooked.
There are good recovery houses, of course, where participants sign in and out and where drug tests are administered, but houses like this are not the norm.
Despite the proliferation of new restaurants, bars and art galleries in Fishtown—there was even a laudatory article about the neighborhood in The New York Times a couple years back—its reputation as a drug capital is still well deserved. Neighbors may balk about the problem, and businesses may chase away panhandlers who beg for drug money, but the daily tidal wash up of used needles still manages to make a Jackson Pollack mess in nearly every local shopping center and Dunkin Donut parking lot.

Thom Nickels

Old City Art, from ICON Magazine, November 2011 by Thom Nickels

2011-11-04T10:45:00.000-07:00

In a troubled economy, people will cut out non-essentials in order to save money. Non-essentials might be anything from magazine subscriptions to purchasing perfumes on fragerences.net or books on Amazon. Buying art, be it an original work, print, serigraph or lithograph, would certainly count as a non-essential.

The recent economic downturn has forced small art galleries to reinvent themselves. From Boulder, Colorado, to Santa Fe, galleries are realigning themselves to the times, not always an easy task. The Boulder Camera, for instance, reports that artists are now pointing to collaboration over competition. That effort, at least in Louisville, Colorado, is called Arts Hub, where “a collective of artists who share a calendar and organize free events to try and draw larger crowds and a buzz, rather than relying on individual sales of a handful of expensive pieces.”

The number of art galleries in Santa Fe decreased from 103 in 2008 to a mere 84 member galleries today. In New York City alone, more than 2 dozen galleries closed between 2008 and 2009. The economic freeze has also spawned a rash of books and websites dedicated to helping artists navigate troubled times. In Jack White’s book, “The Mystery of Making It,” a practical polemic for artists, we learn that fewer than 50% of Americans have ever visited an art gallery.

So how are the art galleries in Philadelphia, and especially Old City, weathering the current economic draught?

Edward A. Barnhart, a Center City architect who opened Always by Design (AxD) at 265 S.10th Street four and a half years ago, at first thought he would have to end art shows and sales at AxD by the end of the summer, but then decided to stretch things out until 2012.

“We’ve had a trickle of sales from last year. We’d sell a piece or two in a show, but that’s it. Last spring there was a spurt of optimism. It began from the start of 2010 till early summer. I guess people were feeling that things were headed back in the right economic direction and they could be looser in discretional spending, but by mid-summer it totally tanked again,” Barnhart said.

The extension was good news to AxD managing director Ryan Mc Menamin, who told me, “At the end of the year we will re-evaluate in what incarnation the gallery is going to be in the new year.”

In September the gallery hosted the work of twelve illustrators from The Autumn Society, an organization of University of the Arts alumni committed to creative networking. The 35 or so prints and illustrations focused on basic graphic arts colors, and the various inks used in digital, offset and screen printing.

German-born artist Annette Cords will exhibit seven new paintings and ten collages at AxD from September 24 to October 29. The exhibition, Turnarounds, concentrates on what Cords calls “energies and transition and anticipation felt throughout one day.” Inspired by her physicist father’s world of science, Cords says that ever since she was a child she was always fascinated with her father’s work with “synchrotrons, electromagnetic fields and sub-atomic particles traveling near the speed of light.”
For several years now AxD has had to reinvent itself as a multi-purpose space in order to stay alive financially.

In addition to housing Barnhart’s architectural practice, the gallery has had rent out its space to theater companies as a rehearsal area, a reception area for author readings or private parties, film night or film castings venues as well as Philadelphia Fringe Festival rehearsals and presentations. This year AxD will host two Fringe Festival offerings, Neil Labute’s This is How it Goes (from Room6 Theatre Co.) and Dark Star Theatre’s The Witch in the Wood.

Like most small galleries in the city, AxD might attract up to 10 walk-ins a day for any given exhibit, a pale number when it comes to art sales.

“In August and September we will do some shows from the collection,” Barnhart says. “They will be more like composites of people we’ve shown in the past, a “best of’ from former shows.”

Barnhart believes that galleries can help their survival during economic downturns by being more active as a community resource. That, he says, is not about leasing prime space that goes for $2,000 a night. “That’s ridiculous. In a downscale economy, people are still looking to socialize, still looking to do the normal things they do, it’s just that they’re doing them in a less robust way.”

In Old City’s Muse Gallery at 52nd North 2nd Street, Muse collective member/artist Susan Wallack (an exhibition of Wallack’s work, “One-Part Paradise,” had been on display until July31st), told me that Philadelphia could be doing a lot more to support the city’s burgeoning Old City art scene, which many have compared to Soho in New York.

“I was in Soho before it was Soho,” the former New Yorker said. “I can tell you right now that Soho is a tourist destination. There are guided tours there in which people are walked in and out of the galleries. Philadelphia hasn’t gotten to that point yet.”

If Wallack had her way, she’d have those fake Old City Benjamin Franklin tour guides take a walk on the wild side and extend walking tours of the area to include something else besides the Liberty Bell and the Betsy Ross House.

“Walking around looking at the Liberty Bell is fine, but they need to have moving docents, who say to tourists that this is Philadelphia’s Soho, and here’s a place to eat, or shop, and here’s an art gallery. New York’s Soho was really promoted when it stopped being a lower part of Greenwich Village. It was promoted so well that the city changed parking regulations there. The city did everything they could to get people to visit and live there.”

Could Philadelphia follow suit, despite the ruinous reputation of the Philadelphia Parking Authority?

Although pleased that several of her Muse pieces sold, Wallack says that art gallery sales could be better in Philadelphia. “You go anywhere today, whether it’s too the Mall, to Bloomingdale’s, to Macy’s, and you see that these big stores are all empty. They don’t draw in the crowds they once did. And basically very little is happening now in the Philly art gallery world because everybody here is so uptight about spending money.”

Muse was founded 34 years ago as an all female arts collective on Rittenhouse Square. In the 1970s, Rittenhouse Square was still touting its legacy as Philadelphia’s version of Greenwich Village. Iconic Philadelphia legend/ art collector Henry Mcilhenny was still alive then, his mansion on the Square having become a magnet for international celebrities like Tennessee Williams and Andy Warhol (who once stayed there and made a sketch of Cecil Beaton’s feet). Other gallery owners, like Roger la Pelle, also had their starts there, until it became apparent that not enough people were coming to the Rittenhouse area to buy art. While both Muse and Roger le Pelle would later move to Old City, Old City was not without a snag or two. In Muse’s case, one snag became landlords chronically addicted to rent increases. This problem necessitated one Old City move for Muse from the middle of 2nd Street to its present corner location.

“Muse never let men in until the mid 1990s” Muse Director Nancy Halbert told me. “We don’t censor art. The environment of a co-op is different from a regular gallery.”

Muse members, in fact, pay a monthly fee, attend monthly meetings, and take turns “sitting” in the gallery. Halbert, who’s taking time off from her directorship because she recently underwent a spinal fusion, describes herself as a figurative artist and mentions a recent review of her work by Philadelphia Inquirer critic, Victoria Donohoe. “It was a good review but I didn’t sell this time,” she says. “Muse cannot really rely on sales, and that is why in August we rented the space to five really great abstract painters from Bucks County. They will pay the rent for August!”

For Rodger la Pelle, who first opened his la Pelle gallery in 1980 in an old basketball court in the former Rittenhouse Fitness Club, moving to 122 N. 3rd Street in Old City was a life saving measure.

“People just weren’t going to 20th Street and Rittenhouse Square Street, so now we are 26 years in this new location,” la Pelle says, adding that he thinks “the whole city must be depressed.”

“I don’t get art students outside of First Friday, which is like a date night. No, I don’t see many art students from all the art schools. I don’t see the faculties; I don’t see the curators and I don’t see the out of town art tours anymore. I think somehow Philadelphia must have gotten bad press because we used to sell to people from Washington and New York. Of course, everyone is still depressed because Philadelphia only got second place in the dirtiest category!”

La Pelle blames the city for making it tougher for art galleries to flourish.

“In Philadelphia there’s a 2% sales tax, a use and occupancy tax on commercial use of the space even if I make no sales. I pay on gross receipts whether or not I make any net profits. The economy of Philadelphia is so bad that the bookends of business, Goodwill Industries and the Mafia, both went broke here.

“And do you want to know something else?” he asks, “the Parking Authority is not giving money to the schools despite a 2007 agreement they made in which they were supposed to do this. The PPA has accumulated some 48 million bucks but now the city wants to raise taxes because they can’t collect the money from PPA.”

Get la Pelle going and he’ll tell you how he once met art historian, architect and Philadelphia Museum of Art Director Fiske Kimball; how he used to have amiable Rittenhouse chats with Henry Mcilhenny (while the later walked his poodle) and about the time that Whoppi Goldberg visited his gallery and promised to buy something at “a later date.”

“Though Whoppi said, ‘I’ll be back,’ I’m still waiting. I try to outwait everyone,” la Pelle says.

On any given First Friday, you’ll find soda and cookies at la Pelle’s, but not wine. “I don’t want to compete with restaurants,” he says, “and I don’t want to deal with a drunken crowd. But yes, we stay open till they stop coming, and that’s after midnight sometimes. I sold a $2500 painting after midnight recently. That’s a good time for chats and to dispense advice to young artists. I tell these young artists that if they see stuff that’s a great bargain and if you have 100 bucks, buy it. I try to tell them about the time I bought a print for 8 bucks and sold it for $3500.”

While almost all Old City galleries are at street level, the James Oliver Gallery at 723 Chestnut Street is a 4th floor walkup.

For serious collectors willing to walk the four flights of stairs to Oliver’s upscale “perfect space” environment, a glass of wine awaits. Oliver’s easy manner can perhaps be attributed to his Austin, Texas roots and the fact that for many years he was a musician by trade.

“We went all out to make this into a really beautiful space,” he tells me. “For starters, we have beautiful arched windows overlooking Chestnut Street.”

Then there’s the art, mostly minimalist with the accent on contemporary paintings, sculpture, photography and glass art installations. Very often there are “theme-inspired” shows in the gallery that Oliver says are designed to attract the more sophisicated art lover. “The fact that not many galleries in Old City and in Philadelphia have not closed because of the economic downturn is something positive to recognize,” he says, “but overall sometimes the galleries in the city are a little wanting-- often there’s a lack of consistency in the whole gallery scene in general.”

Oliver admits to having some reservations about the First Friday crowds, which are not only getting larger, but younger.

“People generally have heard through the grapevine that it’s become more of a younger crowd, college aged, or they witness this fact for themselves. I sometimes get a little frustrated with it because the whole thing is more like going out for a party. People in crowds will walk by someone looking at a painting without acknowledging that the person is looking at a piece and that they need that space. “
Oliver says that while the economy has forced him to do some things out of pocket, generally the gallery is moving along and getting a fair amount of attention. “We’ve always had a fair amount of press,” he adds confidently. “We started from the very beginning to have very strong shows. We always try to up the ante.”

Christine Pfister, of Old City’s Pentimenti Gallery (145 N. 2nd Street), maintains that while Pentimenti has been affected by the economic downturn, Old City is still the place in Philadelphia to shop for art. “There’s no doubt about that. We are over 26 galleries over 2 blocks, all on street level [with the exception of James Oliver, of course].

Pfister, who hails from Switzerland, says Pentimenti is doing fine. “We’ve been in business for 18 years. I think the longevity of the gallery is a help to the current crises in a sense, and I do have clients who have always collected art.”
The art scene in Old City, she says, reminds her of Chelsea rather than Soho. “Because Chelsea is the place in New York for art today, not Soho.”

“First Friday is still important because it’s when a large number of people will actually come to our city. Serious collectors, if they want to buy work at your gallery and if they know that this show is upcoming, will come before the opening.” Pfister thinks that despite the social aspect of First Friday—“people meeting and having a good time”—the event is still important. “I’ve had people in town from San Francisco stop in and buy something to take home with them. You never know who you are going to meet.”

Old City’s Gallery Joe (304 Arch Street) was opened by Becky Kerlin in 1993. Originally from Ohio, Kerlin lived in New York City for a while before heading to Bucks County in the late 1980s. Intent on establishing a more urban environment, Kerlin traded Bucks County for Old City “because opening a gallery in New York City wasn’t really an option.”

Old City, however, was the kind of place where Kerlin felt she could grow and learn rather than “disappearing” in Manhattan.

Gallery Joe deals in contemporary drawing, mostly abstract with at least half of the exhibiting artists from Philadelphia, the other half, as Kerlin says, “from all over the world.”

For Kerlin, Old City “has been great. She’s also pleased with the area, where she says that only one or two galleries have closed, although she’s quick to explain that in some cases “closed” just means they moved and reopened elsewhere. She mentions a couple of student galleries that have come and gone but for the most part she’s adamant that Old City as an art Mecca is pretty stable.

In September, Gallery Joe will host the work of Washington, D.C, artist Charles Ritchie, at which time Kerlin says she will welcome First Friday revelers until the gallery’s slightly early closing time. “For those of us who show very delicate work, we tend not to be open too late. Some people that are showing large items, it’s less of an issue and they stay open for the party aspect of First Friday, and that’s very good.”

For Tereza Gowden, a native of Brazil, and assistant manager of the Knapp Gallery (162 N. 3rd Street), First Friday is the best thing “they ever did for the city.”

The Knapp Gallery, which opened in 2006, is owned by Rebecca Knapp. It’s a mixed-use space. In 2010 Knapp hosted a staged event presented by the Center City Opera Theater.

As for contemporary art sales, Gowden tells me, “Well, we cannot complain. We are not selling 5 paintings a month but we are selling them. Of course it’s not enough. It could be better!”

That refrain is echoed by The F.A.N. gallery (221 Arch Street) owner Fred Al-Nkb, who says that Philadelphia galleries in general don’t make enough money to compete with New York galleries. “There’s no consistency in sales. One December could be good, another December terrible. But I cannot complain,” he adds philosophically, “I have a lot of loyal clients that buy from me, and I enjoy their business.”

My Column The Last Word, ICON Magazine, October 2011

2011-10-06T19:27:00.000-07:00

THE LAST WORD (from ICON Magazine, October 2011)

By Thom Nickels

Paint peels from the high vaulted ceilings in the oval-shaped rooms at the east and west ends of the Woodland Mansion, but this 18th century house still stands as a glorious reminder of Philadelphia’s social heyday.
The Woodland Mansion was built in 1787 in the Federal style on 250 acres of land purchased in 1734 by Andrew Hamilton, a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s. The house was built with a carriage house, stable and garden landscape, inspiring Jefferson to write, “The Woodlands is the only rival which I have known in America to what may be seen in England.”

Further additions to the mansion were added by Hamilton’s grandson, William Hamilton (1749-1813).

Once the scene of lavish 18th-century events, the Woodlands decline began in the 1840s, when the property ceased to be a social “cocktail Mecca” for local and national dignitaries. After William Hamilton’s death, the mansion and grounds were sold off by the heirs. In 1840, the estate became the property of the Woodlands Cemetery Company.

Most of what Jefferson saw in the 18th century can still be seen today, especially in secret passageways and labyrinths that cover the basement area. The cemetery is similarly impressive, where you can walk among the graves and tombs of prominent 18th and19th century Philadelphians.

Buried here are Thomas Eakins, Rembrandt Peale, members of the Drexel and Biddle families, Dr. Samuel Gross and architect Paul N. Cret, designer of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and the 1913 renovation of Rittenhouse Square.

Amid the towering monuments honoring the now-forgotten barons of big industry and business, Paul Cret’s and Thomas Eakins’ shockingly simple grave markers seem tragically understated. Had Eakins and Cret been native Parisians, their tombs would have towered over the ostentatious monuments of the business moguls.

Instead, grazing amid the tombs one cam find small herds of deer, all regular residents of the cemetery who never seem to wander outside the boundaries drawn by the 40th and Woodland trolley stop, but who spend their entire lives nibbling grave grass.

The handsome gateway to Woodlands Cemetery was designed by Paul Cret, as was the University Avenue Bridge which is visible from the Woodlands mansion.
The Woodlands Mansion inspired the creation of Woodland Terrace, the finest example of Italianate villa architecture in the city.

Designed in 1861 by Philadelphia carpenter-turned-architect Samuel Sloan, Woodland Terrace is a grouping of 22 houses built shortly after the western expansion of the city’s trolley railway system. The Italianate style, which evolved from the Gothic Revival period, was predicated on the typical rural Italian villa, which included four-panel doors, square cupolas or towers and colored or etched glass.

In its English and American form, the Italianate style allowed for extensive elaborations, and was America’s most popular form of architecture around the time of the Civil War.

Shortly after Sloan designed the houses in 1861, fashions and styles changed and the architect’s career fell apart.

But West Philadelphia in 1861 was a magnet for speculative builders, whose aim was to construct houses for the affluent middle class trying to escape the congestion of Center City. Sloan, who had established himself in the city as a designer of hospitals, asylums and schools, had already designed an Italianate villa for Andrew M. Eastwick on the site of Bartram’s Gardens when he took on the Woodland project.

Paul Cret’s house is prominently displayed among the other houses in Woodland Terrace. Cret moved to 516 Woodland Terrace in 1913 and remained there until his death in 1945. And, as architects are wont to do, Cret sought to improve or redesign parts of the house, although only a portion of these plans was ever executed. In fact, the most picturesque of Cret’s additions was eliminated from the house when the house was purchased by its present owner, Dr. David Morris, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Musto, who bought the Cret house in 2004, says that, while researching the house on the Internet, he discovered Cret’s original house redesign plan. Included in the plan was a copy of the facial mask sculpture Cret designed for the Rittenhouse Square fountain. Cret had originally put a copy of the mask on the wall above the first floor fireplace. This gargoyle-devil face, which gushes water into the Rittenhouse Square fountain during the warm weather months, obviously frightened a superstitious former tenant, who had it removed or destroyed. Mr. Musto says a large mirror had been placed where the mask had been.

“We moved the mirror to another room and our architect located people to actually re-create from the Cret drawings what had been there,” he said.
A new Paul Cret mask now embellishes the fireplace.

Mr. Musto also re-created Cret’s plan for French wallpaper, but had to sidestep Cret’s unexecuted plan for a front porch.

“Today, Woodland Terrace has a moratorium on anything that’s visible from the street, so on the back of the second floor, we put a deck using the original design that Cret had come up with for the front of the house,” he said.

Italianate house villas are characterized by round headed windows, elaborate frames, bay windows, porches or verandas. Decorative elements in cast iron and metal also typically decorate an Italianate house. Most of the Woodland Terrance houses are wood frame buildings covered with tan-colored stucco although the end houses were special creations made of stone and supplemented with a columned porch and a tower.

Cret’s house was not an end home, so it had a simpler design.

Mr. Musto says he has worked for a year and a half on the restoration, and that it has been an “agonizing amount of work.” Several radical innovations were instituted, such as the addition of a colonnade where there had been a staircase. The house also came with a shed attached.

In Cret’s old study, Mr. Musto installed a Murphy bed for guests (where Cret once had a bookcase) as well as writing and coloring book tables with crayons for his children.

***

More than twenty years ago when you went to buy a ticket at Philadelphia’s old Greyhound bus terminal at 1711 Market Street, you got to interact with live human beings. Not only that, but travelers had a lot more “fun” while waiting for a bus. The plastic seats had bolted- on TV sets and were spaced far enough apart so that you were not on top of fellow passengers. In an adjoining room was a Roy Rogers restaurant where you could get a tolerable fast food meal. When it came time to board your bus, you took an escalator down to the departure level.

Years before this, in the 1950s, both Greyhound and Trailways buses employed on board stewardesses. Dressed in uniforms with hats and gloves, the stewardesses served coffee and Danish on morning road trips to New York City and back. The ‘50s, 60s, and 70s of course were peak years when it came to bus travel. Greyhound had its 1956 double-decker Scenicruiser, the 1955 Courier and the classic 1948 Silverside. Bus terminals, such as Washington D.C.’s super station on New York Avenue, built on the ground floor of a skyscraper, were noted for their various architectural amenities.

Philly’s old Greyhound terminal was a kitschy paradise. There was a small arcade with pinball machines, an instamatic 50 cent photo booth, and an Ellsworth Kelly anodized aluminum 12 foot high and 64 foot long prize winning Sculpture for a Long Wall (1957) on one of the station walls. There were also coin-operated luggage lockers where layover travelers could stash suitcases before setting out to explore the city.

When Philadelphia’s Greyhound bus station moved to 1001 Filbert Street, the fast food restaurant morphed into a glorified food stand where travelers could watch hot dogs and soft pretzels bake to death in plastic neon heaters. Vending machines were installed in place of the treasured foot lockers, while the restrooms had most of their private stalls removed, a redesign that made for a lot of wasted space unless your idea of a bathroom is a smelly lecture hall.

While I rarely travel by bus, I recently traveled by Greyhound to Scranton. My last Greyhound venture was in the 1980s, when it was possible to converse with a ticket agent.

Did I say ‘ticket agent?’ Aside from the very humane NJT booth (where there’s a live person), Greyhound travelers are forced to purchase tickets from machines. A machine attendant barks orders while overseeing other tasks: “Push the red button. Go back. Where do you want to go?” Dealing with so many people, the stressed attendant—who is outfitted in a yellow police style vest—is obviously overworked.
The attendant on duty the day I bought my ticket, though polite, was beside herself.

“Where you’d say you were going?” she shouted into my left ear. I don’t know about you, but when somebody barks in my ear I tend to react like someone escaping gusts of wind. It didn’t help that the terminal was packed with end-of-summer passengers, with everybody trying to figure out where they were supposed to go.

After the machine produced a round trip ticket, I noticed that the price was unusually high. Miraculously, I tracked down the still vexed yellow vest attendant: “Can you tell me why this is? This isn’t the price quoted me when I called Greyhound last week.”

“You got a March Trailways for your return trip, that’s not Greyhound,” she said.
“You mean the machine gave me Greyhound on the way up and Trailways on the way back—without letting me know? Did I miss the fine print?”

“It’s the departure time you selected,” she said, “when there are no Greyhound buses available, it switches you automatically.”

“And raises the price, without offering you an option?”

“You can exchange it,” she said.

But I had had enough of lines and kept the ticket, thinking I’d just watch the machine with a wary eye the next time traveled Greyhound.

Fortunately, the bus ride to Scranton was enjoyable. The driver, who was an older man, didn’t speed on the passing lane. Younger drivers, such as the 24 year old driver who recently lost control of his Greyhound bus on the Pennsylvania turnpike while traveling in the passing lane (the front end of this kid’s bus struck the concrete barrier and eventually flipped on its side, injuring 14 people), tend to like speed. The older driver also had the good taste to wish the passengers good morning and then map out the route to Scranton. As a traveler, one feels comfortable hearing such things, but that was not the case on the return trip.

The return trip reminded me of traveling on a crowded Septa bus or a crowded cattle car in India. The driver said nothing about the route or how many station stops the bus would make on the way to Philadelphia. He did manage to address chronic cell phone users. “Use your cell phones for emergencies only,” he advised, “Be respectful of other passengers.”

Few listened to the driver, of course.

As an added bonus, it was a Friday, the worst possible day for travel; everybody and their grandmother was high tailing it to Philly.

The biggest shock came twenty minutes after the bus pulled out of Wilkes-Barre, when the odor of second hand smoke coming from the back of the bus. “Oh no,” I thought, “Who would dare do this in 2011?”

Bold as brass, the smokers lit up repeatedly until smoke filled the entire cabin, the driver as oblivious to the smell as the passengers. The only thing missing was the voice of ‘Twilight Zone’s’ Rod Serling announcing that this was a road trip into the past.

It was also hardly coincidence that the smokers waited until the driver had pulled onto the turnpike before lighting up. On the turnpike, the driver’s attention would be focused on traffic.

When we arrived in Philly, the yellow vested attendants weren’t smoking but they were still barking orders to the machine-using crowds.

***

The question, “Where were you during the earthquake?” has been making the rounds a lot lately. This is the sort of question that’s interesting for about fifteen minutes. How many times can you hear different versions of “I saw the floor roll,” or “the pictures on the wall of my house rattled like drums?”
Right after last month’s quake I was curious to see how the mainstream media was handling this.

Television reporters were having a heyday interviewing office workers on the streets of Center City. They were also steadfast in their belief that 2 p.m., Tuesday, August 23, would burn a hole in the public’s mind every bit as deep as 9/11 or the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963. A prediction like this of course assumes that an east coast earthquake like the one we experienced will not return for several decades. I’d say that was a pretty optimistic hypothesis given current earth and global warming changes. I wish it weren’t so, but environmental-related events will take center stage in the coming years.

One man who was interviewed took his fifteen minutes of TV fame to talk about his fiancé, not only saying her name and town of origin but also managing to plug the family business and then tying the whole thing together by saying, “I hope they are all okay. I really hope my fiancé is okay.” One almost got the feeling that he was hoping the reporter would respond with a, “Okay, I’ll see if station management can put you in touch with her.”

While I understand the fear that many felt as the quake shook offices in a number of Center City skyscrapers (we may be years away from 9/11, but in the collective mind there’s still a special fear associated with skyscraper emergencies), I hate it when reporters seem to go on protracted hunts for tragedies that will improve ratings.

The Rolodex, repeat-question, “What was your experience of the earthquake?” seems to beg for grisly new details.

Consider this: what’s an earthquake if half the people you talk didn’t even know there was an earthquake?

“I was asleep when it happened,” a friend of mine said blithely. Another friend, who was taking a late shower at the time, said he felt nothing but the well modulated mix of warm and cold water over his shoulders when the 5.8 wannabe mega quake shook the computer terminals in many Center City office buildings.

A clerk in a Center City Rite Aid not far from City Hall told me he “felt nothing” but knew something was up when hordes of office workers began crowding the store entrance on Broad Street.

For years I’ve been reading how animals can be good indicators of coming earthquakes. A neighbor’s cats, all three of them in fact, behaved strangely seconds before the quake, running around her house and racing up stairways, whereas my all too tranquil tuxedo cat gave me no clues if indeed she felt any precursor vibes at all. Not that watching my cat behave strangely would have made any difference, mind you. Had she ran in circles or flung herself against a wall I would have taken that as one of those periodic cat spasms that seem to come from nowhere. And like most people, once I felt the floor “roll” I would not have associated that with an earthquake but most likely with a loose floor joist.

In Pennsylvania, we’re not supposed to have earthquakes. Not only that, but in Philadelphia, which has its share of crime and economic problems, we’ve always been pretty lucky when it comes to natural disasters. At the very worse we may get soaking rains, blizzards or insufferable humidity but for the most part these things pass without collapsing our homes, destroying our office buildings or otherwise wrecking havoc downtown. So yes, it’s good to be a Philadelphian when it comes to natural disasters—so far.

What shocked most people about the quake wasn’t what they felt move under their feet but the fact that this assumption that we were somehow in a safe zone or exempt from the horrendous calamities that happen elsewhere in the world, was finally put to rest. This is scary stuff, Virginia.

Most natural disasters can be predicted. Hurricane Irene, for instance, has been on tracking radar screens for a while now. Snow storms also are seen in advance, as are tornados (if only in terms of minutes, but even one minute can save a life). Earthquakes give no warning. They are like traffic accidents and heart attacks. They just happen.

And they happen on beautiful blue sky humidity-free days, when all seems well with world
***

So called ‘approbation art’ is not supposed to be original but a rehash and a manipulation of old images. If you’re looking for something new with this kind of art you’re likely to go away disappointed or grind your teeth before writing a negative review.

Former TV host Burch Cordora’s second solo exhibit, The Absolution Lab, which just finished a successful run at Ven and Vaida Gallery in Old City, garnered mostly positive press for its appropriated celebrity images—or prints in large format canvasses—of Amy Winehouse, David Beckham, Paris Hilton, and others. As with any creative undertaking, some slings and arrows must fall. For Cadora, the big arrow was a review in City Paper that he calls “snarky.”

“I though the slant was going to be more of an educational, pop culture, or an LGBT slant, but the review was more like an art critic’s review. The kind of stuff that I do you either hate or love, you get it or you don’t get it, but clearly CP’s interviewer was no fan of Warhol. I couldn’t believe that CP didn’t have at least one nice to say; like the Amy Winehouse image was nice (it sold 30 minutes into the opening reception for a whopping $1250). Instead, they went for the juggler.

“I mean, says Cordora, his voice moving up a notch, “Do all gays hate other gays? Everybody in the city loves me, all the girls, all the straight guys think I’m cool, it’s only the homos who I got ‘shitty’ from!”

‘Snarky’ comments aside, opening night for The Absolution Lab was standing room only with sales receipts breaking all Ven and Vaida First Friday records with art sales coming in at upwards of $1600.00.

This year Cordora plans to find another 10 or 12 straight guys to pose for another Straight and Butch calendar as well as get his “Madonna sex book” published. “I really need to get this book done,” he says. “It will be the end all of this project.”

Like approbation art, the book will follow the Madonna template with a little text but 90% of it will be photographs of 30 or so different guys.

Thom Nickels

DEAD MEN WALKING by Thom Nickels ICON Magazine, September 2011 issue

2011-09-02T11:44:00.000-07:00

by Thom Nickels

I’d spot him on Center City streets in the 1980s. He was not young but in fact had a rumpled, unkempt look: longish white hair (like architect Walter Gropius before his death), thick Bennet Cerf-style glasses, and a tall, skinny frame visible from great distances. In his trademark coat and tie, he cut a picture of ruined yet elegant aristocracy despite his air of cosmetic decrepitude.

He was journalist John Guinther (1927-2004), who wrote for the same Philadelphia weekly where I was once a columnist. In those days I remember thinking that Guinther looked as though he’d been through a war. Later I learned that he had not only been through a war but that he had pretty much played the role of an (Old Testament) David who had just beaten the giant, Goliath, with persistent uses of a slingshot.

Goliath in this case was then Philadelphia DA Edward Rendell, a man much loved by Philadelphians. Mounting a Rendell offensive then was pretty much seen as foolish as trying to ban Philly cheese steaks, but that’s what Guinther did when he challenged the conviction of Neil Ferber, a furniture salesman, in the 1981 shooting death of Philly Greek mobster Steve Booras and his girlfriend in a South Philadelphia restaurant.

The murder sent shock waves throughout the city, but rather than taking time to investigate the case, the prosecution went into speed dial mode and put a jailhouse snitch on the stand, one Jerry Jordan, who testified (in exchange for a reduced sentence) that Ferber, the antithesis of a mobster, shot Booras and his girlfriend. Jordan’s testimony was taken as gospel despite his having flunked a lie detector test.

It took Goliath--in this case, Rendell-- 3 years to acknowledge Jordan’s test results but by this time Feber was on death row about to be executed.

Guinther, meanwhile, in his signature rumbled up coat and tie— remember, he was a political nobody who had probably never even been to lunch at the Union League-- investigated the case with a vengeance and eventually published a feature on Ferber in Philadelphia Magazine. Goliath’s people ignored the piece, forcing Guinther to continue his investigations on the murder until he eventually published a piece entitled, “An Innocent Man on Death Row,” which caught the attention of WWDB radio personality Herb Homer, who read the piece on the air.

The reading got the attention of Goliath, who then ordered another lie detector test for Jordan. Jordan failed the test a second time and this resulted in Ferber’s freedom.

Today, a journalist like Guinther would have the support and backing of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, a non-profit organization founded in 2009 that deals with wrongful convictions.

The Pennsylvania Project was founded by two Philadelphia lawyers, David Richardson of Pepper Hamilton, and David Rudovsky, one of the country’s leading civil rights and criminal defense attorneys and teacher of criminal law at the University of Pennsylvania (he is co-author of the book, Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation 2009: the Art of Arrest, Search & Seizure in Pennsylvania). The two men recently celebrated PIP’s second anniversary on May 24th with a party at Eastern State Penitentiary.

PIP’s offices are located in an obscure office at Temple University’s McConnell Hall. On a recent visit to the office I counted as many as 15 law student volunteers working diligently at computers. The barebones office has minimal decoration and is a study in Spartan economy: Filing boxes cover the floors, and the volunteers, glued to their computers, look like the readers of great mystery novels thoroughly engrossed in the stories or case studies at hand.

Marissa Bluestine, the Project’s Legal Director, exudes a feeling of inexhaustible vitality.

“I oversee all of the legal work of the project and the networking of the project,” she tells me, sitting down next to more filing boxes and reams of paper.
I’m thinking of Gunither when I ask her if the recent media attention to wrongful convictions has had any impact on the criminal justice system.

“Though there’s more attention paid to wrongful convictions today, there have been no prominent changes,” she says.

That’s because while other states have made progress in this area, the great state of Pennsylvania is stuck in a kind of retrograde vortex. Consider, for example, the subject of police interrogations.

“Although recording interrogations of subjects, videotaping or audio taping them, do not stop all false confessions, what it does do is give a jury or fact finders the ability to determine whether it may be a false confession. But we don’t do that in Pennsylvania. A lot of these fixes on best practices in terms of protocol that are happening across the country are not happening in Pennsylvania,” Bluestine says.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling stating that police, both local and federal, are permitted to lie to a suspect during an interrogation doesn’t help matters any, either. In Europe, the opposite of this is true: police are forbidden to lie to a suspect, however heinous the crime. “The only thing that the police cannot do is threaten people with the death penalty, or with violence or some kind of physical ramifications,” Bluestine adds.

We live in an era when getting tough on criminals or those suspected of a crime is seen as a way to fight crime. Stiffer sentences, the greater use of capital punishment, as well as a tendency to assume guilt before innocence has been the collective reaction in a world where crimes heretofore rather rare—multiple random killings or family murders-- now seem to have become the norm. An indicator of this change has been the Internet, where harsh “vigilante” feelings about suspects exceed the boundaries of civility. Here it’s not uncommon to read how people want suspects put away for life or strung up in worse-than-Guatamenno prisons without the benefit of a trial.

Add to this the occasional misperception that the Innocence Project is some kind of “get out of jail” card for the guilty, another so-called liberal agenda contribution to the decline of Western Civilization.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Bluestine explains that when she does slide shows and trainings with law enforcement, she literally comes out says, “I am not Barry Scheck.” (Barry Scheck co-founded The Innocence Project in 1992 and is currently co-director of the New York Innocence Project. He was part of the defense team for O.J. Simpson).

“We make a very strong point that we’re not the New York Innocence Project, but we are the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, an entirely separate organization. When we meet with the District Attorneys and law enforcement, I emphasize that we don’t take cases unless we believe that the person is innocent.”

Since the Pennsylvania Innocence Project’s founding the organization has received some 2100 letters claiming wrongful conviction status, but from that huge pool, Bluestine says the Project selected 3 cases (with 3 others having been taken on outside that batch of letters). “In addition, we identified at least 100 cases as probable Innocence cases. The rest we rejected.”

But even after a thorough analysis by law school and other trained volunteers (who all make confidentiality agreements), the Project may still decide, albeit in the late the 11th hour, that cases that don’t hold up or that lack sufficient “innocence” evidence have to be dropped.

Consider the “undropped” case of Harold Wilson, who spent 16 years in prison and who, in 1989, was given 3 death sentences. Wilson was prosecuted by Philadelphia DA Jack McMahon and convicted of 3 counts of murder and robbery in South Philadelphia. When Wilson was originally arrested he cooperated with police and assumed that his innocence would somehow protect him. But this assumption, according to the National Center for Reason and Justice, is a mistake. “If you are accused,” states the Center’s logo, “your innocence does not protect you.” This is especially true for poor and friendless suspects “that are unable to attract committed advocates.”

Happily for Wilson, his sentence was overturned in 1999 when it was revealed that his original defense did not present mitigating evidence at the trial. Wilson’s appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court resulted in a new hearing where DNA evidence confirmed that blood at the scene was not Wilson’s.

The timeline for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project can be traced to 2006, when Philadelphia lawyer David Richardson was sitting in the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Prison Society. As a Board member of PPS, Richardson was paying particular attention to the speaker, Bill Moushey a retired investigative reporter for The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Moushey’s talk focused on the criminal cases he’d been involved with as well as the 40 Innocence Projects he’s been involved with around the country.

Moushey asked the audience, “How is it possible that there isn’t an Innocence Project in Philadelphia?”

Richardson, who used to work for Arlan Specter and who refers to that time as “the Golden Age of Philadelphia’s Prosecution Office,” says he took Moshe’s comment as a personal rebuke. As a corporate litigator for Pepper Hamilton since 1974, his involvement in prisoner’s rights thus far included representing all the inmates of Philadelphia county prisons in a prisoner’s rights class action suit.

While working on that case he met David Rudovsky, then a Public Defender. Richardson himself was as a Philadelphia DA in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The two David’s, their prisoner’s rights minds already in sync, decided to do something about the Goliath of wrongful convictions and formed a Pennsylvania Innocence Project. The catalyst was serendipitous connection during the Moshe lecture-- an officer at Riker’s Island whose wife was the Executive Director of the New York Innocence Project overheard their conversation. Here, then, was the first building block.

Richardson offered his Philadelphia office in November 2006 for the launch meeting, which included about 20 people, mostly law professors, practicing lawyers and public defender types. A working group was formed, and in 2008 the Pennsylvania Innocence Project incorporated as a not for profit charitable corporation. In April of the following year the Project opened.

There was still the question of a physical office space. Richardson’s law firm, Pepper, had opted not to host the project. “I had some support for it,” Richardson said, “but in the end the decision was made not to do it at Pepper. They told me it was ‘really interesting’ but that they were not ready to take this on.”

The proverbial silver lining appeared in the form of JoAnne Epps, a long time faculty member at Temple, who became Dean of the school. Epps told Richardson, “I’d love to do it if we can find some space.” Epps also informed Richardson that while Temple was handing over free office space, Temple wasn’t going to be financially responsible for the project.

Richardson says he looked at her and said, ‘Well, we’ll do that.”

Who better then to walk on the scene, as if out of a dream, then Gerry Lenfest. Richardson had never met Lenfest but he was able to find a contact who knew him through the Prison Society. The contact’s mission was to ask Lenfest for money. Lenfest told the contact, “I’ll give them the money as long as I don’t have to meet them.”

Lenfest was also adamant that he thought support for this kind of work was the responsibility of the legal community and told Richardson, “I’m happy to give you a kind of start up expense,” meaning, of course, that it would be inappropriate to ask for continuing support.

“What people find most appealing about the Pennsylvania Innocence Project is that we are only representing people who have claims of actual innocence,” Richardson emphasizes, adding that he’s quick to tell peers that the Project does not exist to get people off on legal technicalities. “While these people deserve a defense and representation, that’s not the purpose of the Innocence Project. “We’re talking not only about a legally erroneous conviction but the fact that it resulted in an innocent person going to jail,” he says.

The 50 Innocence Projects in the United States and the additional ones around the world are independent entities although there is an annual conference in which organizers network.

Co-founder Rudovsky says that while DNA exonerations have worked to overturn wrongful convictions, at least 70% of wrongful conviction cases involve erroneous eyewitness ID’s. “The problem is the methodology that the police use,” he says. He cites so called sequential showing (of suspects) to the victim as opposed to “the spread, where people tend to pick the suspect that looks most like what’s in their mind.”

“Social scientists are finding that the mind does not work like a video tape recorder you can play back a year later. There’s a deep drop off in the first 24 hours as to memory.”

The jail house snitch issue has to be addressed but not, he says, in the probation of their use but in “making sure of how questionable their testimony might be.”
“Jail house snitches always get deals, and there are professional snitches that have made a career out of playing one side against another. Public defenders are overloaded in terms of case load, and appointed counsel are often not given sufficient funds to properly defend the case.”

Both Richardson and Rudovsky agree that journalists have done “incredible” work in wrongful conviction cases. “Law students,” Richardson says, “are used to writing briefs and they are unlikely, like journalists, to do the grubby work of digging out facts and finding witnesses.”

In both DNA and non-DNA exonerations, PIP reports that eyewitness misidentification has led to a wrongful conviction. How does this happen? PIP says it is because of pre-trial ID procedures that improperly suggest to the eyewitness that the guy that the police have arrested is the wrong doer. “Once that suggestion is implanted,” Richardson says, “the witness by the time of the hearing or trial recognizes the person who their attention has been called to in a lineup or photo. The eyewitness says, ‘Oh yeah, I recognize that person.’ By the time of the trial, they are convinced.”

Perhaps the strangest of all wrongful conviction culprits is the false confession.

Why would somebody confess to a crime they did not commit? That green light that gives police departments in the United States permission to lie to a suspect to get a conviction is partially to blame.

“The police come in and they tell a suspect, ‘We’ve arrested your accomplice and your accomplice has already testified that you are the wrongdoer and so you are going to be executed for the offense unless I can help you. Give me something!’”

Or, as Richardson elaborated, the police might pretend to have DNA evidence that shows that the suspect is the one who did the crime.

“If you’re being interrogated for 5, 10 or 15 hours at a stretch, and if the police aren’t even acknowledging your denials but say ‘We know you did it,’ the suspect thinks, ‘I gotta stop this because I know that the system will work and once I get outa here it will all be made right.’ But the truth is, nothing gets made right.”

Most false confessions, I was told, come from the young and marginally educated who don’t have a lot of emotional support in their lives.

Phony science, notably the old Fire Marshall belief that certain burn patterns are indictative of arson, are old wives tales, according to Richardson. “This theory has never been empirically tested.”

Richardson cites prosecutorial misconduct or suppression of evidence as a reason for wrongful convictions.

“Justice Scalia will say ‘Nobody innocent has ever been executed.’ Well, that’s bullshit. A lot of people who have been exonerated have been on death row and we’ve only been doing this work for a few years.”

For Marissa Goldstein, the cases that cross her desk often do not leave her head.

“When you have a guy that you know is 100% innocent, it’s hard to leave that at the office. I’m going to bed in my nice suburban home with my kids and it’s hard not to think what this guy is doing right now. He’s on a cot in a room not even as big as my bathroom.”

Thom Nickels

Leave the Driving to Us: Traveling by Greyhound (from The Star)

2011-08-24T11:16:00.000-07:00

Traveling by Greyhound in the last days

More than twenty years ago when you went to buy a ticket at Philadelphia’s old Greyhound bus terminal at 1711 Market Street, you got to interact with live human beings. Not only that, but travelers had a lot more “fun” while waiting for a bus. The plastic seats had bolted- on TV sets and were spaced far enough apart so that you were not on top of fellow passengers. In an adjoining room was a Roy Rogers restaurant where you could get a tolerable fast food meal. When it came time to board your bus, you took an escalator down to the departure level.

Years before this, in the 1950s, both Greyhound and Trailways buses employed on board stewardesses. Dressed in uniforms with hats and gloves, the stewardesses served coffee and Danish on morning road trips to New York City and back. The ‘50s, 60s, and 70s of course were peak years when it came to bus travel. Greyhound had its 1956 double-decker Scenicruiser, the 1955 Courier and the classic 1948 Silverside. Bus terminals, such as Washington D.C.’s super station on New York Avenue, built on the ground floor of a skyscraper, were noted for their various architectural amenities.

Philly’s old Greyhound terminal was a kitschy paradise. There was a small arcade with pinball machines, an instamatic 50 cent photo booth, and an Ellsworth Kelly anodized aluminum 12 foot high and 64 foot long prize winning Sculpture for a Long Wall (1957) on one of the station walls. There were also coin-operated luggage lockers where layover travelers could stash suitcases before setting out to explore the city.

When Philadelphia’s Greyhound bus station moved to 1001 Filbert Street, the fast food restaurant morphed into a glorified food stand where travelers could watch hot dogs and soft pretzels bake to death in plastic neon heaters. Vending machines were installed in place of the treasured foot lockers, while the restrooms had most of their private stalls removed, a redesign that made for a lot of wasted space unless your idea of a bathroom is a smelly lecture hall.

While I rarely travel by bus, I recently traveled by Greyhound to Scranton. My last Greyhound venture was in the 1980s, when it was possible to converse with a ticket agent.

Did I say ‘ticket agent?’ Aside from the very humane NJT booth (where there’s a live person), Greyhound travelers are forced to purchase tickets from machines. A machine attendant barks orders while overseeing other tasks: “Push the red button. Go back. Where do you want to go?” Dealing with so many people, the stressed attendant—who is outfitted in a yellow police style vest—is obviously overworked.

The attendant on duty the day I bought my ticket, though polite, was beside herself.

“Where you’d say you were going?” she shouted into my left ear. I don’t know about you, but when somebody barks in my ear I tend to react like someone escaping gusts of wind. It didn’t help that the terminal was packed with end-of-summer passengers, with everybody trying to figure out where they were supposed to go.

After the machine produced a round trip ticket on thin tissue like paper, I noticed that the price was unusually high. Miraculously, I tracked down the still vexed yellow vest attendant: “Can you tell me why this is? This isn’t the price quoted me when I called Greyhound last week.”

“You got a March Trailways for your return trip, that’s not Greyhound,” she said.

“You mean the machine gave me Greyhound on the way up and Trailways on the way back—without letting me know? Did I miss the fine print?”

“It’s the departure time you selected,” she said, “when there are no Greyhound buses available, it switches you automatically.”

“And raises the price, without offering you an option?”
“You can exchange it,” she said.

But I had had enough of lines and kept the ticket, thinking I’d just watch the machine with a wary eye the next time traveled Greyhound.

Fortunately, the bus ride to Scranton was enjoyable. The driver, who was an older man, didn’t speed on the passing lane. Younger drivers, such as the 24 year old driver who recently lost control of his Greyhound bus on the Pennsylvania turnpike while traveling in the passing lane (the front end of this kid’s bus struck the concrete barrier and eventually flipped on its side, injuring 14 people), tend to like speed. The older driver also had the good taste to wish the passengers good morning and then map out the route to Scranton. As a traveler, one feels comfortable hearing such things, but that was not the case on the return trip.

The return trip reminded me of traveling on a crowded Septa bus or a crowded cattle car in India. The driver said nothing about the route or how many station stops the bus would make on the way to Philadelphia. He did manage to address chronic cell phone users. “Use your cell phones for emergencies only,” he advised, “Be respectful of other passengers.”

Nobody listened to him, of course.

As an added bonus, it was a Friday, the worst possible day for travel; everybody and their grandmother was high tailing it to Philly.

The biggest shock came twenty minutes after the bus pulled out of Wilkes-Barre. No, I’m not talking about a Greyhound beheading, such as what happened to a poor 22 year old Canadian man in 2008 when his seatmate started stabbing him uncontrollably. I’m referring to the odor of second hand smoke coming from the back of the bus. “It can’t be now,” I thought, in my best Janis Joplin wail. “Who would dare do that in 2011.”

Bold as brass, the smokers lit up repeatedly until smoke filled the entire cabin, the driver as oblivious to the smell as the passengers. The only thing missing was the voice of ‘Twilight Zone’s’ Rod Serling announcing that this was a road trip into the past.

It was also hardly coincidence that the smokers waited until the driver had pulled onto the turnpike before lighting up. On the turnpike, the driver’s attention would be focused on traffic.

When we arrived in Philly, the yellow vested attendants weren’t smoking but they were still barking orders to the machine-clogged crowds.

Rembrandt (from The Star)

2011-08-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

The current Rembrandt’s The Face of Jesus exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is something every Philadelphia should see.

The exhibit allows Philadelphians an opportunity to view “human friendly” images of Jesus. Prior to Rembrandt, artists ignored their imaginations when it came to portraying Jesus but followed standard images based largely on Veronica’s Veil, (the imprint of the face of Jesus taken when Veronica offered Jesus a cloth to wipe his face on the way to Calvary) or the Holy Mandylion, a legendary imprint of the face of Christ in the Orthodox world that originated well before the crucifixion.

The Rembrandt exhibit comes pretty close to capturing what Jesus may have actually looked like. For starters, Rembrandt used mostly Jewish models. But a Jewish Jesus in Rembrandt’s day was a revolutionary thing.

History tells us that immediately after the crucifixion Jesus was pictured as a clean shaven, Apollo-like deity. In the 4th century, most Jesus images had the close-cropped hair we see today on most Byzantine icons. (These images seem to jive with St. Paul’s famous admonition against men having long hair.) By the 6th century the tide had turned and Jesus was being painted as someone with long hair and a beard. What helped this new view was the discovery of the Shroud of Turin in the city of Edessa (Mesopotamia) in 544.

What Jesus might have looked like has always a subject for speculation.

In my Irish-German Catholic childhood home, for instance, the Jesus images had an Irish troubadour look. Rembrandt actually comes pretty close to this ideal only his models are not Irish. Going back to the 2nd century, you can read how Church Fathers, Justin Martyr and Origen thought that Jesus was unattractive. Both men held fast to the Isaiah 53 quote: “He has no form nor glory, nor beauty when we beheld him, but his appearance was without honor and inferior to that of the sons of men.”

Then there was St. Augustine, who said, “The physical face of the Lord is pictured with infinite variety by countless imaginations, though whatever it was like He certainly had only one.”

In the 20th century, psychic Edgar Cayce wrote that Christ had long red hair and steely blue eyes. Cayce goes on to explain that among Jews the birth of a red haired son was always a special event.

The famous Lentulus letter, allegedly written by a predecessor of Pontius Pilate, spells out Christ’s appearance: “…Hair is the color of ripe hazelnut, parted on top and falling straight to the ears yet curling further below. His beard is large and full but not long and parted in the middle. His glance shows simplicity adorned with maturity, his eyes are clear and commanding. Never apt to laugh but sooner inclined to cry.”

The exhibition is a sort of gamble for PMA. Will going to see it be perceived as paying homage to Jesus? Or will people use the excuse that it’s only Rembrandt that attracts them?

On Facebook, I noticed that someone was offering his two PMA members tickets to the exhibition because he was not into honoring “demi-gods.” For some (perhaps many), Jesus is controversial like that. Some people hate him because they associate him with right wing religions, witch hunts, the Inquisition, and other bad things that Jesus’ followers have concocted. It’s understandable but lamentable, because this exhibit will make you want to come back, again and again and look into this “man’s” eyes.

This is another way of saying that the images are haunting.
For PMA President Gail Harrity, organizing The Faces of Jesus became an opportunity to reach out to Philadelphia’s faith community.

` “Over the last several months we’ve made a robust effort to reach out to a broad cross section of our community, as broad as possible,” Harrity told journalists at the exhibition’s press preview. “In May 2011, for instance, we held a mass discussion for 50 or 60 leaders of different faith communities with the hope that many members of these faith communities would join us for a community opening on July 28th.”

Many in the faith communities did, in fact, stream into PMA for a special two hour community reception. There were Protestant pastors and their wives; innumerable Rosemont College alums; secular dress “invisible” nuns as well as nuns who looked like nuns; clergymen in collars who appeared Catholic although they could have been Anglican or Lutheran. There were no breaded Orthodox priests although Cardinal Rigali made a brief appearance.

Rembrandt should also appeal to Philadelphians because of his prickly individuality. Rembrandt was not a fussy-wussy academic type who did things to further his career but in fact he often did the opposite. He was criticized for hanging out with people of low estate (the wrong people) and for not paying enough attention to the rich and powerful. Rembrandt did not play the game but went his own way. He was no court portrait painter who painted king, queens and cardinals but stuck to the low and non-mighty, like beggars and lepers.

Three Day Visit/Retreat to St. Tikhon's Orthodox Monastery near Scranton, PA

2011-08-16T21:04:00.000-07:00

Went up on a Greyhound bus, was met by Brother Ken
We drove into the wilderness, by fields, hills and trees
Until I spotted icon grottos and three bar crosses.
Settled in my comfortable room in the Men's Quarters
Then off to Dinner (lunch) with the monks, over half
converts from evangelical Protestantism, guys from
Kansas, Ohio, Los Angeles. The Abott himself is a
former Roman Catholic. In his office before the end
of my stay he said that as a boy he was an altar
server at the Novus Ordo Mass. (Story in the works, stay
tuned).

By Comparison: From my Florence, Italy Journal, March 2007

The Novus Ordo Catholic Mass in Italy: Majestic church,
nearly medieval, museum-like sanctuary, icons, hanging
votive lamps, candles, gold and gold and gold.

Holy Mass is about to begin. A laywoman approaches the
lectern; a priest in a simple alb and hood approaches
the other lectern. Suddenly everything turns
Presbyterian. I walk out.

A Trip To America’s Mount Athos
St. Tikhon’s. The dining room with monks. Photo: Thom Nickels
Weekly Press• Wed, Nov 23, 2011

By Thom Nickels
Contributing Writer

It’s a little bit after one in the afternoon and Father Sergius (Bowyer), the Abbott of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, is chatting with a handful of monks. The small group is standing in the garden-grotto area just outside the monastery dining room. The mood is upbeat because in a couple days a miraculous icon from the 13th century, The Wonderworking Kursk Root Icon of Our Lady of the Sign, will be visiting St. Tikhon’s.

On this afternoon, which happens to be the last of my three day visit to St. Tikhon’s, I mention to the monks that since I haven’t read a newspaper in three days, for all I know New York City could have disappeared in a cloud of Armageddon smoke.

"If that were to happen," Fr. Sergius says with a smile, "they’d all be coming up here for refuge."

"They’d be coming here by the hundreds for food and shelter and the safety of the mountains," another monk offers. "But we would require them to go to Divine Liturgy first."

"No we wouldn’t," Fr. Sergius says. "You do not force people to attend Divine Liturgy. We would take them in, regardless."

"Taking people in" has traditionally been the mark of a monastery’s commitment to hospitality. Generally, visitors to monasteries, both Orthodox and Catholic, are advised to stay not more than 3 days and to donate whatever they can at the end of their stay. Visitors are also encouraged to follow as much of the routine of the monks as possible, and this includes attendance at the daily Divine Liturgy.

The Divine Liturgy is the Orthodox "version" of the Catholic Mass, albeit with none of the changes, novelties or controversies surrounding the Western liturgy since the time of the Second Vatican Council. At St. Tikhon’s and elsewhere in the Orthodox world, there are no updated liturgies that attempt to be "modern." You won’t, for instance, see lay ministers in high heels distributing communion, or little children walking up to the altar area with "the gifts." You won’t hear guitars or hymns like On Eagles’ Wings, and you will never come across an Orthodox parish that has weekly Young Adult Community Divine Liturgies.

At St. Tikhon’s, prayer and Liturgy begins at 6 a.m. Congregants mostly stand throughout the 3-hour service. Chairs are arranged alongside the church for the old and infirm, but anyone can take a seat if standing becomes unbearable. Prior to my visit I feared that the constant standing would be less than tolerable; however, I soon found that the rhythm of the chanting and prayers produced a transcendent state that erased discomfort. After a while, I almost forgot that I had legs. The sensation was a little bit like floating.

St. Tikhon’s is located high in the Pocono Mountains on 300 acres of land some 30 minutes (by car) outside Scranton, Pennsylvania. The monastery was founded in 1905 by Patriarch (Saint) Tikhon under the auspices of the Russian Orthodox Church. Years later the word Russian was dropped for the more inclusive Orthodox Church of America, or OCA. The monastery houses 14 monks from various parts of the country. Fr. Sergius, a former Roman Catholic who once served at the altar at his boyhood Novus Ordo parish, converted to Orthodoxy and soon after became an Orthodox priest. His conversion happened, he says, because he felt that Orthodoxy offered him a life "more fully in Christ."

"My family is still very much Catholic," Fr. Sergius told me in his office in the monastery bookstore. "Ultimately the important thing is to keep Christ as the center of our lives."

The historic debate having to do with which Church is the true Church of the apostles has been raging since the official split of East and West in 1054 AD. Some Orthodox clergy believe that the split was a mutual parting of the ways, like a divorce, but this does not stop "experts" on both sides from accusations of schism or heresy.

. Fr. Sergius explained that the Orthodox Church hasn’t changed at all in 2,000 years. Besides safeguarding its Liturgy intact, Orthodoxy did not add the Filoque clause to the Nicene Creed as did the Latin Church after it got its arm twisted to do so by Charlemagne in the year 809.

"From that moment on," he pointed out, "the Latin Church continued to make more and more changes, right up to and including the Second Vatican Council."

At first glance, a stranger wouldn’t necessarily pinpoint the young Hieromonk Sergius as St. Tikhon’s Abbott. Older monks with long ponytails and patriarchal beards, such as white haired Fr. Alexander, a retired priest who could easily play Moses in an Old Testament play, looks more like the Abbott type. Fr. Alexander, also a former Catholic, joins Fr. Sergius in wearing the dramatic kamilavka hat covered with a black veil during church services, which helps give St. Tikhon’s a "Mount Athos" look.

Most visitors to St. Tikhon’s, unless traveling by car, must take a bus to Scranton (where there is no Amtrak service) and then arrange to be met by a monk who will drive them the rest of the way to the monastery. My driver, Brother Ken, met me at the station in his black cassock, beard and black hat. In the car he told me that before he became a monk he spent considerable time traveling the world and that for a time he managed restaurants in Phoenix, Arizona. Having worked in restaurants myself, we told stories about customers who make unreasonable and outrageous complaints in the hopes of getting free meals.

Brother Ken, who was born Orthodox, and who is in his late thirties or early forties, talked about entering a monastery late in life. "It’s far better to become a monastic when you are in your twenties. The problem of obedience is especially hard when you are considerably older than the Abbott. Becoming a monk in your mid-twenties is better, when you’ve had some life experiences but are still malleable or "in formation."

After the lift from the bus station, he escorted me to the newly refurbished men’s guest house. In this "off season," I was the only guest in the large B&B-style space sans television, radio or telephones. A small library in the guest house foyer included books by Fr. Seraphim Rose, Orthodoxy’s answer to Catholicism’s Thomas Merton, as Rose (or Eugene Rose) was a former San Francisco-based atheist and Marxist who hung out with the Beats and studied under Alan Watts (and even had a male lover) before converting to Orthodoxy, becoming a monk and then a candidate for sainthood.

(In his most famous book, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Rose describes Merton as "a sincere convert to Roman Catholicism and Catholic monasticism who ended his days proclaiming the equality of Christian religious experiences and the experiences of Zen Buddhism and other pagan religions.")

Meals at St. Tikhon’s (except for breakfast) are mostly silent affairs as monks and visitors listen to readings from the lives of the saints or the writings of the Church Fathers. The silent portion of the meal concludes when the Abbott rings a hand bell. Afterwards everyone rises for a short prayer and then, if the Abbott allows it (and he almost always does) everyone resumes eating with some conversation.

While there are many orders of Catholic monks who dress in a variety of habits, in the Orthodox world all monks dress alike: black cassock and belt with a small raised black hat. Orthodox monks do not shave or cut their hair, so depending on the monk, long hair can be bunched up ponytail-style or arranged in a "bun" of some sort to get it off the neck. The visual effects of this for the first-time visitor can be startling.

One gray haired monk’s rustic demeanor and long ponytail kept reminding me of the Hell’s Angels, whereas a young novice’s appearance—with his long hair arranged in a fan-like web at the nape of his neck—seemed to be "modeled" after an angelic figure in a Byzantine icon.

Brother Ken told me that he sometimes gets mistaken for Islamic when he goes into Scranton on monastery business. Unlike Catholic monks, who often don secular clothing for trips outside the monastery, Orthodox monks wear the habit 24/7. For Brother Ken, the hostile stares he received when being mistaken as a Muslim at first caught him off guard, although he says he soon learned not to pay any attention to them. "Most of the townspeople know us and enjoy seeing us," he said.

When it comes to international travel, Fr. Sergius allows Brother Ken to wear a silver cross so as to minimize any "identity" confusion. But this does not prevent TSA officials from making life difficult for Brother Ken when they insist that he remove his habit before boarding a plane.

The majority of the monks at St. Tikhon’s are converts from evangelical Protestantism. Fr. Sergius says there’s also a significant waiting list and that plans are underway to expand the monastery.

Many of the converts are in their twenties, typical "white bread" boys from Kansas, Ohio or Los Angeles, where they found their way—"through the grace of God," as Fr. Sergius likes to say—to this esoteric mountain top.

Brother Basil, who hails from Los Angeles, is the monastery maintenance man. He happened upon St. Tikhon’s while on a job search, having worked maintenance jobs at Protestant mega churches. Exposure to the monks and liturgy of the monastery led to his conversion. As a former evangelical who was taught that drinking alcohol is always a sin, a memorable part of his conversion process was learning that Jesus didn’t really drink grape juice at the Last Supper, but real wine, as the monks are allowed to do on Sundays, Easter and certain feast days.

Brother Basil, who conversed with me while sitting on the floor of the kitchen in the men’s guest house, Hilti tools in hand, spoke of a big family evangelical family wedding he had to attend in the fall. He talked about the coming wedding as a dreaded "drunken secular affair" and said that he would probably sit the whole thing out in a corner, as well-meaning old friends came up to him and slurred, "Hey, what’s happening brother!?"

The monks sometimes watch documentaries about Catholic monastic communities like the Carthusians, Trappists and Benedictines.

Brother Basil said that he was recently fascinated by a film detailing the life of a Catholic contemplative nun. When he explained some of what he saw in these films, I asked him whether in Orthodox monasticism there was anything equivalent to the Benedictine prohibition against "particular friendships."

The term "particular friendships" puzzled him, so I explained the Benedictine view that too close a friendship between monks could at some point lead to dangerous intimacies bordering on impurity.

"There is no such thing as that in Orthodoxy," he said, meaning that there is no official restriction or prohibition if two monks want to hang out as a special "team."

Although talking with the monks didn’t come easily for me, the process was helped considerably when Fr. Sergius announced to the group at dinner that I was visiting the monastery "to do a story for a newspaper." Before the announcement, I felt as if I was breaking some rule whenever I’d ask a brother a question or request a photograph. While a few of the younger monks tended to shyly defer to "the Abbott," the older monks were eager to talk.

"I spent a lot of years searching," Brother Michael, the main cook, told me. "I was an atheist, I shopped around. I’d go to Catholic and Anglican churches. Once I went into this really fancy high Anglican Church, prayed, but when communion time came around they started passing out little cups of grape juice. No way can I do this," I thought. Brother Michael says that Orthodoxy gave him the spiritual fullness that he had been searching for.

On the monastery grounds is St. Tikhon’s seminary, opened in 1937, which trains hundreds of married and unmarried men for the priesthood. Students from the seminary sometimes work and live at the monastery for a time. Not far off is one of St. Tikhon’s two lakes, hand dug by the monks and stocked with fish that invariably wind up in the monastery dining room. In its 107-year history, St. Tikhon’s has courted its fair share of dramatic intrigue. Decades ago a famous Serbian Metropolitan was poisoned to death during an overnight visit. A man who was seen entering and leaving the Metropolitan’s room is suspected of poisoning the cleric. (The Metropolitan’s vestments can be seen in St. Tikhon’s museum. To illustrate the murder, an Agatha Christie-inspired tilted teacup sits on the cleric’s portable nightstand).

Brother Jesse, a St. Tikhon’s seminarian from Pennsylvania and a convert from evangelical Protestantism, sat near me during many noonday meals. Since Orthodox priests (but not monks) can marry, Brother Jesse often made references to "finding a wife" when the time was right.

References to seminarians dating women will always get this western Catholic’s attention. During my tour of the museum, for instance, I was joined by an Orthodox woman who kept referring to the time she dated a certain St. Tikhon’s seminarian. Had she mentioned this fact once I would have forgotten it, but when she kept bringing up the reference I had to wonder what exactly had happened to break things off between the two of them.

How does one dump a man of God, or tell him to take a flying leap?

No doubt Father Sergius, who appears to have a sense of humor, could offer some insight here.

Meeting Distant Family from California: The Belz-Faulkner-Nickels Connection

2011-08-04T17:50:00.000-07:00

We met for a delicious Chinese feast at 10th and Race in Philadelphia's Chinatown one month ago. Some of the conversation focused on Mathias Nickels, who fought for
the Union in the Civil War and died in an Old Soldier's home in Ohio.

The Last Word by Thom Nickels, ICON Magazine, August 2011

2011-08-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

The Last Word from ICON Magazine, August 2011When the French Renaissance-style Bellevue-Stratford hotel opened in 1904, it was known as the most sumptuous hotel in the United States.
With electric lights installed by Thomas Edison, expensive marble in the lobby, a grand staircase that recalled the dizzying waltz in Flaubert’s “Madam Bovary,” and a ribbon-cutting ceremony conducted by Noel Coward, it’s no wonder that people would visit the lobby just to ponder the building’s grandeur.

The Bellevue’s architects, G.W. and W.D. Hewitt, also designed New York’s original Waldorf Astoria Hotel before it was demolished to make way for the Empire State Building.

In the beginning the Bellevue was two hotels, the Bellevue hotel on the northwest corner of Broad and Walnut, and the Stratford hotel on the S.W. corner of the same intersection.

The owner of both hotels, George Boldt, a Prussian immigrant who began his working career in Philadelphia by waiting tables, eventually merged the two hotels and built the Bellevue-Stratford. For decades the Bellevue hosted international celebrities, political conventions, and society charity balls. Then, in the late 1940’s and 1950s, with the rise of architectural modernism, many began to criticize the building’s “ostentatious” exterior details. One fatality of this revolution was the elimination of the hotel’s Beaux Arts awnings. While the 1950s saw many improvements in Center City like the destruction of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Chinese wall, the re-imagining of Society Hill and the construction of Penn Center, the era was also known for its advocacy of drop ceilings with harsh florescent lighting that were placed over ornate, inlaid plaster interiors. The Bellevue, fortunately, managed to escape wreck-o-ovations of this sort.

Boldts’ consolidation of two small hotels to create the Broad Street “Grand Dame” would be dicey proposition in today’s depressed economy.
Hotels the world over have taken a major hit as a result of an economic downturn that some experts attribute to behind-the-scenes tampering by the World Bank and the Trilateral Commission rather than anything related to President’s Obama’s so called “debt crises”—but that’s another story.

The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC) reported that the industry rate in the city experienced a drop-off in occupancy in 2008 and 2009 from a strong 2007.

Things took a brighter turn in 2010, when, according to Smith Travel Research, four million room nights were sold in Philadelphia in 2010, a jump from 3.74 million rooms sold in 2009.

The good news throughout the crises is that no Philadelphia hotels have had to close, although some layoffs were inevitable.

Few would argue that it would be a tragedy to lose an historic landmark like the Bellevue.

After all, in one of the hotel’s 1,000 rooms, Bram Stoker wrote “Dracula.” During the Jazz Age, Philadelphia high society danced on the same roof deck that they flooded in winter for ice skating and champagne. Those steeped in city history will also remember the shocking death of Main Line socialite Louise Schoettle in 1956 when Ms. Schoettle fell 37 feet to her death during a dinner party and dance. Straddling the railing of the “Flaubert” grand staircase to show friends how she slid down the banisters as a girl, Ms. Schoettle slipped over the edge.

The Bellevue, if anything, has been a survivor.

In 1976, a bacterium called Legionella Pneumophila got into the hotel’s hot water systems and, like a Stoker plot, spread throughout the hotel through aerosolizing devices such as shower heads and air conditioning vents. Hundreds of people attending an American Legion convention became ill and more than 30 died as a result.

Soon after the tragedy, Mayor Frank Rizzo wanted to demolish the hotel and build a convention center on the site. Not all Philadelphians agreed with the mayor’s proposal.

On November 12, 1976, the president of the Society of Architectural Historians, H. Reed Longnecker, wrote the mayor and pleaded with him to spare the hotel.

“Tearing down the hotel would represent tremendous waste. Presumably all the facilities at the Bellevue are in good condition. The immediate cause for this crisis is of course Legionnaires disease. As one Bellevue employee said on local television recently, ‘The disease came with the Legionnaires, and went with the Legionnaires.’ How will the demolition of the Bellevue look to generations to come?”

The, Bellevue, like the nation’s up and down economy, has been closed and reopened at various times in its history.

When Elizabeth Taylor visited Philadelphia in 1983, to do the play “Private Lives” with Richard Burton, it was known as the Fairmount. Today it is known as the Park Hyatt at the Bellevue.

****
James O’Keefe has been called everything from a morally deranged individual to a guerilla in the war against everything that is right, good and just in society.

The fey-looking Irishman is noted for his undercover videos of public figures that inevitably show them in an unflattering light. O’Keefe’s sting operations generally target (perceived) liberal institutions like Planned Parenthood, ACORN, and NPR. In 2009, O’Keefe dressed as a pimp (sunglasses and fur jacket) entered ACORN offices in Washington with a hooker in hoop earrings (also a plant). In that sting he attempted to expose 8 ACORN employees for their involvement in a child prostitution ring. O’Keefe’s operation failed (there were no child prostitutes), but in 2010 he scored a huge success when his operatives—listed online as Project Veritas—impersonated members of the Muslim Brotherhood and videotaped a meeting with NPR’s Ron Schiller. The meeting, which is now a classic on You Tube, shows Schiller espousing negative views on Republicans and the Tea Party. Schiller, of course, says nothing that the ordinary citizen doesn’t hear everyday. He was also careful to frame his comments as personal views, a sensible precaution that was no help to him at all once the video was posted on Project Veritas.

Shortly after the video went viral, NPR issued an apology, and Schiller, who sometime before had already decided to resign his job, resigned immediately. NPR, no doubt nervous because of its vulnerable position in a political landscape that wants it DOA (witness New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s killing of NJN public television) terminated its CEO, Vivian Schiller (no relation), in what appeared to be a self-abrogating purge.

O’Keefe later said that the Schiller sting was in retaliation for NPR’s firing of Juan Williams, excommunicated by NPR for “offensive” remarks about Muslims.
O’Keefe, of course, had only one aim: to add another lash in the public execution of NPR in order to make it ripe for the slaughter (its eventual dismantling) by the right wing, an action which would then leave the American public with only one news source-- the corporate, mainstream media. The corporate media, of course, only tells the public what it wants the public to know.

So how did a “nice” Irish guy turn out this way?

O’Keefe, who hails from Bergen County, New Jersey, was raised by mildly conservative parents. He joined the Boy Scouts, attaining (conformist) Eagle Scout status before enrolling in Rutgers University. In one student photo he can be seen aping his literary hero, G.K. Chesterton, when he chomps down on a large cigar. At Rutgers, O’Keefe initiated a crank “political correctness” campaign to ban the cereal Fruit Loops from the student cafeteria. O’Keefe wanted to see if Rutgers would take him seriously when he claimed that because the cereal had a leprechaun on its box it was an insult to Irish Americans. (The school was unresponsive).

While still a teenager, O’Keefe was approached by the Leadership Institute (a 501 © (3) located in Arlington, Virginia) and enrolled in the Institute’s “political technology” (aka, Intro to the Dark Side) program. Founded in 1979 by conservative activist Morton Blackwell, the Leadership Institute is part and parcel of the vast array of right wing think tanks supported by the likes of billionaires Richard Mellon Scaife, the Koch brothers and the Coors family empire.
In his post-student days, O’Keefe has proven to be a good drone by following the Institute’s mission to help place conservative activists in politics, government, and (most importantly), the media.

As both Adolph Hitler and George Orwell’s character in 1984, Winston Smith, knew very well, when you control the media or the Fifth Estate, you control everything.

And that’s why NPR is worth saving.

*****
Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 to zero critical acclaim. In fact, the reviews were so bad that Rand spent several days crying about the matter. The book’s moral message concerned an individual’s right to live life according to the dictates of self interest. Gore Vidal, certainly no slouch in the hedonistic self interest department, called Atlas Shrugged, “Nearly perfect in its immorality.” Despite the initial bad reviews, Rand’s book became a sort of bible for the corporate-Fortune 500 crowd, where executives found that Rand’s “free market” business principles could also be applied to life.

An early admirer of Rand’s was Alan Greenspan. Greenspan was also an early member of a Rand support group that met weekly in the writer’s New York apartment. Greenspan continued his ardent discipleship until 2008, when he suddenly announced that he was “wrong for years to assume that government regulation was bad for markets.”

The startling confession had Greenspan admitting that his libertarian views of the financial world had not worked out, which I can only assume is also a condemnation of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

“I’ve been going for 40 years or more,” Greenspan lamented, “with very considerable evidence that it [free and loosely-regulated markets] was working exceptionally well.”

What many people don’t know is that Greenspan was warned early on that something was amiss with his financial policies, and if he didn’t change his ways there would be a national financial disaster.

The Cassandra in this case was Brooksley Born, former chairperson of the Commodity Fixtures Trading Commission (CFTC), an organization that oversees the futures and commodity options markets. In the early 1990s, Born campaigned heavily to convince Congress to regulate the risky derivatives market. Her prediction of a great downturn sometime in the future angered Greenspan, then Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers (all free-market devotees from the Reagan era who occupy top spots, sans Greenspan, in the Obama administration). All three men were so upset by Born’s determination to reinstitute regulations that they managed to get Congress to stop Born in her tracks. Born was prevented from putting a cap on the regulation of derivatives.

Born, who was the first female student to be made president of the Stanford Law Review, and who was briefly considered as a candidate for U.S. Attorney General under President Clinton (Janet Reno was named), was made to feel like an enemy of the United States.

Libertarian propaganda defines government as the root of all evil, conveniently forgetting that the era before and after WWII saw the greatest era of prosperity in the nation’s history. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal helped get the nation out of its financial morass with the creation of the Social Security Act, by extending and revising the tax structure and by the creation of agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Wall Street did not save the Nation after the Great Depression, government did.
Who, after all, would trust Wall Street to save anyone much less regulate itself?

So, hats off to Brooklsey Born, a true American hero. ****

The “global warming is a myth” folks continue to march in step despite eerie evidence to the contrary: mega tornados in Oklahoma and Kansas in which many were left homeless; tornados over water in Massachusetts; boiler plate summers; the death of honeybees and bats; the disappearance of wildflowers, and the emergence of Antarctica winters. Greenpeace recently announced that one of the world’s most prominent scientific figures to be skeptical about climate change has confessed—yes, confessed-- to being bought off by more than $1 million in the past ten years by major U.S. oil and coal companies. The so called climate "skeptic" — Dr. Willie Soon — works as an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Since the year 2001, Dr. Soon has received cash from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries (here we go again) and Southern, one of the world’s largest coal-burning utility companies.

Pope Paul VI and the Slippery Slope

2011-07-12T17:59:00.001-07:00

I recently came across this interview with Alice von Hildebrand. The interview was conducted by the Latin Mass Magazine (I am a subscriber). Alice von Hildebrand also writes for the New Oxford Review. Her words speak to the present crises in the Catholic Church.

[The interview, reproduced in part]

TLM: In terms of the present crisis, when did you first perceive something was terribly wrong?

AVH: It was in February 1965. I was taking a sabbatical year in Florence. My husband was reading a theological journal, and suddenly I heard him burst into tears. I ran to him, fearful that his heart condition had suddenly caused him pain. I asked him if he was all right. He told me that the article that he had been reading had provided him with the certain insight that the devil had entered the Church. Remember, my husband was the first prominent German to speak out publicly against Hitler and the Nazis. His insights were always prescient.

TLM: Did your husband think that the decline in a sense of the supernatural began around that time [1920s -- from an earlier question], and if so, how did he explain it?

AVH: No, he believed that after Pius X’s condemnation of the heresy of Modernism [1907], its proponents merely went underground. He would say that they then took a much more subtle and practical approach. They spread doubt simply by raising questions about the great supernatural interventions throughout salvation history, such as the Virgin Birth and Our Lady’s perpetual virginity, as well as the Resurrection, and the Holy Eucharist. They knew that once faith – the foundation – totters, the liturgy and the moral teachings of the Church would follow suit. My husband entitled one of his books The Devastated Vineyard. After Vatican II, a tornado seemed to have hit the Church ...

Even the pagan Plato was open to a sense of the supernatural. He spoke of the weakness, frailty and cowardice often evidenced in human nature. He was asked by a critic to explain why he had such a low opinion of humanity. He replied that he was not denigrating man, only comparing him to God.

With the loss of a sense of the supernatural, there is a loss of the sense of a need for sacrifice today. The closer one comes to God, the greater should be one’s sense of sinfulness. The further one gets from God, as today, the more we hear the philosophy of the new age: “I’m OK, You’re OK.” This loss of the inclination to sacrifice has led to the obscuring of the Church’s redemptive mission. Where the Cross is downplayed, our need for redemption is given hardly a thought.

The aversion to sacrifice and redemption has assisted the secularization of the Church from within. We have been hearing for many years from priests and bishops about the need for the Church to adapt herself to the world. Great popes like St. Pius X said just the opposite: the world must adapt itself to the Church.

TLM: From our conversation throughout this afternoon, I must conclude that you don’t believe that the accelerating loss of the sense of the supernatural is an accident of history.

AVH: No, I do not. There have been two books published in Italy in recent years that confirm what my husband had been suspecting for some time; namely, that there has been a systematic infiltration of the Church by diabolical enemies for much of this century. My husband was a very sanguine man and optimistic by nature. During the last ten years of his life, however, I witnessed him many times in moments of great sorrow, and frequently repeating, “They have desecrated the Holy Bride of Christ.” He was referring to the “abomination of desolation” of which the prophet Daniel speaks.

TLM: This is a critical admission, Dr. von Hildebrand. Your husband had been called a twentieth-century Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XII. If he felt so strongly, didn’t he have access to the Vatican to tell Pope Paul VI of his fears?

AVH: But he did! I shall never forget the private audience we had with Paul VI just before the end of the [Second Vatican] Council. It was on June 21, 1965. As soon as my husband started pleading with him to condemn the heresies that were rampant, the Pope interrupted him with the words, “Lo scriva, lo scriva.” (“Write it down.”) A few moments later, for the second time, my husband drew the gravity of the situation to the Pope’s attention. Same answer. His Holiness received us standing. It was clear that the Pope was feeling very uncomfortable. The audience lasted only a few minutes. Paul VI immediately gave a sign to his secretary, Fr. Capovilla, to bring us rosaries and medals. We then went back to Florence where my husband wrote a long document (unpublished today) that was delivered to Paul VI just the day before the last session of the Council. It was September of 1965. After reading my husband’s document, he said to my husband’s nephew, Dieter Sattler, who had become the German ambassador to the Holy See, that he had read the document carefully, but that “it was a bit harsh.” The reason was obvious: my husband had humbly requested a clear condemnation of heretical statements.

TLM: You realize, of course, Doctor, that as soon as you mention this idea of infiltration, there will be those who roll their eyes in exasperation and remark, “Not another conspiracy theory!”

AVH: I can only tell you what I know. It is a matter of public record, for instance, that Bella Dodd, the ex-Communist who reconverted to the Church, openly spoke of the Communist Party’s deliberate infiltration of agents into the seminaries. She told my husband and me that when she was an active party member, she had dealt with no fewer than four cardinals within the Vatican “who were working for us.”

Many a time I have heard Americans say that Europeans “smell conspiracy wherever they go.” But from the beginning, the Evil One has “conspired” against the Church – and has always aimed in particular at destroying the Mass and sapping belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. That some people are tempted to blow this undeniable fact out of proportion is no reason for denying its reality. On the other hand, I, European born, am tempted to say that many Americans are naïve; living in a country that has been blessed by peace, and knowing little about history, they are more likely than Europeans (whose history is a tumultuous one) to fall prey to illusions ... Judas had played his hand so artfully that no one suspected him, for a cunning conspirator knows how to cover his tracks with a show of orthodoxy.

TLM: Do the two books by the Italian priest you mentioned before the interview contain documentation that would provide evidence of this infiltration?

AVH: The two books I mentioned were published in 1998 and 2000 by an Italian priest, Don Luigi Villa of the diocese of Brescia, who at the request of Padre Pio has devoted many years of his life to the investigation of the possible infiltration of both Freemasons and Communists into the Church. My husband and I met Don Villa in the sixties. He claims that he does not make any statement that he cannot substantiate. When Paulo Sesto Beato? (1998) was published the book was sent to every single Italian bishop. None of them acknowledged receipt; none challenged any of Don Villa’s claims.

In this book, he relates something that no ecclesiastical authority has refuted or asked to be retracted – even though he names particular personalities in regard to the incident. It pertains to the rift between Pope Pius XII and the then Bishop Montini (the future Paul VI) who was his Undersecretary of State. Pius XII, conscious of the threat of Communism, which in the aftermath of World War II was dominating nearly half of Europe, had prohibited the Vatican staff from dealing with Moscow. To his dismay, he was informed one day through the Bishop of Up[p]sala (Sweden) that his strict order had been contravened. The Pope resisted giving credence to this rumor until he was given incontrovertible evidence that Montini had been corresponding with various Soviet agencies. Meanwhile, Pope Pius XII (as had Pius XI) had been sending priests clandestinely into Russia to give comfort to Catholics behind the Iron Curtain. Every one of them had been systematically arrested, tortured, and either executed or sent to the gulag. Eventually a Vatican mole was discovered: Alighiero Tondi, S.J., who was a close advisor to Montini. Tondi was an agent working for Stalin whose mission was to keep Moscow informed about initiatives such as the sending of priests into the Soviet Union.

Add to this Pope Paul’s treatment of Cardinal Mindszenty. Against his will, Mindszenty was ordered by the Vatican to leave Budapest. As most everyone knows, he had escaped the Communists and sought refuge in the American embassy compound. The Pope had given him his solemn promise that he would remain primate of Hungary as long as he lived. When the Cardinal (who had been tortured by the Communists) arrived in Rome, Paul VI embraced him warmly, but then sent him into exile in Vienna. Shortly afterwards, this holy prelate was informed that he had been demoted, and had been replaced by someone more acceptable to the Hungarian Communist government. More puzzling, and tragically sad, is the fact that when Mindszenty died, no Church representative was present at his burial.

Another of Don Villa’s illustrations of infiltration is one related to him by Cardinal Gagnon. Paul VI had asked Gagnon to head an investigation concerning the infiltration of the Church by powerful enemies. Cardinal Gagnon (at that time an Archbishop) accepted this unpleasant task, and compiled a long dossier, rich in worrisome facts. When the work was completed, he requested an audience with Pope Paul in order to deliver personally the manuscript to the Pontiff. This request for a meeting was denied. The Pope sent word that the document should be placed in the offices of the Congregation for the Clergy, specifically in a safe with a double lock. This was done, but the very next day the safe deposit box was broken and the manuscript mysteriously disappeared. The usual policy of the Vatican is to make sure that news of such incidents never sees the light of day. Nevertheless, this theft was reported even in L’Osservatore Romano (perhaps under pressure because it had been reported in the secular press). Cardinal Gagnon, of course, had a copy, and once again asked the Pope for a private audience. Once again his request was denied. He then decided to leave Rome and return to his homeland in Canada. Later, he was called back to Rome by Pope John Paul II and made a cardinal.

TLM: Why did Don Villa write these works singling out Paul VI for criticism?
AVH: Don Villa reluctantly decided to publish the books to which I have alluded. But when several bishops pushed for the beatification of Paul VI, this priest perceived it as a clarion call to print the information he had gathered through the years. In so doing, he was following the guidelines of a Roman Congregation, informing the faithful that it was their duty as members of the Church to relay to the Congregation any information that might militate against the candidate’s qualifications for beatification.

Considering the tumultuous pontificate of Paul VI, and the confusing signals he was giving, e.g.: speaking about the “smoke of Satan that had entered the Church,” yet refusing to condemn heresies officially; his promulgation of Humanae Vitae (the glory of his pontificate), yet his careful avoidance of proclaiming it ex cathedra [infallible doctrine]; delivering his Credo of the People of God in Piazza San Pietro in 1968, and once again failing to declare it binding on all Catholics; disobeying the strict orders of Pius XII to have no contact with Moscow, and appeasing the Hungarian Communist government by reneging on the solemn promise he had made to Cardinal Mindszenty; his treatment of holy Cardinal Slipyj, who had spent seventeen years in a Gulag, only to be made a virtual prisoner in the Vatican by Paul VI; and finally asking Archbishop Gagnon to investigate possible infiltration in the Vatican, only to refuse him an audience when his work was completed – all these speak strongly against the beatification of Paolo VI, dubbed in Rome, “Paolo Sesto, Mesto” (Paul VI, the sad one) ...

God alone is the judge of Paul VI. But it cannot be denied that his pontificate was a very complex and tragic one. It was under him that, in the course of fifteen years, more changes were introduced in the Church than in all preceding centuries combined. What is worrisome is that when we read the testimony of ex-Communists like Bella Dodd, and study Freemasonic documents (dating from the nineteenth century, and usually penned by fallen-away priests like Paul Roca), we can see that, to a large extent, their agenda has been carried out: the exodus of priests and nuns after Vatican II, dissenting theologians not censured, feminism, the pressure put on Rome to abolish priestly celibacy, immorality in the clergy, blasphemous liturgies (see the article by David Hart in First Things, April 2001, “The Future of the Papacy”), the radical changes that have been introduced into the sacred liturgy (see Cardinal Ratzinger’s book Milestones, pp. 126 and 148, Ignatius Press), and a misleading ecumenism. Only a blind person could deny that many of the Enemy’s plans have been perfectly carried out.

One should not forget that the world was shocked at what Hitler did. People like my husband, however, actually read what he had said in Mein Kampf. The plan was there. The world simply chose not to believe it.

But grave as the situation is, no committed Catholic can forget that Christ has promised that He will remain with His Church to the very end of the world. We should meditate on the scene related in the Gospel when the apostles’ boat was battered by a fierce storm. Christ was sleeping! His terrified followers woke Him up: He said one word, and there was a great calm. “O ye of little faith!” ...

TLM: So you see the only scenario for a solution to the present crisis as the renewal of a striving for sanctity?

AVH: We should not forget that we are fighting not only against flesh and blood, but against “powers and principalities.” This should elicit sufficient dread in us to make us strive more than ever for holiness, and to pray fervently that the Holy Bride of Christ, who is right now at Calvary, comes out of this fearful crisis more radiant than ever.

THE RAPE MONOLOGUES: (from The Weekly Press)

2011-07-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

The first line of Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL reads: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…”

Put a contemporary Philly twist on Ginsberg’s HOWL and you might come up with: “I saw heretofore reasonable intellects destroyed by political correctness, starving hysterical in their search for answers, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an appropriate scapegoat…”

The scapegoat in this case, Broad Street Review editor Dan Rottenberg, has been blacklisted by some in the theater community because of an editorial he wrote in BSR in which he admonishes city women to pay attention to what they wear if they want to be “on guard” against rapists. Ideologues interpreted Rottenberg as saying that women who dress scantily deserve (or “ask”) to be raped. The emotional backlash went even further when some men and women put the iconic and often cantankerous editor on the same level as a rapist.

A fatwa of sorts was issued by a number of small theater companies barring Rottenberg or any of his BSR freelancers (the online publication is famous for its huge stable of theater reviewers) from reviewing new plays “forever and forever” (the bigger theater companies, of course, took the high road).

(For those not in the know, the highly readable and often enjoyable BSR is a quirky publication in which contributors write not to a general audience but attempt to address or appeal to some mysterious, albeit therapeutic, need in Dan Rottenberg’s head. If you don’t understand or “get” Dan Rottenberg, you’ll never appear in BSR, despite the fact that you may be a Pulitzer Prize winner or a columnist for The New York Review of Books.)

At Plays and Players Theater recently, a one time showing of “Dan Rottenberg is Thinking About Raping You: An Educational Presentation” was presented at Plays and Players Theater. The show’s creator, Clara Blouin, told The Philadelphia Weekly that she wanted to “put Rottenberg’s ideas under the lights to be laughed at.”

But what are Rottenberg’s ideas?

One of them is the egregious sin of paternalism, his seeming to offer “fatherly” advice (the man does have a grown daughter) to women to pay some attention to how they dress before going out in public.

On the surface at least, the idea of a man giving advice to women on how to dress when going out in public may appear as slightly medieval. But…this is Philadelphia, an often times “medieval” place where shopkeepers get shot in the face with sawed off shotguns and where spitting in the street is accepted as normal behavior.

I wonder if all the people hanging Rottenberg out to dry have ever hung out or walked in the most dangerous sections of the city, which seem to be everywhere these days sans the oasis of Center City and the Avenue of the Arts.

I doubt whether presenting exposed cleavage and mini shorts as a green light for rape was Rottenberg’s explicit intention. I think Rottenberg was merely asking: why risk rattling the cage of uncivilized urban animals, since there seem to be so many of them? I mean, if you’re deciding what to wear to go to WAWA in the middle of the night for that bit of frozen yogurt, would you opt to wear something skimpy rather than a sweater that may draw less attention? If you know that at that hour there might be a number of skuzzy men hanging around, why invite possible animal leers? Why even tempt them a little bit to go over the edge?

Of course, every woman has the legal and human right to wear whatever she wants, just as I have the right to walk hand-in-hand with a male partner through questionable, gay unfriendly neighborhoods. But why invite the hassle?

While dressing sexily in no way excuses a rapist, Rottenberg’s paternalistic common sense rule still contains a little bit of wisdom.

I wish the antiRottenberger bigrade good luck in attempting to eliminate any reference to common sense when it comes to navigating Philly’s mean streets.

I say this because just the other day, as I was exiting the EL at Berks Street, I witnessed a police officer pull over a scantily clad young woman in a mini skirt. What he said to her was right out of an article written by Dan Rottenberg: “Miss, you shouldn’t be walking around this neighborhood like that. You don’t know where you are. I suggest you call someone and have them pick you up.”

.

Swimming in the Crest (STAR column)

2011-07-03T14:52:00.000-07:00

Wildwood Crest is a place I keep returning to, as noted in other Sojourn columns. Once a year I usually head down to the bus station at 13th and Filbert and take New Jersey Transit to the Wildwood Bus Terminal, and then walk with my luggage to the little apartment that I rent every year.
Ocean swimming has gotten a bad reputation over the years. I know people who will not swim in the ocean because of toxins and pollutants or because they have a primal fear of marine life. While the “ocean is a dirty place” mindset may direct our attention to legitimate ecological concerns, in my mind the concern is inevitably linked with current scientific data on the atmosphere or the air we breathe.
Do we stop breathing because the air around us is filled with toxins?
True ocean lovers realize that swimming in the sea is like taking a leap of faith with Mother Nature.
Four years ago when I visited the Crest after Labor Day I noticed a lot of jellyfish in the water. Not live jellyfish mind you, but those dead blobs of protoplasm that float over the waves like transparent Jell-O molds.
Three years ago I noticed another “impurity”: the water was filled with unusual tangles of seaweed, Seaweed, while a great herbal food (especially in soups) is most unpleasant when it gathers around your body. This year the seaweed problem was minor; there were also virtually no jellyfish, as well as no big fish swimming around my ankles (as there was last year) when I waded into the breakers.
This year, for the first time ever, I experienced the feeling of a crab’s claw clamping down on my feet. One crab attached itself to my little toe and caused me to loose my balance in the breakers. I no sooner disengaged the thing when another one attached itself. I literally had to lift my left leg out of the water and shake it loose in the air. A third crab came along but I think the pounding surf washed it away. For a moment I imagined that I was crab special target #1, caught in some “crab version” of Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Believe it or not, there are big men and big women who are afraid of fish, otherwise fearless individuals who wouldn’t think twice about engaging in a street fight but who run like Goldilocks from the living, wiggling things on the ocean floor.
But nothing, neither rabid crabs, fish as long as eels, or dead jelly fish, can keep me out of my beloved ocean. I’m sure that other Philadelphians, and especially Riverward residents, feel similarly. The ocean is not an antiseptic chlorine saturated pool, but a natural playground. When we swim there we unite with our primal selves. And that’s why I love it.
There’s a certain skill to swimming in the ocean. For starters, always respect the ocean and always be on guard. Whether it’s the paranoid influence of B movies like Jaws, but when I swim in the ocean my eyes always periodically scan the horizon for fins or strange “above water” protrusions. This obsession served me well a few years ago when I noticed a huge 20 foot pier plank, with a number of spikes in it, floating over the rollers towards the beach. Two nephews of mine who happened to be swimming with me then did an altruistic thing and carried the plank to the beach.
Now I’m a firm believer in teaching children to swim if only because I think that conquering a fear of water can have a positive influence on handling a number of problems in life.
When you think about it, there’s nothing more depressing then hearing a strong looking man or woman announce to friends or strangers that they never learned how to swim. They may be a star athlete in every other area of life; they may be able to press 200 pounds, but when it comes to water they are reduced to silly putty. At the beach I sometimes see tough football player types wade in the ocean up to their ankles only to retreat skittishly when a big wave comes in.
Sometimes these brawny characters, though “gladiatorial"” in every other aspect of life, draw back from the ocean like the infirm or a scared young child. Like the Biblical Samson without his hair, not knowing how to swim has rendered them powerless.
A crab, however, may still find their feet delectable.

PAFA Annual Student Exhibition, ICON June 2011

2011-06-06T05:33:00.000-07:00

There may be nothing quite like it in the nation: student artists with their work on display mingling with potential patrons and buyers in a party circuit atmosphere where the only “bad” vibe is a theatrical frown or two because the generous open bar has just run out of champagne.
For an art lover, events like this don’t get any better.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ (PAFA) 110th Annual Student Exhibition (May 13-June 5, 2011) preview this year hit a milestone. The word in the crowd is that the works on exhibit from third-and-fourth year students, as well as Bachelor of Fine Arts and graduating Master of Fine Arts students, was better than ever.

After years of unglamorous solitary creation in the “dorms” of studios, classes, and trial by fire experimentations (which inevitably include a fair share of artistic failures), the PAFA student finally has the opportunity to help arrange their first show. For the emerging student-to-adult artist ready to step into the world as a creator, the Annual Student Exhibition is a crucial first step. The exhibition’s preview party, besides being a great opportunity for artists to chat with potential buyers, also doubles as a serious competition and critical venue for these (almost) former students.

Since most of the works on the three floor exhibition space exhibition are for sale, the air of expectation among the artists is high.

Will the public respond favorably? Or will they walk past and nod politely, their eyes set on the next artist’s work?

“I think this years’ show is a good looking show in terms of installation,” Jill Rupinski, PAFA’s Appointed Faculty and ASE Coordinator told me by phone. “The students did a really good job in putting a more professional look on the show in terms of editing their work, and thinking hard about what they wanted to show. This was less concern about throwing everything up on the walls in terms of selling work.”

With the work of 128 student artists on display, Rupinski says there’s more crossover work this year as well, with sculptors doing painting and vice versa. And sales so far have been good, with some works commanding what Rupinski calls “hefty prices,” especially among graduate students who left careers to return to school.

“We always say to the students, if you get a large price for a piece you may not get that large a price after school. We tell them that our venue, the annual student exhibition, is heavily marketed and advertised.”

The Exhibition comes on the cusp of school graduation, when exhibiting students will pack up the paintings that don’t sell and implement plans to head home, wherever that may be.

I got a taste of this when I visited the PAFA studio of Master of Fine Arts Exhibitor Roman Serra.
Serra, who hails from Detroit, grew up on a farm and worked as a landscaper before winning a scholarship to the school. An abstract artist, his small studio is identical to the other students’, about as large as a boxy efficiency apartment. Sectioned off in an old automotive warehouse with an exposed factory-like ceiling, the off-white walls in the cubicle are paint splattered as is the floor.

“People like the floor,” Roman tells me, “but before I leave for Detroit I have to repaint the walls, though you can see the hearts my girlfriend painted there.”

I look up and notice half a drawn heart, the other half hidden behind one of Serra’s works.

In this vast space student voices can be heard coming from other cubicles. Most seem to be packing to leave their studios for good. Along the hallway are bunches of stacked paintings, awaiting U-Haul or SUV transport.

Serra, who plans on studying and working in Italy in September, and who has an upcoming exhibition at The Sporting Club at the Bellevue, tells me that the groundbreaking shovel he designed for the Lenfest Plaza groundbreaking was chosen as the winning shovel over other student-designed shovels.

“I did something different than what other people did. I made it into a staff of power, a sort of Shaman’s staff . I carved it with a diamond blade grinder. I wanted it to have a special quality. The school was impressed with what I did. Then they asked if I would be a presenter at the groundbreaking and if I would carry a 65 pound paint brush and present it to Mrs. Lenfest.”

Serra says he’s disappointed that his Philadelphia experience has been on the mediocre side.

“I think Chicago was a better city for my work. There are a lot of conservative tastes in Philadelphia when it comes to buying work. It’s been hard for me to support myself.”

Sometime during our chat, Serra mentions a friend, Tyler Kline, who has a studio on the other side of his.

I met Kline rather serendipitously while touring the preview party. Kline, a slight of build guy with a small goatee, was pacing in a remote corner of the exhibition space some distance away from his work when we began speaking.
He told me he is primarily a sculptor and describes his work as something that’s “after post modern.”
“It’s grotesque romanticism for this new 21st century,” he said, “which has been shaped by the September 11 attacks and this ongoing holy war.”
He tells me that there is a political element in his work but that he tries not to make it “upfront.” “There are certain veiled things alluded to, a lot of it is allegory.”
“I’m concerned with not being overly obvious, in not creating things that are quickly read. Ten years ago I was doing overly political paintings and I look back now and realize that I was just perpetuating an aesthetic—perpetuating things that I didn’t want to happen.” A native or Portland, Oregon, Kline’s political paintings then had a lot to do with the World Trade Organization protests in that city.
Kline, who bought a house with his wife some time ago in what he calls a “fringe area between between East Falls and Germantown,” plans to make Philadelphia his home. “Philadelphia is not the art market place that New York is, and most artists here can’t make a living from selling art. I think Philly has Manhattan beat as far as things being produced in the city. It has Brooklyn beat.”
He tells me about his membership in an arts collective, what he calls an “alternative performance/installation laboratory for the Creative Arts,” the Little Berlin Gallery on West Montgomery Avenue.

An avid skateboarder, Kline says he skates around the city in order to “watch the urban space.”
“One corner of urban renewal instead of the gentrification of neighborhoods in the building of condos, is building alternative spaces. Now we have working class artists buying houses and turning around these spaces. Skate parks,” he said, “are popping up in underused playgrounds that were formerly open air drug markets.”

While the PAFA preview party offers its fair share of spotting ‘Who’s Who,’ —I’m thinking especially of watching Gerry Lenfest pour himself coffee and getting to ask if anybody asked him for money today—that was not always the case. Thrity years ago, Rupinski says, the preview parties were “less of a cohesive effort in advertising,” and that during the party things were so quiet “you could hear a pin drop.”

But preview parties for some of the artists can be rough. Rupinski tells me that faculty members then are on the lookout for artists who seem to be having a meltdown because nobody is talking to them about their work. “This also is an education,” she says, “so we go over and talk them up.”
“When there’s a dull moment for a student, I see them standing there all pretty in their finer attire and I come over and say, ‘Tell me about your art, talk to me.”
The Dean of the School of Fine Arts agrees.
“The Annual Student Exhibition is perhaps the single most important event in the school year,” Jeffrey Carr told me. “It draws together all the various elements of the Academy, museum and academic programs, and it is a clear statement of what we are and what PAFA values. We are a strictly fine arts school and also a unique combination of school and museum committed to the evolving diversity and vitality of the fine arts in America.”

From ICON Magazine, June 2011

2011-06-06T05:26:00.000-07:00

THE LAST WORD

When most people think of the Pearl S. Buck house they think of the sprawling 60-acre estate in Bucks County. But long before the women’s rights crusader, philanthropist, humanitarian and author moved to this house (or Green Hills Farm) she lived at 2019 Delancey Street in Center City.
The Delancey Street house, despite its having been occupied by the author of over 70 books and the winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature for “The Good Earth,” is registered with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission as the Richard Cadwalader house. Built in 1860 for Cadwalader in the Federal style, the multiple dwelling row house was later recast in the Beaux Arts style in 1918 by the Philadelphia architectural firm of DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley.
DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley (1911-1938), all University of Pennsylvania graduates, were famous for their colonial revival residences and English-influenced style buildings. They also designed (the long demolished) Franklin Trust Company Building at 18 South 15th Street in Philadelphia.

It was in this Center City house where Ms. Buck compiled her 1972 short story collection, “Once upon a Christmas.” Other holiday stories like “Christmas Miniature,” (1957), “The Christmas Ghost,” (1960) and “Christmas Day in the Morning,” may also have been written in the Delancey Street townhouse.
The 9,000 square foot, 5-floor townhouse was purchased in 1964 as the home of Pearl Buck and the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. While the basement and first floor was renovated for use as Foundation space, the second floor was designed to house the dining room, a formal drawing room and the solarium or Sun Room where Buck had large numbers of plants.
With the famous Rosenbach Museum and Library just a few doors away at 2008-2010 Delancey Street, it’s no wonder that Buck saw this area as a special part of Center City. Although it was the informal, tumultuous Sixties, when Ms. Buck called 2019 Delancey Street home, she was often referred to as “Miss Buck.” When in Center City it is said that she dressed like a society matron, but when she was her Bucks County home she was far more informal.
The octagonal-shaped dining room was lavishly decorated with a Ming screen with inlaid ivory figures. A long Chinese buffet table was also situated under a smoked glass mirror. Since the dining room also doubled as a place for dancing, the octagonal table could be rolled into a closet and the chandelier could be raised or lowered as needed.
“Why did I choose Center City, you ask?” Pearl S. Buck once wrote. “Because there was a street, there was the house, there were the people. There, too, was the tradition of brotherly love…” Buck also wrote that no matter where she lived there were always elements of the Chinese. “Sooner or later into every room in any house I own the Chinese influence creeps.”
At 2019 Delancey, the 3rd floor library contained a baby grand piano, the famous “Good Earth Desk,” an ancient Chinese drum on a pedestal which acted as a coffee table, as well as leather bound editions of her books given her as gifts by her publisher. Much of the furniture was imported from the Buck house in China, namely the rose and tan Peking rugs, the Blackwood chairs, and a daybed.
The 3rd floor Master Bedroom had a small sitting room and a writing table.
One walked through the 1st Floor entryway into a vestibule that exploded with red lacquered doors, stained glass and a large statue of the Chinese goddess of Mercy. Beyond the foyer, near the fireplace with its flanking Mandarin Chinese chairs, was an altar table flanked by two antique candelabra.
During the renovation of the townhouse in 1964-65, the first floor kitchen was moved to the basement and the former kitchen became the Foundation’s conference room. In the center of the conference room was a six foot round table made of walnut and yellow marble.
Many of Buck’s Delancey Street townhouse treasures were moved to the Bucks County home when the townhouse was sold.
Of special note is the wrought iron gate on the front door. Artistically designed to downplay its use as a “guard” against intruders, the design of the mail slot is of special interest.
If you’re attending the Rosenbach’s Bloomsday celebration on June 16 from 12:00 pm to 7:00 pm when 75 Philadelphians will take turns reading sections from James Joyce’s Ulysses (I will be reading at 5:30pm), you might want to observe the proceedings from Miss Buck’s steps.

After Osama Bin Laden was shot dead by Special OPs forces in Pakistan, thousands of people, many of them students, took to the streets in celebration. Many of the revelers, who were in middle school when the 9/11 attacks occurred, responded in a way that more mature adults did not. Much of the celebratory frenzy that occurred in front of the White House, on college campuses, Times Square and Ground Zero, was like a big sports stadium roar. The reaction was definitely middle school behavior. But shouting, “USA, USA!” reduced bin Laden’s death to a gross manifestation of nationalism, as if America was a hockey team en route to a Stanley Cup victory. The hoopla seemed to suggest that the world’s troubles were over, when in fact the opposite is probably true. Cautious optimism and focused meditation, not frat party mayhem, should have been the rule that day. Why? Because when it comes to the psychology of war, one retaliatory strike breeds another.
Will the Talibun target President Obama during the 2012 campaign in the same way that Osama was targeted in May 2011? Only time will tell whether killing Bin Laden was a good thing, or whether having him fade away, his whereabouts unknown, would have been the better alternative.

Bin Laden’s rushed burial at sea (in the water or buried in the ground under the water?) must have seemed anti-climatic to most people, despite the comments of Tariq Ali, the noted Pakistani writer and activist, who noted, “Why wasn’t he captured alive and tried in a court of law to prove him guilty?” But it was the disposal of the body according to the rituals of Islam that struck me as most peculiar. I had a hard time imagining how the soul of a terrorist of Bin Laden’s ilk could possibly have benefited spiritually from prayers and an anointing after death. Perhaps in God’s great universe this makes an illogical sort of sense, but for the loved ones of the thousands killed on 9/11, a “holy” send off like this must somehow seem perversely incongruent. I suppose, ultimately, the (reported) reverence shown Bin Laden’s body stands as a reminder of death’s transcendent realm: We may be judge, jury and executioner here, but when it comes to the great unknown, we don’t necessarily have the last “word.”
*
In March, Philadelphia police had to close John F. Kennedy Plaza (or Love Park) because there were threats of flash mob activity. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News, police spent some time chasing bands of young people in an attempt to curtail rowdy behavior. Disturbances on South Street also punctuated the day.

While police reported no violence or destruction of public property during these episodes, several arrests were made. Love Park was also closed for several hours in anticipation of further flash mob activity. The closure prevented visitors, tourists and office workers from enjoying the park on a beautiful spring day.

So what gives with the City of Brotherly Love?

In the days of Mayor Frank Rizzo, this sort of behavior would have been nipped in the bud. School kids, although minors, would have been hauled into jail and then turned over to their parents, or maybe the parents would have been arrested. The candy-coated, velvet glove “Ah, come on, they’re just kids” treatment would not have played out in Rizzo’s Philadelphia. But then was then and now is now as they say, and now is not so good, especially with the warmer weather here.
Mayor Nutter’s promise to crack down on flash mob activity comes after the horses have left the stable. The kids, or the culprits in question, don’t seem to mind his threats.
When gangs of school kids have the police chasing them around Laurel and Hardy style, you know those threats are basically meaningless.
When flash mobs first surfaced over a year or so ago, many nervous progressive types made all sorts of excuses for the behavior. There were Op-Ed editorials calling for more “after school” programs. Voices calling for the arrest of the students or their parents were criticized as being “racist” and “cruel.” But where is it written that any kid, be they Asian, Italian, Irish, African American or Indian, can team up with ethic or racial peers and hold a city hostage?
The Nutter Administration seems to be handling the problem on a case-by-case basis, as the incidents occur. This “damage control” approach to the problem has not prevented the mobs from reinventing themselves. Again, the kids do not feel intimidated or frightened because they keep doing it.
Two weeks ago, while crossing Market Street in Center City on a late Wednesday afternoon, a group of African American female students were crossing in the opposite direction. Walking beside me was a middle aged white woman, probably coming home from work. Suddenly and without warning one of the students jumped in the woman’s face and began screaming at the top of her lungs. The incident took all of five seconds, and may not have been much by urban standards, but it displayed an attitude that’s become all too common these days: callous disregard for other people’s rights and feelings. That small action, despite the fact that nobody was touched or physically harmed, constituted a kind of assault.
It would have been the same thing had a white girl screamed in the face of an older black woman-- same offense; same ignorance.
The woman was understandably shaken, but what could she do? Scenes like this have become normal in the City of Brotherly Love, and that’s the sad part. As a city we are building a tough collective hide that processes but then tunes out incidents like this. We’ve come to accept outrageous rudeness as “part of what it’s like to live in the city,” although if we were to compare Philadelphia to other cities we would discover that this is anything but the case, even though violence-prone flash mobs have occurred in Boston and New Jersey. That’s not true, however, in Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, or even Detroit.
Frank Rizzo in the 1970s often went overboard when it came to maintaining public order, but one thing was certain: Philly was a safe city then.
As I see it, the way to eliminate flash mobs or random (group) teenage hooliganism, such as the March 4, 2011 incident at the Shops of Liberty Place when at least two dozen teens kicked over food and display tables in the Food Court, is to immediately implement the following:
Eliminate the “free ride” Septa transpass system for students, prohibit teens from gathering in groups of ten or more, and hold parents responsible for injuries or damages inflicted on homes or businesses during a flash mob
Since we can’t bring Frank Rizzo back from the dead, we can at least implement some useful, workable Rizzo-like solutions

*

Why Pope John Paul II is not a saint: As Catholic writer Michael Matt noted, “No man is great until history judges him so, which is why the rush to beatify John Paul strikes many Catholics as an attempt to preemptively overrule history’s inevitable verdict against a problematic pontificate that left the human element of the Catholic Church in chaos.”

FEAR AND LOATHING AT THE PHILADELPHIA CATHOLIC STANDARD AND TIMES

2011-06-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

The following email from Matthew Gambino, General Manager of the Philadelphia Catholic Standard and Times, was sent to me the other day. It concerns a letter to the editor of mine that the CS&T approved and edited for publication, and then in fact did publish, giving it a prominent "framed" space in the newspaper.

The letter mentioned a family wedding I attended in a Catholic parish in Media. I wrote about the general mayhem and loud talking among the congregation before Mass. The point of the letter was to attempt to address a problem that seems to exist in a lot of Catholic parishes today. In the letter I also expressed disappointment in the wedding homily.

This letter, as I said, was approved for publication and then published prominently in the newspaper. I received many comments afterwards thanking me for writing it (from priests and neighbors). Almost everyone I spoke to agreed that the loud talking issue before Mass in many Catholic churches is an issue that should be addressed.

It should also be noted that I did not use the priest's name in my letter to the CS&T, but merely mentioned "the priest." He could have been a visiting priest. Regardless, the letter--my words--were initially approved for publication.

After my letter to the CS&T was published, I wrote the editor and asked if the CS&T would like to reprint an article of mine on sacred architecture previously published in The Philadelphia Bulletin.

I did receive a response from Mr. Gambino, but it was not about sacred architecture.

It shoud be noted that after reading Mr. Gambino's letter, I opted to telephone him as well. Mr. Gambino told me that he would have canceled my subscription had I been a subscriber to the newspaper. Mr. Gambino laughed at me when I pointed out that issues like wild talking and socializing before Mass need to be addressed.

The unprofessional behavior of the CS&T is disturbing.

MY PUBLISHED LETTER IN THE CATHOLIC STANDARD & TIMES:

Hello,

I attended a wedding Mass at this beautiful church about a month ago. It was my first time in Nativity and the architecture and interior design of the church seemed to promise an equally beautiful ceremony. As a side note, it was good to see that the "remodeling" frenzy that followed Vatican II did not harm Nativity in any way.

While the church was beautiful, I was disappointed in the quality of the Mass at this particular wedding. Before Mass, people stood and talked--in fact, they talked quite loudly--all over the church. Initially there was a tendency to whisper but this soon gave way to reception-like normal voices, and even laughter. Gone was the traditional quiet one used to expect (before Mass) in Catholic churches. It was like sitting in a cafeteria and watching old friends say hello to one another after slapping each other on the back.

The pastor should address this problem in one of his sermons in the future. There was plenty of time to chat and "get down" after the Mass.

Another disappointing thing about the Mass,was the homily. The priest, rather than using the pulpit to speak, stood in front of the couple and talked to them like he was chatting them up in a bar. He kept saying, "Wow, they met in Barnaby's, wow, isn't God great, wow, oh wow!"

I lost count of the "wow's" after a while, but many of the people around me in the pews seemed to be wincing. The off the cuff homily was pure stream of consciousness bar talk. The only thing missing was a high five and a baseball cap.

One expects something more formal at a wedding. A litany of WOW's might be okay at the reception, but we don't need to hear this very dumbed down and condescending talk in the middle of Mass.

Sorry to have to write this.

Sincerely,

Thom Nickels
Philadelphia, PA

-----Original Message-----
Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:25:43 -0400
From: "Matthew Gambino"
To:
Subject: Re: Fwd: church architecture submission

Well, if it isn't Thom Nickels, the man who wrote a letter to the editor
which we published May 26. Publishing that letter was a mistake for
which I am truly sorry.

You could not stop at a good comment about the beautiful church. You
had to complain, as if there are not enough complaints in the world
today. You took a cheap shot at the priest -- you didn't have to name
him, he is the only priest at that parish. It wasn't enough that you had
to criticize his homily, you had to call it and him "dumbed down and
condescending."

You couldn't bring yourself to keep a mean-spirited insult to a fine
man and fine priest to yourself. You had to express it. And so you
insulted him and every priest trying his best to preach and minister to
the people.
Again, I regret bitterly that we published your letter; we never should
have allowed such garbage in this newspaper.

Please, save your strength in the future. Send no further
correspondence or phone calls or any communication to the Catholic
Standard and Times. I wanted to cancel your subscription but I see you
are not a subscriber.

Keep your complaints and your negativity to yourself. The world does
not need them. Make the gripe article you sent the last thing you ever
send this newspaper. Your name will never appear in it again.

Goodbye.

Matthew Gambino
Director and General Manager
The Catholic Standard and Times
Archdiocese of Philadelphia
222 N. 17th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103

215-587-3509

Dateline: Author Appearances & Readings

2011-05-31T17:03:00.000-07:00

At the Rosenbach Museum on Bloomsday, June 16, I will join 75 other Philadelphians and read a section from Ulysses. This particular section is the rather long Corny Kelleher Dialogs with Bloom, the Horse, Stephen and Rudy. I will act out all parts. Stay tuned.

In September, Spiral Bookcase in Manayunk is planning a Pretzel Park outdoor reading and Q and A from my book, Manayunk, on the Spiral Bookstore Best Seller List for the last few years.

Recorded 4 Rainbow Minute history readings for The Rainbow Minute, WRIR 97.3fm in Richmond, Virginia. Air time to be announced. Judd Proctor recorded these sessions in Center City for broadcast sometime in June.

Published Letter to the Editor in The Catholic Standard & Times this week:

To the Editor:

I attended a wedding Mass at this beautiful church about a month ago. It was my first time in Nativity and the architecture and interior design of the church seemed to promise an equally beautiful ceremony. As a side note, it was good to see that the "remodeling" frenzy that followed Vatican II did not harm Nativity in any way.

While the church was beautiful, I was disappointed in the quality of the Mass at this particular wedding. Before Mass, people stood and talked--in fact, they talked quite loudly--all over the church. Initially there was a tendency to whisper but this soon gave way to reception-like voices, and even laughter. Gone was the traditional quiet one used to expect (before Mass) in Catholic churches. The experience was like sitting in a cafeteria and watching old friends say hello to one another after slapping each other on the back.

The pastor should address this problem in one of his sermons in the future. There was plenty of time to chat and "get down" after the Mass.

Another disappointing thing about the Mass, was the homily. The priest, rather than using the pulpit to speak, stood in front of the couple and talked to them like he was chatting them up in a bar. He kept saying, "Wow, they met in Barnaby's, wow, isn't God great, wow, oh wow!"

I lost count of the "wow's" after a while, but the people around me in the pews--they were traditionalist Catholics--seemed to be visibly wincing as well. The off the cuff homily was pure stream of consciousness bar talk. The only thing missing was a high five and a baseball cap.

One expects something more formal at a wedding. A litany of WOW's might be okay at the reception, but we don't need to hear this very dumbed down and condescending talk in the middle of Mass.

Sincerely,

Thom Nickels

An Incredibly Beautiful Day Despite the Novus Ordo Accents

2011-05-21T05:56:00.001-07:00

I attended my niece's wedding Mass at this beautiful church about a month ago. It was my first time in Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary church in Media, PA. The architecture and interior design of the church seemed to promise an equally beautiful ceremony. As a side note, it was good to see that the "remodeling" frenzy that followed Vatican II did not harm Nativity in any way.

While I was very happy for my niece Colleen, I was disappointed in the quality of the wedding Mass. Before the Mass, people stood and talked--in fact, they talked quite loudly--all over the church. Initially there was a tendency to whisper but this soon gave way to reception-like raised voices, even bursts of laughter. Gone was the traditional quiet one used to expect (before Mass) in Catholic churches. A friend told me that this is what evangelical Protestants do before the beginning of a service--they chat up a perfect storm. I felt like I was sitting in the Wilma theater in Center City before curtain time.

I'm not against saying hello to old friends and telling jokes, but isn't this what a reception is for? There's plenty of time to "get down" after the Mass.

Another disappointing thing about the Mass--besides the lackluster Novus Ordo elements that rarely ever inspire---was the homily. The priest, rather than using the pulpit to speak, stood in front of the couple and talked to them like he was chatting them up in a bar. He kept saying, "Wow, they met in Barnaby's, wow, isn't God great, wow, oh wow!"

Wow, oh wow.

I lost count of the "wow's" after a while, but the people around me in the pews--there were a few traditionalist Catholics--appeared to be wincing. The off the cuff homily was pure stream of consciousness bar talk. The only thing missing was a high five and a baseball cap.

A litany of WOW's might be okay at the reception, but do we need to hear this very dumbed down and condescending talk in the middle of Mass?

Do we?

Stage One:The Sleepy 2011 Mayoral Primary in Philadelphia (From The Star)

2011-05-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

The other night I got a phone call from a public opinion pollster. Initially I thought it was a national opinion poll about the demise of Bin Laden, so I was ready to talk. My spirits deflated somewhat when the pollster asked if I was voting in the city primary on May 17th.

The question got me thinking about the “sleepiest primary” in the city’s history where T. Milton Street, ex-con, ex-state senator, ex-truck driver and ex- hot dog vendor is running for mayor. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a truck driver or a hot dog vendor, but Milton Street? I remember Mr. Street when he was throwing punches with his brother, the former mayor, during his vendor days in the 1970s. The best thing I think you can say about him then was that he lacked polish. He really was like one of those ruffians you observe while waiting for a bus in a seedy section of town. Today, of course, he’s all buttoned up and beautiful-- despite his just getting out of prison last year.

You have to button up somewhat when you run for mayor, but is this enough?
Mayor Nutter will win this primary hands down, despite the almost total absence of an official campaign. There have been no TV ads, no mayoral debates, no rallies or roving vans with bullhorns. It must be a rare, singular experience indeed to be able to claim an election victory while sleepwalking. Not many of us will get to experience this in life.

When the pollster asked me if I was voting, I almost replied, “When both candidates leave you cold, what’s a voter to do?”

“We only want to know if you are going to vote,” she said.

“I will not be voting,” I replied, instantly recalling all the hoopla Michael Nutter created the first time he ran for office. That mania was like a tailwind from a Lady Gaga concert. It was a time when even apolitical people became Nutter acolytes, when an affluent friend of mine, a Republican, organized a wine fundraiser for Nutter in her Center City digs. The Nutter-support camp was like Jonestown without the Kool-Aid. Here was a politician, after all, who could outtalk a Harvard professor despite a personality trait that I found to be calculatingly cold and “surgical.” Call it a tricky element that would disappoint the people who once hailed him as savior. Political friends brushed me off. “Try to get past his personality. He may not be warm and fuzzy, he’ll get things done.”

I don’t think the city is succeeding with Nutter. Look at the mayor’s record: a 10% temporary property tax hike; a proposed soda, blogger, cigar and trash tax. Some of these ideas materialized and some didn’t. Additionally, there was the firehouse and library-closing fiasco, not to mention that Philly still has the second highest wage tax in the nation, and-- as columnist Chris Friend pointed out—“an educational system on a par with third-world nations.”

Immediately after the pollster’s call I received a campaign email from DA Seth Williams campaigning for City Council candidate, Andy Toy.

“Andy represents not just a voice for change, but rather he will be a much needed catalyst for change in City government. His passion for reform and dedication to improving our City is unshakeable. No other candidate has a record of creating jobs and improving neighborhoods like Andy Toy, and when he is elected to Council there is no doubt he will work hard to move our City forward,” the message said in part. Haven’t I read these words before? Isn’t this just copy and paste political rhetoric, the same promises “re-gifted” campaign after campaign, no matter the politician’s name, when somebody new wants to work in City Hall?

I’m beginning to think that politicians should not talk about change at all.

‘Change’ is becoming a dirty word. It’s become an empty mantra, something that sounds good but has come to have little substance or believability. Can it be that the politicians who would really change things would never talk about change?
I will vote on May 17, but I’m half tempted to bring in a special envelope with a different name on it, and hand it to one of the poll watchers.

Islam is a Political System (From The Bulletin)

2011-05-05T11:26:00.001-07:00

Tom Trento, Director of the Florida Security Council, was in Philadelphia last year to showcase the film, “The Third Jihad,” and to share his thoughts on what he calls “the silent jihad in Philadelphia.”

Over two hundred people packed the main auditorium of the central branch of the Free Library to watch the controversial film that former presidential candidate Rudy Guliani calls “a wake-up call for America.” The Third Jihad exposes the destructive aims of radical Islam, including the subtle dangers of “peaceful” cultural jihad and its influences on western society.

Among the many people interviewed in the film were Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former member of the Dutch Parliament who made the film, Submission, with Theo Van Gogh. Van Gogh was later killed by a Muslim radical for his portrayal [in Submission] of the treatment of women in Islamic societies. Ali, a former Muslim, escaped to the Netherlands to free herself from an arranged marriage in Somalia in 1992.
After the feature length film—a large part of which focuses on Western Europe’s growing radical Islamist populations that call for the institution of Sharia Law in these countries—Mr. Trento took the podium.

A power de-surge prevented the lights in the auditorium from switching on, so Mr. Trento was framed in shadows, as was the audience, symbolic, perhaps of the doomed nature of the subject at hand.

“Islam is a political system, primarily,” Mr. Trento said. “Serious analysts and Islamists say this also. There’s no separation of God and state in Islam. There’s no separation of mosque and state. If this is true, then the essence of its quality, Sharia, also called the pathway or Sharia law, begs the question: can this coexist with a Constitutional Democratic Republic? Is there a way to bring these two together?”

Mr. Trento’s answer is an unqualified no.

“We are talking about a clash of civilizations here,” he said, going on to quote CIA operative Claire Lopez, who also makes an appearance in the film: “We are in the battle for the essence of the United States of America.”

Mr. Trento, in fact, calls it “the epic battle of our lifetime” but insists that most Americans are asleep when it comes to the silent jihad happening all around them.

“You have a battle right here in Philadelphia,” he said. “In fact, on October 28, we are going to hold a 3 or 4 hour workshop on Jihad in Philadelphia and detail all of this in an evidentiary way. For instance, you have an individual in Philadelphia who made a lot of money in the Philadelphia Soul Sound. His name is Kenny Gamble, or Luqman Abdul-Haqq.”

Mr. Trento reminded the audience that Gamble became a Muslim in the 1970s after a personal crisis and then “used his money to build a lot of companies that are working to rebuild the inner city.”

“We are seeing this sort of thing all over the United States,” Mr. Trento said, “This is what is part of the stealth jihad.”

While quick to remind the audience that his desire was not to bash Muslims, Mr. Trento said that it was his intent to confront the ideology of Islam that desires to implement Sharia Law in place of the Constitution of the United States.
“If anyone wants to mess with the Constitution, they become an enemy of the United States. But the issue isn’t Muslims; it’s where you stand on Sharia Law. If you’re for Sharia Law, you’re an enemy of the United States.”

Sharia Law governs every aspect of private and public life of an individual, from how one eats, dresses, grooms, and worships.

“Kenny Gamble has an operation going on,” Mr. Trento said. “Now, when U.S. Intelligence starts to look at these guys—and they’ve been looking at them for a long time—they will see that a kind of organizational flow chart is being utilized the Islamic world by an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is the Costra Nostra of the Muslim world. So, when you look into this in Philadelphia, and you see the guys with black berets, the new Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, all these various Islamic organizations tie into Kenny Gamble, and they all sit on boards together.”

The next question Mr. Trento asks is: What is Kenny Gamble doing?

“If Kenny Gamble desires to save the inner city, we are with him 100%. If he desires to use Sharia Law and establish an enclave as he’s developing that is separate and distinct from the American Republic Democratic Constitutional system of government as is occurring in London, then he becomes someone that needs to be stopped.
“This is why Kenny Gamble is currently under a pretty intensive microscope,” Mr. Trento said.

An additional concern, Mr. Trento feels, are Kenny Gamble’s “young shock troops… boys anywhere from the age of five to 12. Called Jawala scouts, “these young troopers are the exact duplication of the Hammas model,” Mr. Tento explains. “The psychological impetus being that if you influence a kid when they are 7 years old, you have them for life.

“Part of the plan, whenever poison is introduced anywhere, is to introduce it in a nice container of some sort,” Mr. Trento said. “The container right now is trying to rebuild the inner city. We’re going to give Mr. Gamble a chance to denounce Sharia for U.S. principles. Right now the effort is to clean up the neighborhood and grow young men and women in the Islamic faith. I do believe there are sincere Muslims who want to do that, but there are higher officials and they are working out a grand plan, and they are using non Sharia Muslims as useful idiots, as Karl Marx did, to help usher in hundreds of billions of state and federal dollars to protect the progress of low income housing and job finding programs. “

One audience member asked Mr. Trento’s opinion of the proposed Islamic Center two blocks from New York’s Ground Zero.

“There’s a doctrine in the annals of the theology of Islam that allows it in wartime to deceive, to have a deceptive position,” Mr. Trento said. “It’s affirmed by the four schools of Islamist theology. It’s for real, folks. When we hear various Inman’s saying, ‘We’re building a building of love and compassion, so that Jews and Christians and everybody can get together, you can believe that if you want to. But it’s important in Islamic theology that once you conquer something or have a conquest of some sort, you claim the land, then you own it eternally, that’s why there will never, never, never be peace in Israel because the 1.3 billion Muslims believe that they own that land because they conquered it at one point.

“Tell your friends and family about this film, tell everyone,” Mr. Trento said. “We are fighting a theocratic political system that’s an irresistible force!”

Thom Nickels

Museums in the Down Economy (From ICON, May 2011)

2011-05-04T06:19:00.000-07:00

The time is 2001, and Anne d’Harnoncourt is the Director at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Museum dining room is packed with art critics and journalists anticipating another press luncheon that will launch another world class exhibit. The wait staff offers red or white wine as journalists search the twenty or so silver accented tables for their name cards. The mood is celebratory and gay, like a scene from the Vincent Minnelli movie, Gigi.

After the speeches, appetizer, entrée and dessert, the press is handed complimentary copies of the exhibition catalog, which is really not a catalog at all but a pricey art book ranging in the $50.00 price range. These art tomes—Cezanne and Beyond, Andrew Wyeth, Giorgio de Chirico, The Arts in Latin America, Renoir, Dali or Thomas Eakins—make a substantial addition to any library.

If you think this sounds good, just a couple of years before, at a PMA Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi exhibit, the museum hosted ‘journalist trolleys’ that escorted the press to Manayunk and back in order to visit the Venturi offices after another sumptuous feast in the PMA dining room.

Today, many of the classic perks that still have journalists talking have been relegated down the George Orwell memory hole.

Signs that the bad economy was impacting the museum surfaced shortly before Ms. d’Harnoncourt’s death when the Versailles-style press luncheon, in a nod to minimalism, replaced wine with iced tea, and the press catalog handouts metastasized into CD photo miniatures.

Not only at PMA but at large and small museums nationwide, layoffs have decimated staffs, reduced departments, or forced high profile museum personnel--who thought they had a lifetime career—to look for other work. In effect, the national Recession has forced museums to crawl on all fours like survivors of some half baked holocaust.

In Massachusetts, the Rose Museum at Brandeis University put its entire collection up for sale—deaccessing is the museum term—in order to cover operating expenses. In New York, the Brooklyn Museum, in order not to betray a donor, turned its exhibition space over to one artist. The Art Newspaper reported that in Colorado, the Denver Museum announced plans in 2010 to sell 4 of the 825 works earmarked for its new satellite site, the Clyfford Still Museum. With layoffs, furloughs and hiring freezes at an all time high, not to mention endowments shrinking by a third during the worst of the market swoon, the larger the museum the steeper the loss.

Economic stagnation also affected general museum income from tourists, members, publications, shops and restaurants. Corporate support, once as dependable as a rock called Gibraltar, was scaled back because of market priorities. If you think this Lentil soup couldn’t get any thinner, consider the startling new statistics regarding the museum habits of Americans: Three out of 4 people don’t visit museums, and when they do, it’s for “King Tut” style blockbuster exhibitions that bring in huge audiences. Museum visitors are also getting older, unless of course you count the six years old who like to go to Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum.

Please Touch, as has been noted in the Philadelphia press, has also seen better days.

The museum opened in October 2008 to great fanfare, but its move from an economically smart (and small) Center City location to high priced Fairmount Park that has the potential to spell financial disaster for the ‘little museum that could.’ Today both membership and attendance at Please Touch is considerably down.
“The new Please Touch Museum has won adoration from 6-year olds and other important critics,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently, “and its move to Memorial Hall undoubtedly kept a rare architectural artifact of the 1876 Centennial Exposition from sliding into irretrievable decrepitude…”

The implied ‘but’ here refers to the museum’s slide into economic disaster.
When plans were announced several years ago to move Please Touch to Memorial Hall, skeptics predicted that the new location wouldn’t work. The criticism wasn’t questioning the remarkable renovation of Memorial Hall that took place in lieu of the move, but it did suggest that betting on a children’s museum to garner enough financial support to meet an 88 million dollars fundraising goal (according to The Inquirer, Please Touch is still 21.5 million shy of its target) was comparable to investing in sub-prime loans.

The planners whose vision it was to turn a small Center City museum into a PMA-like fortress devoted to the “toy” fantasies of 6-year olds must have been smoking something.

Museum officials are still hopeful that Please Touch can rise to the occasion. Executive Vice President Concetta Bencivenga says that “because the economy is starting to show some hopeful signs, we are hopeful that engaged individuals who are passionate about children and education, and really passionate about educating the next generation, begin to support Please Touch, or reaffirm their commitment to help us fulfill our goal of completing our capital campaign.

“Anyone who has ever opened a museum knows that the first year is the most inefficient year,” Bencivenga added, “So we have gone through a lot of reorganization as we settle into the new space.”

Hopefully that can be accomplished despite the museum’s relative isolation from the rest of the city. SEPTA bus service to this part of Fairmount Park is tricky unless you’re a veteran bus rider, so travel by car is almost a necessity. A museum that is out of the “walkable” centralized area of the city where buses rarely travel is bound to experience trouble.

In marked contrast to Please Touch, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has had a relatively unscathed last few years, according to PAFA President and CEO, David R. Brigham. PAFA, in fact, is experiencing a kind of Renaissance with its new director, Harry Philbrick, formerly Director of Education at The Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

“Aldrich was a very nice and quiet contemporary art center and he [Philbrick] turned it into a very important contemporary art museum,” Brigham says, “He has an artist’s edge and an artist’s hand.”

PAFA has not only weathered the economy, but according to Brigham it has had six consecutive balanced budgets. “We’ve also maintained full employment—we’ve had no layoffs during the recession and we’ve actually been able to grow our program and not cut it. We’ve been healthy.” With 650 full time students and 65 faculty members, tuition helps keep PAFA afloat, but it’s not the only thing. “A remaining portion comes from earned income from the store, facility rentals and income from endowments, and that’s a good healthy mix,” Brigham adds.

The PAFA collection houses some 2,000 paintings, 450 sculptures and 11,000 works on paper. The museum’s biggest draw is the annual student exhibition which takes place in May. The exhibition, which showcases the work of graduating students, attracts potential buyers who survey the works while balancing checkbooks, drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The exhibition gives student artists the opportunity to chat up guests as well as make themselves available for interviews.

PAFA, it seems, has no worries about the future. The new addition to the convention center directly across the street is likely to increase visitors. A serendipitous element was the center’s recent gala opening with a convention of 20,000 operating room nurses. The timing for PAFA couldn’t have been better, since its March exhibition, “Anatomy Academy,” included Thomas Eakins’ ‘Gross Clinic,’ as well as other medical works, something that Brigham called an “ideal content for that audience.”

While many museums around the world, in order to increase revenue, have taken to hosting commercially-based “blockbuster” exhibitions, that’s certainly not the case with PAFA.

“The blockbuster exhibition model,” Brigham said, “is not our model because going this route tends to lead to decisions that might be in conflict with one’s mission. That’s not our motivation. Our motivation is to help organize exhibits that help to illuminate the current state of American art. Of course we want them to be popular but our first motivation is to do serious exhibitions.”

Museums outside the City of Philadelphia are also feeling the Recession’s scorched earth policy.

Mention Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania to most people and chances are they will think of artist Andrew Wyeth.

At the Brandywine River Museum one can see generations of Wyeth family art as well as American art that relates in some way to the Brandywine Valley. American still life painting, illustrations, portraititure and landscape works are among the hundreds of works represented in the collection. This summer the museum plans a large Jamie Wyeth exhibit (“Farm Work by Jamie Wyeth”) that will feature the sculpted shapes of farm implements as seen by the artist who lives on a farm in Chadds Ford with his wife, Phyllis.

The Brandywine River Museum was a favorite place of Andrew Wyeth, who used to “pop in and out all the time” according to Director James Duff.

“Jamie pops in as his father did. It’s never a regular thing but it’s a fairly frequent thing because they want to see art. On any given day when he was alive you might find Andrew Wyeth in our gallery just looking at pictures. And Jamie does the same thing to a certain degree. Jamie has a more parapetic life; one day he might be in Washington, the next day in New York or Maine.”

The Brandywine is unique in that it is not a separate organization but a department of the Brandywine Conservatory. The Conservatory, according to Duff, also operates the Chadds Ford Environmental Management Center, charged with the specific task of water quality preservation. This double-barrel mission has been made more complicated by the faltering economy.

“We are scrambling for funds to support environmental work just as we are scrambling for funds to support the arts program,” Duffs adds. “The environmental program was the first program here before the museum came along. “
An old 1864 grist mill was acquired in 1967 for the Conservancy and then later, as Duff notes, “a lot of people thought it would make a dandy museum to deal with regional art.” That happened when the mill was renovated by Baltimore architect James R. Reeves.

Duff was the director of a museum in New York State before coming to the Brandywine 38 years ago. “There have been significant changes in the area,” he says. “When the museum first opened 40 years ago people wondered why there was a 4-lane highway down here because there wasn’t enough traffic to justify 4-lane traffic on US Route 1. No one would have conceived of a stop light in the middle of Chadds Ford then, it was just so unnecessary.”

With the growth of the region also came the growth of the museum.
Today the museum has over 300 volunteers and five buildings on a 12 acre campus filled with wildflowers and indigenous trees. But the Brandywine, like most museums, has not had an easy time of it. “These times have been difficult,” Duff confesses,” especially the last two years, but right now with endowment coming back nearly to what it was 3 years ago, and with attendance increasing, we’re very hopeful about the future.

“Most not for profit institutions take their income based on a trailing average of the market value. When you do that,” Duff adds, “the effect of a declining endowment hits you even years after the actual decline. But with the market coming back we look forward to what we hope will be years of able and growing income.”
Duff also believes that the Brandywine collection will grow, and mentions that the last two exhibits related to the Civil War have been drawing in all kinds of people.

In nearby Bucks County, the place where William Penn called home, there are historic stone cottages, gourmet country stores, the canal, and two museums: the Henry Chapman Mercer Museum and the James Michener Museum.

The Michener Museum, says museum director Brice Katsiff, was one of hundreds of regional museums built in the late 1980s and early 1990s when 1.2 museums a week were opening around the country. These institutions celebrated local cultural history. As for the museum’s namesake, Katsiff says that many people coming into the museum today don’t know who Michener was.

“He’s not in the pantheon of American Literature by any means. Young people will come to the museum and they will know that there’s a museum named after him, but that’s it. When the museum started out there were some people who said that the entire museum should be about Michener.

“Like most museums,” Kistoff says, “the majority of things that come to us come to us through gifts, but we do have modest, limited acquisition funds and we are buying new work. If we give an artist an exhibition we try very hard to buy something from the exhibit for the collection.”

The economy has forced the Michener to cut back on staff through hiring freezes, some layoffs and early retirements. The museum also shrank a portion of its programming. The Michener is a leaner institution than it was 5 years ago.
It also experienced a radical 50% cut in State Arts Funding, declining federal support and the end of a State run program called the Legislative Initiative Grants.

“In the current climate there’s even more negative pressure on government support, witness the effort to eliminate funds for NPR,” Katsiff says, adding that he doesn’t think all the factors in the current government support for the arts cultural climate are the byproduct of the cultural wars. “Some factors are the by product of financial pressure; the cultural war issue may be lingering a little bit in the minds of some people but I don’t think it has the power that it had 10 or 15 years ago.”

For the Michener, the silver lining in the crises is that it is forcing museums to find more diverse funding sources. “The final outcome,” he says, “may be a strengthening and one of the options may be that not all Non-profits or all cultural institutions are going to survive. The question is what degree of government support is healthy.”

Perhaps the most traumatic change for the Michener was the forced closure of its satellite facility in New Hope sometime before the financial collapse. It closed because the museum was not able to support it.

“Look,” Katsiff says, “I think we saw that 20 years ago when Canadian cultural institutions were almost entirely dependent on government money and then there was a shift. Reagan came in and there was a shift in thinking about government money for cultural institutions and the Canadian institutions really suffered serious cutbacks because there had been only one source of money—the government. An institution has to have multiple sources of income so that no one agency ‘owns’ it.”

Despite its financial woes, the Michener added a new wing designed by Philadelphia’s Hillier Group and a new project, by the prestigious Kieran Timberlake firm (currently involved in the design of the US embassy in London) is set to begin soon. The museum is also opening a pavilion for concerts, lectures and jazz night entertainments, a “must do” development in an age when museums must be multi-purpose. Fortunately for the Michener, it is located in a county of almost 700,000 people, many of whom have some financial means.

While life at the Allentown Art Museum may not be all Billy Joel songs, it’s still looking up.

Brooks Joyner, President and CEO of the Museum since May 2010, says that the nation’s financial crises has caused the museum “to hit rock bottom with a bare bones budget.”

Founded in the 1930s, the Allentown Art Museum has a diverse collection of American and Renaissance painting. The museum’s famous Samuel H. Kress collection includes some important Old World Masters, Italian, Dutch and Flemish masterpieces that have been in storage since the museum’s temporary closure since November 2010 until the construction of new gallery space. The museum is scheduled to re-open in October 2011 with a grand opening in February.

Staying open during construction was an option but an expensive one that Joyner says would have cost the museum at least a quarter million dollars. Joyner, who hails from the Josyln Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, has had plenty of experience in budget cuts that approach the shock level of a radical mastectomy.
At the Joslyn, he recalls at July 2001 meeting in which the museum was told by its controllers and financial officers that the institution would come up a 1.2 million short and literally run out of money to pay its obligations. “Jaws dropped on a number of Board members and our Chairman’s face when we heard this,” he said. “And this was before 9/11 and the great economic disaster.”

Joyner says that the museum has been suffering since 2008 when it lost government funding at the federal, state and county levels. The last 2-3 years have been Lentil soup ones, with the museum eliminating Tuesday hours, reducing personnel, establishing a hiring freeze and reducing salaries by 5% across the board. It also had to re-do employee benefit packages and order Departments to reduce their budgets. The bold pairing down, while seemingly inhumane, produced results: By June 2010 the museum was able to balance its budget.

Joyner tells me, “We hope to do that this year. We’ve turned the corner on the losing proposition that had reduced benefits, morale and salaries. Our plan is to restore salaries to the level where they once were.” Just as importantly, the museum has achieved this without, as Joyner says, selling out the integrity of its programs in any way when it lost government funding.

“We’ve been able to supplement with private, corporation and foundation support.” If that happens, the museum can look forward to a significant rebound when it reopens in October; a rebound that Joyner expects will “hit some of our all time highs next year.”

As if the American museum financial crisis needed more bad news, Joyner reminds me that over the last couple of years there’s been “a generational die-off” among the nation’s top museum directors.

“The greatest museum directors in the country have been dying quite frequently,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. A few years ago the Cleveland Museum director was going to speak at our museum in Omaha but we got a call from his secretary who said he was ill, not feeling well, and he was dead in 5 days. We also lost Jim Woods, the Chicago Art Institute director, and most recently the Getty President, and then Anne d’Harancourt and 2 months ago the director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Some die of age and infirmity, but some die suddenly and unexpectedly.”
But that, as they say, is another sad story.

The time is 2001, and Anne d’Harnoncourt is the Director at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Museum dining room is packed with art critics and journalists anticipating another press luncheon that will launch another world class exhibit. The wait staff offers red or white wine as journalists search the twenty or so silver accented tables for their name cards. The mood is celebratory and gay, like a scene from the Vincent Minnelli movie, Gigi.
After the speeches, appetizer, entrée and dessert, the press is handed complimentary copies of the exhibition catalog, which is really not a catalog at all but a pricey art book ranging in the $50.00 price range. These art tomes—Cezanne and Beyond, Andrew Wyeth, Giorgio de Chirico, The Arts in Latin America, Renoir, Dali or Thomas Eakins—make a substantial addition to any library.
If you think this sounds good, just a couple of years before, at a PMA Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi exhibit, the museum hosted ‘journalist trolleys’ that escorted the press to Manayunk and back in order to visit the Venturi offices after another sumptuous feast in the PMA dining room.
Today, many of the classic perks that still have journalists talking have been relegated down the George Orwell memory hole.
Signs that the bad economy was impacting the museum surfaced shortly before Ms. d’Harnoncourt’s death when the Versailles-style press luncheon, in a nod to minimalism, replaced wine with iced tea, and the press catalog handouts metastasized into CD photo miniatures.
Not only at PMA but at large and small museums nationwide, layoffs have decimated staffs, reduced departments, or forced high profile museum personnel--who thought they had a lifetime career—to look for other work. In effect, the national Recession has forced museums to crawl on all fours like survivors of some half baked holocaust.
In Massachusetts, the Rose Museum at Brandeis University put its entire collection up for sale—deaccessing is the museum term—in order to cover operating expenses. In New York, the Brooklyn Museum, in order not to betray a donor, turned its exhibition space over to one artist. The Art Newspaper reported that in Colorado, the Denver Museum announced plans in 2010 to sell 4 of the 825 works earmarked for its new satellite site, the Clyfford Still Museum. With layoffs, furloughs and hiring freezes at an all time high, not to mention endowments shrinking by a third during the worst of the market swoon, the larger the museum the steeper the loss.
Economic stagnation also affected general museum income from tourists, members, publications, shops and restaurants. Corporate support, once as dependable as a rock called Gibraltar, was scaled back because of market priorities. If you think this Lentil soup couldn’t get any thinner, consider the startling new statistics regarding the museum habits of Americans: Three out of 4 people don’t visit museums, and when they do, it’s for “King Tut” style blockbuster exhibitions that bring in huge audiences. Museum visitors are also getting older, unless of course you count the six years old who like to go to Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum.

Please Touch, as has been noted in the Philadelphia press, has also seen better days.
The museum opened in October 2008 to great fanfare, but its move from an economically smart (and small) Center City location to high priced Fairmount Park that has the potential to spell financial disaster for the ‘little museum that could.’ Today both membership and attendance at Please Touch is considerably down.
“The new Please Touch Museum has won adoration from 6-year olds and other important critics,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently, “and its move to Memorial Hall undoubtedly kept a rare architectural artifact of the 1876 Centennial Exposition from sliding into irretrievable decrepitude…”
The implied ‘but’ here refers to the museum’s slide into economic disaster.
When plans were announced several years ago to move Please Touch to Memorial Hall, skeptics predicted that the new location wouldn’t work. The criticism wasn’t questioning the remarkable renovation of Memorial Hall that took place in lieu of the move, but it did suggest that betting on a children’s museum to garner enough financial support to meet an 88 million dollars fundraising goal (according to The Inquirer, Please Touch is still 21.5 million shy of its target) was comparable to investing in sub-prime loans.
The planners whose vision it was to turn a small Center City museum into a PMA-like fortress devoted to the “toy” fantasies of 6-year olds must have been smoking something.
Museum officials are still hopeful that Please Touch can rise to the occasion. Executive Vice President Concetta Bencivenga says that “because the economy is starting to show some hopeful signs, we are hopeful that engaged individuals who are passionate about children and education, and really passionate about educating the next generation, begin to support Please Touch, or reaffirm their commitment to help us fulfill our goal of completing our capital campaign.
“Anyone who has ever opened a museum knows that the first year is the most inefficient year,” Bencivenga added, “So we have gone through a lot of reorganization as we settle into the new space.”

Hopefully that can be accomplished despite the museum’s relative isolation from the rest of the city. SEPTA bus service to this part of Fairmount Park is tricky unless you’re a veteran bus rider, so travel by car is almost a necessity. A museum that is out of the “walkable” centralized area of the city where buses rarely travel is bound to experience trouble.

In marked contrast to Please Touch, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has had a relatively unscathed last few years, according to PAFA President and CEO, David R. Brigham. PAFA, in fact, is experiencing a kind of Renaissance with its new director, Harry Philbrick, formerly Director of Education at The Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
“Aldrich was a very nice and quiet contemporary art center and he [Philbrick] turned it into a very important contemporary art museum,” Brigham says, “He has an artist’s edge and an artist’s hand.”
PAFA has not only weathered the economy, but according to Brigham it has had six consecutive balanced budgets. “We’ve also maintained full employment—we’ve had no layoffs during the recession and we’ve actually been able to grow our program and not cut it. We’ve been healthy.” With 650 full time students and 65 faculty members, tuition helps keep PAFA afloat, but it’s not the only thing. “A remaining portion comes from earned income from the store, facility rentals and income from endowments, and that’s a good healthy mix,” Brigham adds.
The PAFA collection houses some 2,000 paintings, 450 sculptures and 11,000 works on paper. The museum’s biggest draw is the annual student exhibition which takes place in May. The exhibition, which showcases the work of graduating students, attracts potential buyers who survey the works while balancing checkbooks, drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The exhibition gives student artists the opportunity to chat up guests as well as make themselves available for interviews.
PAFA, it seems, has no worries about the future. The new addition to the convention center directly across the street is likely to increase visitors. A serendipitous element was the center’s recent gala opening with a convention of 20,000 operating room nurses. The timing for PAFA couldn’t have been better, since its March exhibition, “Anatomy Academy,” included Thomas Eakins’ ‘Gross Clinic,’ as well as other medical works, something that Brigham called an “ideal content for that audience.”
While many museums around the world, in order to increase revenue, have taken to hosting commercially-based “blockbuster” exhibitions, that’s certainly not the case with PAFA.
“The blockbuster exhibition model,” Brigham said, “is not our model because going this route tends to lead to decisions that might be in conflict with one’s mission. That’s not our motivation. Our motivation is to help organize exhibits that help to illuminate the current state of American art. Of course we want them to be popular but our first motivation is to do serious exhibitions.”
Museums outside the City of Philadelphia are also feeling the Recession’s scorched earth policy.
Mention Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania to most people and chances are they will think of artist Andrew Wyeth.
At the Brandywine River Museum one can see generations of Wyeth family art as well as American art that relates in some way to the Brandywine Valley. American still life painting, illustrations, portraititure and landscape works are among the hundreds of works represented in the collection. This summer the museum plans a large Jamie Wyeth exhibit (“Farm Work by Jamie Wyeth”) that will feature the sculpted shapes of farm implements as seen by the artist who lives on a farm in Chadds Ford with his wife, Phyllis.
The Brandywine River Museum was a favorite place of Andrew Wyeth, who used to “pop in and out all the time” according to Director James Duff.
“Jamie pops in as his father did. It’s never a regular thing but it’s a fairly frequent thing because they want to see art. On any given day when he was alive you might find Andrew Wyeth in our gallery just looking at pictures. And Jamie does the same thing to a certain degree. Jamie has a more parapetic life; one day he might be in Washington, the next day in New York or Maine.”
The Brandywine is unique in that it is not a separate organization but a department of the Brandywine Conservatory. The Conservatory, according to Duff, also operates the Chadds Ford Environmental Management Center, charged with the specific task of water quality preservation. This double-barrel mission has been made more complicated by the faltering economy.
“We are scrambling for funds to support environmental work just as we are scrambling for funds to support the arts program,” Duffs adds. “The environmental program was the first program here before the museum came along. “
An old 1864 grist mill was acquired in 1967 for the Conservancy and then later, as Duff notes, “a lot of people thought it would make a dandy museum to deal with regional art.” That happened when the mill was renovated by Baltimore architect James R. Reeves.
Duff was the director of a museum in New York State before coming to the Brandywine 38 years ago. “There have been significant changes in the area,” he says. “When the museum first opened 40 years ago people wondered why there was a 4-lane highway down here because there wasn’t enough traffic to justify 4-lane traffic on US Route 1. No one would have conceived of a stop light in the middle of Chadds Ford then, it was just so unnecessary.”
With the growth of the region also came the growth of the museum.
Today the museum has over 300 volunteers and five buildings on a 12 acre campus filled with wildflowers and indigenous trees. But the Brandywine, like most museums, has not had an easy time of it. “These times have been difficult,” Duff confesses,” especially the last two years, but right now with endowment coming back nearly to what it was 3 years ago, and with attendance increasing, we’re very hopeful about the future.
“Most not for profit institutions take their income based on a trailing average of the market value. When you do that,” Duff adds, “the effect of a declining endowment hits you even years after the actual decline. But with the market coming back we look forward to what we hope will be years of able and growing income.”
Duff also believes that the Brandywine collection will grow, and mentions that the last two exhibits related to the Civil War have been drawing in all kinds of people.

In nearby Bucks County, the place where William Penn called home, there are historic stone cottages, gourmet country stores, the canal, and two museums: the Henry Chapman Mercer Museum and the James Michener Museum.
The Michener Museum, says museum director Brice Katsiff, was one of hundreds of regional museums built in the late 1980s and early 1990s when 1.2 museums a week were opening around the country. These institutions celebrated local cultural history. As for the museum’s namesake, Katsiff says that many people coming into the museum today don’t know who Michener was.
“He’s not in the pantheon of American Literature by any means. Young people will come to the museum and they will know that there’s a museum named after him, but that’s it. When the museum started out there were some people who said that the entire museum should be about Michener.
“Like most museums,” Kistoff says, “the majority of things that come to us come to us through gifts, but we do have modest, limited acquisition funds and we are buying new work. If we give an artist an exhibition we try very hard to buy something from the exhibit for the collection.”
The economy has forced the Michener to cut back on staff through hiring freezes, some layoffs and early retirements. The museum also shrank a portion of its programming. The Michener is a leaner institution than it was 5 years ago.
It also experienced a radical 50% cut in State Arts Funding, declining federal support and the end of a State run program called the Legislative Initiative Grants.
“In the current climate there’s even more negative pressure on government support, witness the effort to eliminate funds for NPR,” Katsiff says, adding that he doesn’t think all the factors in the current government support for the arts cultural climate are the byproduct of the cultural wars. “Some factors are the by product of financial pressure; the cultural war issue may be lingering a little bit in the minds of some people but I don’t think it has the power that it had 10 or 15 years ago.”
For the Michener, the silver lining in the crises is that it is forcing museums to find more diverse funding sources. “The final outcome,” he says, “may be a strengthening and one of the options may be that not all Non-profits or all cultural institutions are going to survive. The question is what degree of government support is healthy.”

Perhaps the most traumatic change for the Michener was the forced closure of its satellite facility in New Hope sometime before the financial collapse. It closed because the museum was not able to support it.
“Look,” Katsiff says, “I think we saw that 20 years ago when Canadian cultural institutions were almost entirely dependent on government money and then there was a shift. Reagan came in and there was a shift in thinking about government money for cultural institutions and the Canadian institutions really suffered serious cutbacks because there had been only one source of money—the government. An institution has to have multiple sources of income so that no one agency ‘owns’ it.”
Despite its financial woes, the Michener added a new wing designed by Philadelphia’s Hillier Group and a new project, by the prestigious Kieran Timberlake firm (currently involved in the design of the US embassy in London) is set to begin soon. The museum is also opening a pavilion for concerts, lectures and jazz night entertainments, a “must do” development in an age when museums must be multi-purpose. Fortunately for the Michener, it is located in a county of almost 700,000 people, many of whom have some financial means.

While life at the Allentown Art Museum may not be all Billy Joel songs, it’s still looking up.
Brooks Joyner, President and CEO of the Museum since May 2010, says that the nation’s financial crises has caused the museum “to hit rock bottom with a bare bones budget.”
Founded in the 1930s, the Allentown Art Museum has a diverse collection of American and Renaissance painting. The museum’s famous Samuel H. Kress collection includes some important Old World Masters, Italian, Dutch and Flemish masterpieces that have been in storage since the museum’s temporary closure since November 2010 until the construction of new gallery space. The museum is scheduled to re-open in October 2011 with a grand opening in February.
Staying open during construction was an option but an expensive one that Joyner says would have cost the museum at least a quarter million dollars. Joyner, who hails from the Josyln Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, has had plenty of experience in budget cuts that approach the shock level of a radical mastectomy.
At the Joslyn, he recalls at July 2001 meeting in which the museum was told by its controllers and financial officers that the institution would come up a 1.2 million short and literally run out of money to pay its obligations. “Jaws dropped on a number of Board members and our Chairman’s face when we heard this,” he said. “And this was before 9/11 and the great economic disaster.”
Joyner says that the museum has been suffering since 2008 when it lost government funding at the federal, state and county levels. The last 2-3 years have been Lentil soup ones, with the museum eliminating Tuesday hours, reducing personnel, establishing a hiring freeze and reducing salaries by 5% across the board. It also had to re-do employee benefit packages and order Departments to reduce their budgets. The bold pairing down, while seemingly inhumane, produced results: By June 2010 the museum was able to balance its budget.
Joyner tells me, “We hope to do that this year. We’ve turned the corner on the losing proposition that had reduced benefits, morale and salaries. Our plan is to restore salaries to the level where they once were.” Just as importantly, the museum has achieved this without, as Joyner says, selling out the integrity of its programs in any way when it lost government funding.
“We’ve been able to supplement with private, corporation and foundation support.” If that happens, the museum can look forward to a significant rebound when it reopens in October; a rebound that Joyner expects will “hit some of our all time highs next year.”

As if the American museum financial crisis needed more bad news, Joyner reminds me that over the last couple of years there’s been “a generational die-off” among the nation’s top museum directors.
“The greatest museum directors in the country have been dying quite frequently,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. A few years ago the Cleveland Museum director was going to speak at our museum in Omaha but we got a call from his secretary who said he was ill, not feeling well, and he was dead in 5 days. We also lost Jim Woods, the Chicago Art Institute director, and most recently the Getty President, and then Anne d’Harancourt and 2 months ago the director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Some die of age and infirmity, but some die suddenly and unexpectedly.”
But that, as they say, is another sad story.

Thom Nickels

An American Journalist in Lapland (from the May issue of ICON Magazine)

2011-05-04T06:06:00.000-07:00

There’s not much to the Finnish Lapland day during the winter months. The sun rises around 10:30 am and begins to set around 2. In the summer, it’s a different story. Twenty-four hours of sunlight make this the land of the Midnight Sun. It’s also a time, however, when Laplanders admit to having trouble sleeping.
“Even if I draw the curtains and make my bedroom as dark as possible, I know the sun is out there and this makes it hard to sleep,” is a comment you might hear if you ever make the day and a half journey to this faraway place.

A winter’s day in Lapland is a fragile thing. I know because I traveled to this unique part of the world in January. My first view of the Lapland sunrise was from the lobby of the Levi Soko hotel where I roomed with other members of a small international press corps after our ‘get acquainted’ dinner the night before. The sunrise on that first morning was hardly spectacular. The sun’s rays were so weak throughout the day that I commented to someone, “It looks like the sun is in Intensive Care.”

We were seven journalists from countries as diverse as Russia, England, Austria, Italy, Germany, Poland and the US.

As the representative American journalist, I had traveled the longest with multi-hour stopovers in Copenhagen and Helsinki before hopping a jet to Rovaniemi, Lapland, where I met my colleagues.

The Rovaniemi airport was my first sense of being near the North Pole. A large neon Santa sleigh that looks as if it’s emblazoned in the sky hovers over the airport as a sort of reminder that the world’s only official Santa Claus Post Office Box is in this very town.

In Rovaniemi—where the corps, as if in a synchronized trance, studied the tall, snow-capped Finish trees—boarded a small chartered bus for the two hour trek into Levi Lapland. It was snowing lightly, the Arctic’s version of the daily “pineapple mist” rain in the Hawaiian Islands. The flakes had a non-threatening feel. Never, for instance, did we feel that our driver would get stuck in a snow drift as she drove with military like precision into the Arctic Rim. The Finns, after all, are geniuses when it comes to dealing with snow.

During the ride we were given a rundown on the two Finnish personalities. “There’s the winter persona--dour and introspective; and the summer self, which is high, sunny, and extroverted,” Leena, our Lapland tour guide said.

Later, in restaurants, I’d notice Finnish couples and families who’d sit and brood in silence, as if awaiting execution. Couples sat with their backs to walls rather than face one another. Leena explained that although the Finns seem cold they have good hearts. “Once they decide you are a friend, they are there “permanently.” Certainly not like those fickle Californians who have made an art out of the easy, meaningless smile.

Our hotel was a good place to observe interactions between Finns and Russians. Because the December-January holiday is the Russian ski season, many of the Russians were checking out while we were there, so it was easy to observe classic Bolshevik boisterousness, which reminded me of Philadelphia Flyers fans after a winning game.

(During a post-tour visit to Helsinki several days later, I’d be informed that the Finns like the Russians about as much as the Russians like modern Finnish design. “The Russians want everything to be gold. The gaudier, the better!” my guide told me.)

Day one of the tour was a snowmobiling safari, so we boarded the bus that gave us ample views of the architecturally plain Lapland houses, set back in snowy Hallmark card style silhouettes. Mention was made of a snow covered golf course “somewhere out there in the distance.” A reward was offered to anyone who could spot a golf ball.
Snowmobiling is big business in Lapland. We donned zoot suits and helmets and signed waivers promising we would not hold the snowmobile company accountable for accidents.

. Snowmobile injuries and deaths are not uncommon in Lapland. In fact, it was only after the safari that I checked the Internet for the grisly facts associated with this. It was then that I understood why the Berlin journalist who had opted to be my passenger had been so frightened. While I proved to be a fairly good driver- I kept myself in the lead section throughout much of the ride—there were a couple of near skirmishes in which my snowmobile almost toppled over.

Driving these 30-40 mph devices made me think of WW II and the time that Finnish Commander-in-Chief Gustof Emil Mannerhein (later the country’s sixth president), invited Hitler to lunch. It was Hitler’s only visit to Finland, and Mannerheim, eager to show his independence, did his best to blow cigar smoke in the (antismoking) Fuhrer’s face as well as annoy the persnickety vegetarian by asking for great helpings of meat.

Our snowmobile safari traveled for miles through the Lapland wilderness, stopping periodically for photographs or to let the slower drivers catch up. Our destination was a Reindeer Farm by Perhesafarit, where we would meet our guides, a young married couple in traditional Laplander clothes. At the farm we were taught how to feed and walk the animals after taking the obligatory sleigh ride. Lunch was in their private home at a long wooden table near a blazing fireplace. Salmon soup, bread, and an iced berry drink warmed us considerably even as a few of us began to fantasize about red wine. Alcohol and snowmobiling don’t mix, however. In fact, it’s more of a lethal combination on snowmobile paths than it is on US roadways.
By the time we said good-bye to this very 1960s “Alice’s Restaurant” couple, the sun was beginning to set.

On the snowmobiles again, there was a rush to beat impending darkness. Our ride guide upped the speed quota which meant that he was through babysitting. The snowmobiles in front of me, headlights on, bolted away in a jet propulsion thrust. I didn’t know that speed like this was possible on a wintry terrain. Then I recalled our guide’s warning: “Slowing down out of fear only increases the chances of tipping over, so keep at it.” With this in mind, I stepped on it as the Berlin journalist behind me held on for dear life.

“We’re going to be alright,” I said, more out of self affirmation than certainty.

During the ride back two journalists fell far behind the group, lost somewhere in the forest. For some reason I thought of the Donner party although they eventually surfaced.

Laplanders, perhaps because of the extreme climate, seem to have a healthy, sexy vitality. While many Finnish men and women have Scandinavian traits--tall with large extremities—(At the Soko there were a number of statuesque Finnish females in long Heidi-braids)—never tell a Swede that Finland is part of Scandinavia. It is not. (When I visited Sweden a couple years ago the Finns were referred to as if they constituted a population of the developmentally disabled. Conversely, in Finland, I spotted menu items like Baked Swede, which seemed tap into this animosity. )

Nightlife in Levi has the exuberance of a 1980s USA disco. I witnessed kids in knit hats raise their hands in unison to a DJ and sing along enthusiastically as if acting in a Pepsi commercial. The mood is definitely “Up with People,” with men dancing with men when no women are present. There are almost no bar fights in Lapland.

We writers had no trouble dancing together in Lapland’s many bars and clubs. A few of us even joined the Moscow writers for vodka at an Irish pub. Breakfast the next morning was a little later than usual.

At Levi’s Polar Speed Husky farm we watched as hundreds of huskies, some of them mixed breed wolves, barked in unison. Huskies live to work but while waiting to pull sleds they can look sad or anxious. The sled ride itself, at least in the beginning, is a fast and furious affair. I definitely got the feeling that one miscalculation by the dogs or driver could have wrapped the lot of us around a tree or two. Still, few things in life are as beautiful as finding yourself in a sled being pulled by dogs over a vast frozen lake surrounded by tall snow capped trees.

No trip to Finland is complete without a traditional Finnish sauna. In our case the men and women split up and headed towards separate cabins on a frozen lake. There, naked, each of us dipped our bodies into a hole in the below zero lake before heading into the sauna.

In August, 2010, Finland’s annual world sauna championship was called off after the death of a Russian man who had spent 6 minutes in a sauna with a temperature of 110c. His competitor, a Finnish man, was hospitalized.

Finland is secular nation with the Evangelical Lutheran Church as the official state religion, and the Finnish Orthodox Church claiming about 10% of the population. My Helsinki city guide was quick to tell me that when Finns need spiritual nourishment, they go outdoors and sit among the tall trees “where they commune with Nature.”

Helsinki is a small, walk able city with a building height limit much like pre-1986 Philadelphia. It’s hilly in sections, making a post-snowstorm walk on the sidewalks a dicey affair. During my frequent forays to and from the KlausK Design Hotel in the central design district, I found myself taking measured baby steps to avoid Laurel and Hardy-style slide down the steep hills. I was also told to be on the lookout for falling ice from the tops of buildings, a not uncommon occurrence during the Finnish winter.

With Reija, my guide, we met designers in Artek (Art Furniture) at Etelaesplanadi 18; toured Designforum Finland and snuck a peek inside Aero Design Furniture. Everywhere we visited we found the signature “stamp” of architect/designer Alvan Aalto, from furniture and buildings to a bottle of Aalto red wine. The famous Academy Bookstore, with its stairway to the stars design, occupied me for hours. The Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma, while mostly trendy, did feature a 24/7 video of Russian youths revolting in the nearby town because town fathers had decided to disassemble a Russian statue.

At the Uspenski Cathedral Orthodox Church, I met with Timo Mertanen, a monk, who told me that the church used to have a miraculous icon. The miracle-working Mother of God Kozelchan icon was recently stolen by thieves who entered the church at night through a small window. The icon, covered in jewels and gems offered by the faithful in thanksgiving for favors received, has still not been recovered.

As a memento of my visit, Timo the monk handed me a replica of the miracle working icon, a gesture I appreciated and that I’m sure saved me from a lot of traveler angst, or even a plane crash, on the way home.

My Evening with Taylor, a European Film Star

2011-05-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

She's not in films, but she could be. She's the one on the left.
The guy in the middle is my nephew Kevin and his wife Tiffany
is beside him. Kevin and Tiffany came out from Colorado for
Colleen's (Kevin' sister) wedding.

House of the Setting Sun

2011-05-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

In the 1993 movie, A Home of Our Own, Kathy Bates plays a Los Angeles widow who jumps in her car one day with her six kids and heads out into the country in search of a home. In this 1960s based (true) story there are no home mortgages or banks to deal with, only a sincere desire to find an abandoned but potentially inhabitable home. Bates’ character, Frances Lacey, does eventually find what she is looking for: a shell of a house in God’s country, and the fascinating story continues from there.
Were I to rewrite A Home of Our Own I would have Frances Lacey drive a lot further east until she reaches the Pennsylvania border via I-95. I would then have her drive, six screaming kids in tow, into Philadelphia as far as the Lehigh-Girard exit whereupon she’d follow Richmond Street to Lehigh, and then to the 2600 block of Mercer Street where she would find a ripe, abandoned house, albeit torn to shreds, but ready for some serious tender loving care.
The home in question sits across from my property. It used to be an attractive seashore-like looking home, with its set-back-from-the-sidewalk entrance and second floor front deck that always reminded most people of a ship. When I first moved here some nine years ago, the house was in fairly good shape. Years before that, however, before its slip into rental Purgatory, I was told it was a neighborhood showplace with a manicured, small goldfish pond on the front yard. The pond has since been covered over (what a surprise) as times changed, but at least the renters, if not always amiable folks (one renter couple used to take a special delight observing the street from the deck and issuing beer-bloated comments to the people below), kept the exterior of the house up.
The interior of the house is another story, of course, because when the last renters moved out and when the property was sold, the word on the street here was that the inside of the infamous ‘ship house’ was a mess.
Conventional wisdom says that renters can be careless. I can attest to this general truth, having been a renter for many years. As a home owner, were I to rent again, I would certainly be far more respectful of the property I inhabited than I was in my twenties.
But on with the story…. A year or so ago the ship house’s new owners came up with a plan to gut the house and rebuild it, but like many plans on paper, the reality didn’t quite measure up to the fantasy.
The new owners assembled a work crew right out of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. They demolished the front deck, tore out windows and walls. The process was slow and insidious like the growth of a fungal infection. The “skin” or the siding of the house came off first, and this exposed the under layer so that the house called to mind an ICU burn victim. The house stayed like this for a while until the crew felt another surge of rehab fever. Then they began demolition in earnest as huge chunks of brick and mortar began to pile up in the back yard and side alley. From the street the once cute little ship house now looks like a bombed out building in Afghanistan.

Neighbors who live alongside this disaster have been pulling their hair out.
“Peasant labor without the benefit of industrial machines,” one neighbor stated in an email. “There’s no contractor, only the owner, his relatives and a schlepper.”
Then there were reports of the owner throwing bricks out the back window, but the real A-bomb was when a 200-300 pound chunk of steel, brick and mortar fell down into a neighbor’s yard and caused $600.00 in damages.
The house is now a local tourist attraction. “What’s going on there?” people say, “Has L&I been contacted.”
But the City of Philadelphia moves at stage coach speed; weeks pass, and nothing happens. It’s the same old story: Abandoned old house sits on a block for years, even decades; if it “sits” long enough people stop caring. They don’t even “see” it anymore.
While I applaud the owner’s “do it yourself” Martha Stewart gusto, I’d also like to remind him that his project is beginning to affect the health and welfare of the community. You can’t have 300 pound chunks of concrete flying off your roof.
Or can you?
Frances Lacey, how I wish I could bring you and your kids here for real, and have you settle this.

Matthias Baldwin Park

2011-05-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

MATTHIAS BADLWIN WAS A VERY NICE MAN
Will the City--and his so-called friends-- uphold that legacy?

On an unseasonably cold and windy April 16th Saturday morning in a small park formerly known as Franklintown at 19th and Hamilton Streets, a group of people gathered. The small crowd chatted while periodically checking their watches for the arrival of City Councilman Darrell L. Clarke for the big event: the renaming of the park to the Matthias Baldwin Park.

The name change had been in the works for years. The idea was first proposed in an email from Mel Seligsohn, co-chair of Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park, to City Redevelopment Planner, Rick Shnitzler in December of 2007. Emails generally go nowhere but this one caught fire—a slow fire but name changes take time.

The park itself was the creation of Athena Tacha after its commission by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and the Franklintown Corporation in the 1980s.

Who was Matthias Baldwin?

For starters, he was a benevolent businessman, often an oxymoron in today's world.

He was also the founder of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, the sprawling 8-city block industry that occupied the area from Broad Street to 18th Street and then from Spring Garden Street to the Reading Railroad tracks. This cramped 196-acre “field” was the Silicon Valley of its day.

In 1831, Baldwin built a small solitary engine that led to the development of the steam engine that in turn led to the locomotive that ran on tracks from Philadelphia into Germantown and Norristown. The company employed thousands of men in the city before its move to Eddystone.

“It’s rare to name a park after a business person,” Friends of Matthias Baldwin member Mrs. Sandy Owens told the crowd. “Most parks are named after poets, beloved American presidents and musicians, but rarely after a famous businessman, but that’s our mane today.

“Even as late as 1957 when his business closed after 112 years, people in Philadelphia still knew who Matthias Baldwin was and they knew the Baldwin Locomotive Works. I think if we asked Philadelphians today who Matthias Baldwin was very few could answer that question…”

Unfortunately, there were no signs of life in or around the Tivoli, the handsome but somehow ghostly looking apartment complex bordering the park. A friend informed me that its primary occupants, hipsters and yuppies with dogs, were probably still asleep in their digs, unaware that their favorite doggie park was undergoing a name change. One would think, naturally, that such an event would be a draw, and that the couples would exit en masse, doggie in tow, to take a peek, but that was not the case. We were left wondering if any of them were viewing the proceedings, knee deep in coffee and laptops, from the upper story windows.

Had they ventured out they would have heard Seamus Kearney, key organizer of the event and co-founder of the Friends of Matthias Baldwin, recite the Baldwin-disappearance mantra.

“His great house on the banks of the Delaware, gone
His factor disappeared
The company he founded no longer in existence
The school named for him now demolished
And a statue of him situated in a little visited nook in City Hall!”

But we will, Kearney promised, “revive the memory of Matthias Baldwin and his deeds.”

When at last the ever gracious Mr. Clarke spoke, he apologized for being late although nobody was holding him to it.

“I was up at a park in Northern Liberties near 4th Street waiting for the mayor, waiting for the mayor,” he said to knowing chuckles. “And then I said, ‘I gotta go,’ and they said, ‘Where you have to go?’ and I said “I gotta go down to Franklin Town Park; they’re renaming it,’ and they said ‘Oh you mean that little fancy park?’”

More chuckles from the crowd as the wind kicked in, blowing the paper plates set nearby for the donated fresh fruit from a nearby deli called Fretters.

“It may be a little fancy, but it’s no less a park than what you guys have here,” Clarke said he told the Northern Liberties folks.

“Actually, I thought this was going to be much more of a challenge,” Clarke confessed. I thought at first—Franklin Town? That’s a significant name. Franklin? Em, been around for a while. Well, we contacted the park, and they went to work with the Friends group here and they got on the case!”

As great as Ben Franklin was, the city can survive with one less park named Franklin.

At the sign’s unveiling there was a robust round of applause, and immediately after this came a gust of wind I can only describe as “locomotive.”

---The absence of the mainstream press at the event was discouraging. Only The Weekly Press showed up. For that The Weekly Press should receive a special citation. The reality is, they received the opposite from the very people who shuld have been more "Baldwin-like."

Sour Economy Puts Philly Skyscraper on Hold: From The Philadelphia Bulletin

2011-04-17T06:37:00.000-07:00

Why Not Philadelphia?
By Thom Nickels, For The Bulletin
11/16/2008

Many questions have been asked about the proposed American Commerce Center since it was unveiled by Garrett Miller in the spring of this year. But of them, the most important was the first, pondered by Mr. Miller himself - "Why not Philadelphia?"

He remembers sitting at his desk, leaning back with feet raised, late in the day on Sept. 18 of last year, having just closed on the acquisition of a property owned by Verizon. The 1.5-acre site lies directly adjacent to the Comcast Center, Bell Atlantic Tower, One and Two Logan, and the Mellon Bank Center. It sits squarely in the heart of the Central Business District and from a distance marks the missing piece in the skyline of Philadelphia.

Mr. Miller, born and raised in Philadelphia, graduated from LaSalle High School in 1995 and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in 1999. He is now the president of Hill International Real Estate Partners, the owner of 1800 Arch St. He spent nine years rowing on the Schuylkill River, is a three-time World Rowing Champion, and competed at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. He spent five years working in the real estate markets of New York City before returning home to Philadelphia. He is also the visionary and driving force behind Philadelphia's most exciting addition to its storied skyline, the 1,510-foot-tall American Commerce Center.

ACC, as many now call it, was born out of Mr. Miller's simple question: "Why not Philadelphia? Why not here? Why not now?" Upon hearing him speak about the project, it quickly becomes clear that it is his vision, passion and intensity that drive this project forward.

The first step was a call to Gene Kohn, a Philadelphia native and fellow graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

"Gene and I first met on a cool fall day in late October of last year on the corner of 18th and Arch," Mr. Miller said. "We walked the site while I explained my vision for Philadelphia and the site to him. He asked me many questions that day, including what I love about Philadelphia."

After an hour wandering the site, the men sat down to develop some ideas.

"I watched intently as Gene's mind went to work," Mr. Miller said. "He sketched out on a napkin a number of design ideas, and amazingly one of them was not too dissimilar from what became the American Commerce Center."

It took five months before anyone got a glimpse of the design.

"Everyone knew that the site had been sold by Verizon to a developer but I don't think anyone, other than Garrett Miller, had been envisioning this" said Tim Conrey of CRESA Partners.

Although he is young - 31 years old - you get the sense that this project is not just about Mr. Miller and his ambitions, but, rather, it is the embodiment of his hopes and dreams for Philadelphia.

"I love this city. I know this city's heart and soul," he said. "Unfortunately, we've been beaten up the past few decades, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly but regardless, we need to come together to break away from this second city mentality, we are known for the underdog mentality embodied in 'Rocky.'

"I love 'Rocky' too, but the gritty city that is portrayed in the films is not the Philadelphia of today. We've grown up and evolved into a great American city, and are now starting to be recognized as such by those looking from the outside in. Philadelphia needs to start taking the same view of itself from within, and start asking the question, 'Why settle for our past when we can embrace such an exciting and dynamic future?'

"Cities are dynamic environments," Mr. Miller continued. "They either improve or they decline. Philadelphia needs to put itself into a position to change for the better. Although we have a great historical past that we should respect, it's important for us to realize and embrace our future. The thing to remember is cities don't stay the same. When you choose to live in an urban environment, you choose a dynamic area that is always evolving."

Mr. Miller is referring to a small but vocal group opposing the ACC, a contingent of mostly older residents of the Kennedy House in Center City.

"We have received broad support for the project. However, there has been some limited opposition from a few local residents," said Peter Kelsen, the attorney for developer Hill International. At a previous City Planning Commission meeting, opponents of ACC wanted the project scrapped or the height of the tower scaled back to traditional and "safe" Philadelphia building heights. Opponents of the project apparently fear that the iconic gleaming tower, which will be one of the tallest buildings in the nation, will block views of the city from their Kennedy House windows, or cast unsightly shadows. Opponents also insist that the building's height is out of scale with the neighborhood.

The proposed skyscraper, however, is not in the Logan Square neighborhood, but smack in the middle of the city's Central Business District.

For Christopher Paliani, a resident of the Logan Square neighborhood at 19th and Arch streets, the notion that the new building is in somebody's neighborhood is far from but valid.

Mr. Paliani created a website in support of the ACC (www.LSN4ACC .com) and says that many Logan Square neighbors think that the project will be a huge benefit to the neighborhood.

"This area is really the central business district, but the opponents are making it seem like it is being stuck in the middle of Fairmount," he said. "This is one of the best places they could put this building. This is the kind of building that people would move to Philadelphia from New York for. This is not a neighborhood issue. It's a regional issue, and having one small group having veto power over something is not something that benefits the entire region."

The idea of quashing a proposed skyscraper project because it would potentially block views from another high-rise ignores the fact that all buildings in cities do just that.

"There was the same kind of opposition when they wanted to build Liberty I and II," Mr. Paliani added. "Detractors said those buildings were too big or too tall and now that they are there they are a spectacular addition to the city."

The fate of the American Commerce Center now lies in the hands of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. There have been two information-only presentations before the Commission by the development and design team in recent months. A formal hearing will be held tomorrow.

The past sessions included presentations and studies by the development team on parking, traffic, loading, shadow studies, economic impact, the architectural design and pedestrian interaction. "The most important part of the design of any building is how it interacts with the pedestrian on the street and it was my charge to the architects to create a podium and retail presence that engages and excites Philadelphia," Mr. Miller said.

The artful "ground scale" design makes the rising tower above look even more fantastic. No matter what school of architecture you subscribe to, this is no vertical glass canyon that "slams" the face of the sidewalk like a footprint left by Frankenstein. The building engages the pedestrian at the street and encourages interaction. The ACC's signature design feature is the "urban room" situated between the 63-story office tower and 26-story hotel.

"While the retail is designed to draw pedestrians to the site, the elevated green park spaces are designed to draw them into it," explained Bill Louie of Kohn Pedersen Fox architects.

A City Planning Commission meeting is a grandstander's paradise. At the last ACC City Planning Commission meeting, opponents voiced their opinion that Philadelphia doesn't need the American Commerce Center because "Philadelphia isn't that kind of city."

But what does "that kind of city" mean?

City Planners heard arguments like this in 1986, when the debate raged over Center City buildings exceeding the Billy Penn's hat height limit. Those debates were loud, passionate and sometimes vicious.

What are the prospects for success?

"It's a beautiful building and an incredible design. It's a piece of art," said Andi Pesacov, the broker in charge of leasing the retail space at the ACC.

Plans are underway for a gourmet food store, two or three restaurants, a boutique cinema, a theater and a high-end gym.
And what about the prospects for the always ubiquitous "anchor tenant?"

"Garrett now has a team of people with the economic capability and the expertise to do a project of this magnitude," Mr. Conrey said, when asked about the tower's prospects for success. "In a small way, you have a perfect storm of a few events happening that can make this a viable project."

That might not bode well with the opponents of the ACC, who want Philadelphia to be aware of its limitations.

The website for the American Commerce Center (www.acctower .com) bluntly states, "This Changes Everything." Truer words may have never been spoken about Philadelphia.

It might also be the perfect answer to Mr. Miller's question.

Germantown Cricket Club; Bradley Manning, and Clergy Sex Abuse: ICON Magazine column, April 2011

2011-04-15T16:51:00.001-07:00

In the somewhat rundown landscape of Northwest Philadelphia, the Germantown Cricket Club has seen it all.

Founded in 1854 by a group of ardent cricket players, the Club was designed by architects McKim, Mead & White in 1879. The date is important because some critics consider the firm’s work from 1879 to 1887 to be superior to the design of the firm’s later buildings which copied post 16th Century Italian Renaissance styles and which quickly became the firm’s signature style (Boston’s Trinity church and the Public Library are two fine examples of this). MMK, in fact, produced so many “Renaissance” buildings in Manhattan that architects such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright found it hard to hide their contempt. Wright, for instance, once remarked that the firm’s post 1887 work was “No more beneficial to humanity than the bubonic plague.”

The Germantown Cricket Club follows MMW’s “shingle style” design used in the construction of a number of seashore homes, casinos and villas, such as the Newport Casino Tennis Club in Rhode Island.

In its heyday, MMW boasted so many wealthy clients that some wondered how other architects ever got a chance to earn a living.

The Club’s Manheim building, with its Grand Ballroom, spacious outdoor dining area and manicured lawn, all of it evoking the atmospheric qualities of an Evelyn Waugh novel. Taking a tour of the place recently with (the Lou Kahn-trained) Germantown architect Robert Crouh, made me wonder how this imposing structure-- which was granted National Historic Landmark status in 1987-- managed to survive Germantown’s long devolution.

Germantown in the late 1800s was a moneyed place when visitors entered via a rose garden (where today there’s a parking lot). By 1891, when 7,000 or more spectators converged at the Club to watch the Philadelphia Cricket team beat England’s Lord Hawke’s boys, the Club had become world famous. Exponential growth required the addition of an athletic wing (with lockers, squash courts and an indoor pool and lounge) in 1903-4, also designed by MMW.

The manicured lawn behind the Manheim building, though covered with snow the day of our visit, cannot be walked on without special shoes. It’s easy to imagine a large hated, white-gowned Vanessa Redgrave “floating” over this space in some 19th century epic.

“Cricket is not a sport one associates with Philadelphia. Before the Civil Wart it was really immigrants who played cricket. Prominent Philadelphians didn’t want their kids playing cricket with kids who didn’t speak English,” Couch told me. “After the Civil War it became a sport that the people on the Gilded Age side of things didn’t feel that bad about playing.”

The Ladies clubhouse was torn down in the 1950s when women were incorporated into the Club while the cricket stadium, which held a pool and underground bowling alley, was demolished 45 years earlier.

From the beginning, Couch says, membership was far more open “than you’d expect a Philly club to be…there were Jewish and Spanish members long before such things were common.”

When the Big Bill Tilden sex scandal hit the 1940s, and the star was given a prison sentence, Couch says the Club archives were “purged of anything related to him. “The only time you found something was when you went into the ladies scrapbook and you found a little invitation to a celebrity dinner because Bill Tilden had arrived back on the boat after winning Wimbledon.”

It was Couch, in fact, who “redesigned” Tilden’s legacy when he replaced the picture of Tilden in the Club’s hallway that was removed decades again. “Everything you see in here with Bill Tilden’s name on it, I bought on e-bay,” he said.

As for Big Bill Tilden, he was arrested on Sunset Blvd. in 1946 for having sex with a male teenage prostitute (underage). Not more than a year later he was slapped with a morals charge for propositioning a 16-year old male hitchhiker. Before these scandals he was voted the greatest athlete of the first half of the century by American sportswriters. He died at age 60, alone and in squalor.

.
.
******

Support for PFC military intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, thrown into solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Brig last May for allegedly releasing a classified video that depict U.S. troops murdering civilians in Iraq, has increased in recent months. For almost a year now the 23-year old soldier has been in solitary confinement, deprived of sunlight, exercise and human contact despite the fact that he has not yet been formally indicted. The situation has even aroused the concern of military psychologists who worry that the torture may create long term psychological injuries. According to Glenn Greenwood of Salon.com, the young soldier isn’t even allowed to sleep at night but is awakened by guards around the clock, presumably for his own protection.

Bradley’s “crime,” the release of a video showing soldiers from Bronco Company 2nd Battalion 16th Infantry Regiment, shooting civilians from an Apache helicopter in Iraq in which 12 people were killed and two children injured, has garnered worldwide attention. The video, which was released to Wikileaks, has been compared to Daniel Ellsberg’s October 1969 7,000 page Vietnam War secrets document Ellsberg smuggled out of his office and then published as The Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg, who just barely escaped a fate similar to Bradley’s, is now considered an American hero by most. The Pentagon Papers helped not only to end the Vietnam War but to terminate the presidency of Richard Nixon.

Recently 22 additional charges were brought against Bradley by the military, almost assuring further abuse by the young hero’s jailers. The additional charges, as reported by The Times, include ambiguous categories like “Aiding the enemy,” and a recasting of old charges but in a different form.

Some contend that because PFC Bradley is seen wearing a rainbow wristband in an early Facebook photo, that he’s being persecuted because he’s gay. Those who side with the government’s treatment of Bradley insist that the treatment has nothing to do with his sexuality but that the fact that he “betrayed America.”

“If this young soldier had not leaked the video, we would have no evidence of what was clearly a serious abuse on the part of the U.S. military,” stated Reporters Without Borders.

*******

Recently I visited the basement chapel of St. John the Evangelist parish in Philadelphia. The time was late afternoon, when the Capuchin-Franciscan monks have a Latin Benediction service. Usually there are many people in the chapel at this time but I found that I was only one of three people in the pews.
So where were the people?

Call it coincidence, but only days before Philadelphia DA Seth Williams and a grand jury charged 2 priests, a former priest and a Catholic school teacher with molesting young boys. It was the first time in the United States that a high ranking Church official had been charged with failing to protect children from abusive priests.

Fire was added to the scandal when the Archdiocese of Philadelphia suspended 21 priests from active ministry because of accusations involving inappropriate behavior with minors. This caused the blogosphere and message boards throughout the city to explode. Many left messages boasting that they were former Catholics because of the scandals. Others encouraged Catholics to quit the Church or eliminate financial support.

While priests who abuse children should be prosecuted, people who use the scandal to enflame anti-Catholic bias are out of bounds.

Catholics who choose to renounce their faith because of the scandals have every right to do so, but I would then ask them: Where are you going to go? If that answer is “To some Protestant denomination,” I’d remind them that an AP report in 2008 stated that sexual abuse among Protestant clergy may be higher than among Catholic clergy.
The 2008 report, published by ethicsdaily.com, states that Protestant abuse statistics “are harder to come by because the hundreds of denominations are less centralized than the Catholic Church.”

Similarly, should an ex-Catholic hope to find refuge in [a sex abuse free] Orthodox Church, he or she would be sadly mistaken. The problem of sexual abuse has no denominational boundaries. Several years ago, the Hellenic Communication Service stated that not only has the Orthodox Church been affected by such scandals, but “in America, individuals have already contacted the archdiocese asking for monetary compensation in [the] millions of dollars.”

In many ways the world of religion has a tendency to attract people who are maladjusted sexually. This is not to disparage Protestant or Catholic religious life, although it does point to the necessity of finding a better way within "religion" to keep potential predators out. It's also true that while religion and sex are close cousins -- how often has sexual passion been described as something linked to the religious experience?--in the western world the dualism between the two continues to be the source of many problems.

Within Catholicism, for instance, seminaries did not have pre-admission psychological testing until 2008. Prior to this, Catholic boys were urged to enter the seminary directly from high school, having no idea who they "were" as sexual beings.
Today, the average age of the Catholic seminarian is older, somewhere in the late 20s or early 30s, so there's plenty of time for him to sample the pleasures of life, or at least figure out who he "is," before considering celibacy.

The clergy sex abuse crises in the Catholic Church doesn’t mean that there’s something inherent in Catholicism—a bug in the holy water? -- that changes priests into pedophiles or ephebophiles. Unfortunately, anything less than an outright condemnation of Catholicism these days is seen as being soft on abusers.

I experienced a little of this leaving St. John’s when a passerby gave me a disapproving look, as if just entering a Catholic Church in some way made me a sinister co-conspirator.

“What boy have you abused?” the glare seemed to say.

Earthquakes in Philadelphia: STAR Column

2011-04-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

Not long after the almost 9 point quake in Japan a friend of mine commented, “Say what you will about Philadelphia, but at least we don’t have any problems like that.”
This is something we’ve all heard before. Our region may be susceptible to blizzards, high humidity in summer, hurricanes and Northeasterners, but we rarely if ever get earth tremors, and a tsunami is definitely out of the question.

This is far from the truth, according to Prof. Simon Day of University College London. Day and a number of his colleagues at University College point to active volcanic activity in the Canary Islands as having a very direct and possibly devastating influence on cities like Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. A so called volcanic collapse in the Canaries (that’s when a volcano aborts and explodes underwater) would have the ripple effect of a rock being thrown into a pool of water only in this case there would be tons of rock sliding into the sea to form a mega “ripple” tsunami. Day says that based on global test results and geological studies, volcanic activity like this occurs during very warm weather cycles.

A volcanic collapse in the Canaries could then result in a 2,000 foot high mega tsunami that would make Philadelphia especially vulnerable because of the flat Chesapeake Bay inlets. A wave like this has the potential to move up the Delaware, causing fatalities in the millions, Day says.

Since there’s not much high ground in Philadelphia (with the exception of Manayunk), moving to the mountains, in advance of a natural disaster, is probably the only solution. This doesn’t seem to bode well for the Riverwards.
We’ve been lucky, disaster-wise, in Philadelphia, but history tells a different story. On December 10, 1968 a 2.5 quake shook Philadelphia and the suburbs. The quake, according to The Earthquake Information Bulletin by Carl A. von Hake, broke windows in New Jersey and shook the toll booths on the Ben Franklin and Walt Whitman Bridges. And just a few years earlier, on December 27, 1961, a small tremor lasting about ten seconds affected Harrisburg, Reading, Philadelphia, and York. “Bridges shook, dishes rattled and other objects were disturbed,” von Hake writes.

I was in grammar school at the time and remember the rumbling sound that seemed to cover our house like an imploding freight train. It was as if the earth itself had decided to cough up its insides.

Historically, the Philadelphia region has been vulnerable to both quakes and huge Delaware River swells caused by earth tremors. In 1884, “The Landmark,” a newspaper in Stalesville, North Carolina, reported on the Great East Coast Quake of the same year.

“In Philadelphia, the shock was very perceptible….the strongest buildings in the city were shaken, rickety chimneys toppled over on the roofs and bricks tumbled down upon the pavement in all parts of the city….Nervous people were frightened to such an extent that many thought the destruction of the world was at hand.

“Huge waves,” the report continues, “backed up by the rising tide, overflowed many of the wharves, and considerable property was flooded.”

The last quake to hit Philly was in October of 2009. Philadelphia, in fact, is one of the ten most earthquake endangered cities of the world. Number one is San Francisco; Philly is number nine, coming before Osaka, Japan.

Japan, of course, has also had to deal with the defective General Electric Mark 1 boiling water nuclear reactors that may cause a major radioactive meltdown. For decades since this type of reactor was built in the 1970s, experts have questioned the Mark 1 containment system. Many experts also warned that this type of reactor was subject to rupture.

There are twenty-three GE Mark 1 reactors in the United States, and one is located in Delta, Pennsylvania. The reactors at Limerick, Pennsylvania and in Salem Township are of the Mark II or III design. Both reactors are not far from Philadelphia.

While we should not opt to live in fear, we still cannot say with any certainly that what happened in Japan cannot happen here.
“Boast not for tomorrow,” as Proverbs cautions us, “For thou knowest not what the day to come may bring forth.”

Organized Trash Picking:STAR column

2011-04-15T16:28:00.001-07:00

On Saturday, April 2nd I finally did it. After writing about the trash problems in the neighborhood for a number of years, I put my muscle where my writing hand is and joined a handful of volunteers from the Olde Richmond Civic Association (ORCA) and spent a few hours cleaning up the neighborhood.

We met at 9 A.M. behind the Wawa on the 2400 block of Thompson Street where we signed waivers, received a pair of work gloves and then split up into teams of 2 or 3. Equipped with brooms, rakes, trash picking hand extensions and industrial strength trash bags, we set out like determined missionaries to rid the hood of debris.
What struck me first of all was how quiet the streets were on this cool, sunny morning. Do people really sleep this late?

Those of us with brooms got to work right away sweeping the curbs until we had significantly high trash piles. When a pile seemed sufficiently high we’d sweep another long stretch of the street and then make another one. It wasn’t long before our eyes became accustomed to food wrappers, iced tea bottles, half eaten sandwiches and discarded articles of clothing. Sweeping the streets you very often get a lot of dirt so the process isn’t as easy as sweeping your kitchen.

When my little group hit the area behind Wawa and Applebee’s restaurant—that stretch of green grass bordered by the East Thompson Street fence—we encountered a heavy concentration of trash.

The number of cigarette butts alone could very well have matched the plague of locusts that hit Salt Lake City during the great Mormon migration of the 1800s. Picking up individual butts with those E.T. extension arms would have taken all day; not only that, it probably would have had a deleterious mental effect on the picker. As a result, we decided to let most of the butts go. In the meantime, some of us had to dislodge large pieces of cardboard stuck into the ground from the Wawa and Rite Aide properties. But the big cinematic trash moment came when we cleaned Applebee’s backyard, an area that the Applebee’s General Manager told me later is regularly cleaned by his staff at least once or twice a week and then given an in-depth cleaning once a month. But more on Applebee’s later.

I don’t know what it’s like for everyone, but I went through a couple of different mental stages as I was picking up trash. The first stage is the reluctance to get started stage because of the daunting task ahead. The second is the “God awful!” stage when your eyes settle on something unusually disgusting or offbeat. It’s as if your hands, though gloved, were in full revolt at the mere thought of reaching out, if even by proxy, to the conglomerate of garbage. This stage soon passes, and suddenly everything changes as a ‘trash killing’ instinct kicks in. I compare it to going to the gym and experiencing muscle resistance for the first 5 minutes before feeling an all consuming adrenalin rush. Suddenly you and the rest of the volunteers are like synchronized dancers in some cosmic You Tube video, especially as you watch members of team throwing large cardboard pieces over the Wawa fence.

“You’re wasting your time,” a passerby snorted to one of the volunteers.
Had we listened to this advice we would have promptly given up and gone home and effectively killed any plans for future spring time cleanups. “Yes, you’re right, lady,” the ORCA volunteer could have replied, “This is a total waste. I switch my allegiance to trash.”

The plan was to cover as much of the neighborhood as possible. At first there was talk of going under I-95 but in the end we decided that that area was a day’s work in itself. We still stuck to the tributary streets around Thompson like the stretch to Richmond and then north to Cumberland Street and the Conrail tracks. But there was also Sergeant Street, Albert Street, parts of Webb Street, and of course the Vatican of Trash itself, Thompson Street behind Wawa, where most of this stuff seems to have mimicked evolution in its breeding capabilities.

The cleanest street was Salmon Street and parts of Edgemont. Give these streets the Gold Medal Award.

It’s hard to think of a family restaurant as being a magnet for trash, but when we tackled the backyard of Applebee’s, we got more than we bargained for. With Lisa, the volunteer in my group, I extracted a full set of wet, half decayed sweats—shirt, pants, undies—as well as an entire encampment of contemporary archeological finds: crack pipe, beer cans, condoms, half eaten Wawa wrap sandwiches, combs, suspicious plastic bags, and more condoms. If the early Native Americans could come back and compare our culture’s archeological findings with theirs, they’d regret that Penn Treaty deal with William Penn.

When I phoned Applebee’s GM after the cleanup and asked him what his take on the situation was, and if he could do something to help, I got good news.

“In the winter people camped behind the restaurant and drank beer all night, and sometimes things got rowdy when we would ask them to leave,” he said. “One night they even lit a bonfire. Unfortunately, much of the trash blows in from Wawa, and if we don’t clean it then it all blows into the parking lot. But I really want to work with the community,” he said. “I support your efforts.”
But the next time ORCA does a cleaning, let me know and we’ll arrange a free lunch for the volunteers at Applebee’s.”

That’s saying something in my book.

TEA, SYMPATHY & FLASHMOBS: FROM MY STAR COLUMN

2011-04-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

On March 21, Philadelphia police had to close John F. Kennedy Plaza (or Love Park) because there were threats of flash mob activity. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News, police spent some time chasing bands of young people in an attempt to curtail rowdy behavior. Disturbances on South Street also punctuated the day.

While police reported no violence or destruction of public property during these episodes, several arrests were made. Love Park was also closed for several hours in anticipation of further flash mob activity. The closure prevented visitors, tourists and office workers from enjoying the park on a beautiful spring day.

So what gives with the City of Brotherly Love?

In the days of Mayor Frank Rizzo, this sort of behavior would have been nipped in the bud. School kids, although minors, would have been hauled into jail and then turned over to their parents, or maybe the parents would have been arrested. The candy-coated, velvet glove “Ah, come on, they’re just kids” treatment would not have played out in Rizzo’s Philadelphia. But then was then and now is now as they say, and now is not so good, especially with the warmer weather coming.

Mayor Nutter’s promise to crack down on flash mob activity comes after the horses have left the stable. The kids, or the culprits in question, don’t seem to mind his threats.

When gangs of school kids have the police chasing them around Laurel and Hardy style, you know those threats are basically meaningless.

When flash mobs first surfaced over a year or so ago, many nervous liberal types made all sorts of excuses for the behavior. There were Op-Ed editorials calling for more “after school” programs. Voices calling for the arrest of the students or their parents were criticized as being “racist” and “cruel.” But where is it written that any kid, be they Asian, Italian, Irish, African American or Indian, can team up with ethic or racial peers and hold a city hostage?

The Nutter Administration seems to be handling the problem on a case-by-case basis, as the incidents occur. This “damage control” approach to the problem has not prevented the mobs from reinventing themselves. Again, the kids do not feel intimidated or frightened.

Two weeks ago, while crossing Market Street in Center City on a late Wednesday afternoon, a group of African American female students were crossing in the opposite direction. Walking beside me was a middle aged white woman, probably coming home from work. Suddenly and without warning one of the students jumped in the woman’s face and began screaming at the top of her lungs. The incident took all of five seconds, and may not have been much by “Grungy city” standards, but it displayed an attitude that’s become all too common these days: callous disregard for other people’s rights and feelings. That small action, despite the fact that nobody was touched or physically harmed, constituted a kind of assault.

It would have been the same thing had a white girl screamed in the face of an older black woman-- same offense; same ignorance.

The woman was understandably shaken, but what could she do? Scenes like this have become normal in the City of Brotherly Love, and that’s the sad part. As a city we are building a tough collective hide that processes incidents like this and then tunes them out. We’ve come to accept outrageous rudeness as “part of what it’s like to live in the city,” although if we were to compare Philadelphia to other cities we would discover that this is anything but the case, even though violence-prone flash mobs have occurred in Boston and New Jersey. That’s not true, however, in Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, or even Detroit.

Frank Rizzo in the 1970s sometimes went overboard when it came to maintaining public order, but one thing was certain: Philly was a safe city then.
As I see it, the way to eliminate flash mobs or random (group) teenage hooliganism, such as the March 4, 2011 incident at the Shops of Liberty Place when at least two dozen teens kicked over food and display tables in the Food Court, is to immediately implement the following:

Eliminate the “free ride” Septa transpass system for students, prohibit teens from gathering in groups of ten or more, and hold parents responsible for injuries or damages inflicted on homes or businesses during a flash mob
Since we can’t bring Frank Rizzo back from the dead, we can at least implement some useful, workable Rizzo-like solutions

My Letter from Elizabeth Taylor

2011-03-26T05:30:00.000-07:00

I wrote Elizabeth Taylor in the mid-1980s when she was in Philadelphia with Richard Burton while touring with the play Private Lives. I wrote Liz a four page letter asking for an interview. I sent her an interview I did with Maureen McGovern. I received her response after the run of the play in Philadelphia (my letter arrived at the Bellevue too late). Elizabeth Taylor was an early supporter of HIV-AIDS activism.

First a Scare, Then Some Compassionate Help--STAR column

2011-03-17T06:13:00.000-07:00

Recently I had the opportunity to re-watch Jonathan Demme’s movie Philadelphia with Tom Hanks playing corporate lawyer Andrew Beckett who is fired from a big law firm because he has HIV-AIDS.

What struck me most about the film was the accuracy of what life was like for Philadelphians with HIV in the 1980s and early 90s. In the early 1980s, when the first cases of AIDS were reported by The New York Times, the medical community could not explain how AID was contracted. At that time people were afraid to kiss or hug one another. The situation was so bad some thought that you could catch HIV from shaking hands or sharing drinking glasses. Others thought that mosquitoes could carry the virus from one person to another.

As I listened to the movie’s theme song, “The Streets of Philadelphia,” (as sung by Bruce Springsteen) while taking in the film’s montage of city street life, I got to thinking about my walk up Lehigh Avenue a couple weeks ago. During my own gritty “montage” walk I passed panhandlers, shopkeepers with wares on the sidewalk, prostitutes under the El, and addicts looking to score.

Unlike Hanks’ character, I don’t have HIV- AIDS, but I did have a problem.

The day before, while helping a friend clean out bags of trash in an alleyway beside his house, I felt something prick my index finger. It took a second to realize what had happened: I had picked up a plastic bag containing an uncapped, used syringe. The stages of panic that then ensued—the blood draining from my head, the accelerated heart rate, and a feeling that my life could be about to change—were very pronounced indeed.

I ran inside my friend’s house, inserted my finger under warm tap water and kept it there for a long time while squeezing the small wound until the bleeding stopped. Then, as an extra measure, I applied massive doses of iodine. For years I’d read about hospital personnel getting pricked with dirty syringes, and in some of these stories the outcome was not good.

I was good and scared, and I had a right to be.

After a round of phone calls—during which a number of city public health officials expressed their sympathy and concern, a sentiment that instead of relaxing me only made me feel more fearful. It was as if they were saying, “How tragic. I hope you come out of this okay.” While they were only trying to be helpful, I took their comments to mean that I was dealing with a problem more serious than I knew.

It was strongly recommended that I get tested for both Hepatitis C and HIV. Because I don’t have health insurance, I was put in touch with Prevention Point at 166 W. Lehigh Avenue. Like most people, I’d always assumed that what Prevention Point did was distribute syringes to addicts in order to curb the spread of HIV.
Prevention Point was considered controversial when it was initiated in 1991 by then Mayor Edward Rendell. Some saw it as a “give-away” for addicts, a sort of pass to indulge their habit. But with AIDS sweeping the nation in the early Nineties, the Rendell administration saw an organized syringe exchange as an absolute necessity.

My first time look into the basement office of Prevention Point was an eye opener. Minutes after I walked in the door I was introduced to am counselor who then took me into a side room where I was given a blood test. The process was faster than any hospital emergency room, and the personnel much nicer, I was amazed at the organizational skills and the care that I observed.

. Yesterday I went back for my test results, and I was told that I was negative, although it was suggested that I undergo another test in a couple months. When I asked the counselor what would have happened if I had tested positive, she said that she would have made doctors appointments for me and saw that I received the correct care. In other words, I wouldn’t be sent away with a mere, “good-bye and good luck.”
Since its founding in 1991, Prevention Point has grown into a multi-health facility where one can get physical exams, Hepatitis A & B vaccinations, intense harm reduction counseling, and legal and medical referrals. And I have probably just touched the tip of the iceberg.

Thank you, Prevention Point!

Now I think I’m going to go back to my computer to listen to Springsteen’s Philadelphia.

Crossing the Line When it Comes to Public Anger; STAR column

2011-03-17T06:05:00.001-07:00

It’s not unusual these days to witness public displays of anger (or PDA’s). Unlike public displays of affection (which range from the sentimental to the exhibitionistic), public temper tantrums are often embarrassing.

Recently I went into a Center City Wendy’s for a bite to eat, but no sooner did I give my order to the young cashier than a woman walked up to me from the far side of the restaurant and said, “You broke in front of the line. You took my place.” Her tone was gruff and challenging.

“I didn’t see you till just now,” I said.

“You broke in the line!” another woman shouted. I looked for the cashier who had waved me forward but suddenly she was conveniently out of sight. “I did not break the line,” I said defensively, feeling like a two year old. “Yes you did,” the first woman said, gearing up for a fight.

Sometimes it’s wise to take the high road and concede defeat rather than risk bodily harm or even death over a take-out baked potato. Still, I couldn’t fathom how anyone could delude themselves into thinking that I had somehow known they were first in line when in fact they were across the room talking to a friend. The cashier, of course, should have intervened since she was the one who waved me forward. In a situation like this, the cashier has all the power. Store managers, it seems, rarely train cashiers in line management techniques.

The psychology of waiting in line, according to Dr. Dick Larson of NPR’s ‘Talk of the Nation,’ “…can be boring and annoying, and it can even lead to queue rage.”

Like road rage, “queuing up” rage is alive and well in the City of Brotherly love, as evidenced by yet another “line” implosion I experienced about a week ago at the local Aramingo Avenue Wawa.

I had gone, as I do most mornings, to purchase a large Hazelnut coffee. On this particular day I headed for the shortest line, vaguely aware of a man in a bandana standing several feet away but with his back to the queue. Because he was equi-distant between two lines as well as a fair distance away, I assumed he was a) debating which line to join, or b) looking at someone or something in the store. It would have been clear to anyone that he was not ready to checkout.

But once my line started to move, the guy jumped behind me with his girlfriend, who seemed to appear from nowhere. He then began talking about rude people who break in front of people.

How could I not speak up? “I thought you were trying to decide which line to join because you were standing so far away,” I said.

My choice of words irked him, so instead of saying “Okay, buddy, no problem,” (at which point I would have given him my place); he simmered like hot volcanic ash. “No, no, no, you are a rude person.”

“You had your back to this line and you were standing way over there,” I said. “Aren’t you being nasty?”

“At least I’m not a girl,” he said loudly.

When Larry King called fellow TV journalist Anderson Cooper a “she,” he was making a joke. The guy in pirate drag, however, was dead serious. My dress that day was a corduroy jacket and tie, which may have some connection to a form of lesbian dress in Kentucky. The truth is, I looked more like a tweedy bookworm than a Barbie Doll although I did manage to run my hand over my chest to indicate its flatness (and non girlishness), before asking him, “What are you talking about?”

“You know,” he sneered, “The gay lifestyle!” His girlfriend, turning a scarlet red, kept her head lowered.

For many men these are fighting’ words. Think of all the barroom brawls, cracked mirrors, smashed egos and chairs; not to mention broken noses and fat lips that have resulted from this classic a Nethanderal challenge. I studied the pirate in disbelief, unsure of what to say other than “Better gay than stupid.” As it turned out, I said nothing, opting instead to switch to another line where I paid for my coffee and then put on my leather gloves, a maneuver that—amazingly—seemed to make him nervous, as if he was expecting me to pull out a revolver and start shooting.

Twenty minutes later, on the 15 trolley, I took comfort in the fact that if I ever had any doubts about my gender in the future, all I had to do was look at the ‘M’ on my Septa transpass.

Clergy Sex Abuse Cases in Philadelphia (from my weekly STAR column)

2011-02-27T19:48:00.000-08:00

It’s disheartening to see what is happening to the Catholic Church in Philadelphia and throughout the world.

Last week I visited the basement chapel of St. John the Evangelist parish in Center City. Between 4 and 5 pm on any weekday the chapel is usually packed. It’s a time when the Capuchin-Franciscan monks have Benediction (with Latin hymns). People on their way home from work usually stop in for a quick visit, and then head out for home. Last week, however, I found that I was only one of three people in the pews.
So where were the people?

Call it coincidence, but only days before DA Seth Williams and a grand jury charged 2 priests, a former priest and a Catholic school teacher with molesting young boys. It was the first time in the United States that a high ranking Church official had been charged with failing to protect children from abusive priests.
It was not a good week to be Catholic.

The Philadelphia blogosphere exploded with people railing against the abuser priests. Many people also boasted that they were former Catholics and that they left the Church because of the sex abuse scandals. Others encouraged church-going Catholics to stop going to Mass or curtail their weekly financial offerings. The numbers of posters who admitted to being ex-Catholics was astonishing.

On the Sunday following the news of the scandal, a parishioner at Saint John’s told me that Sunday Mass attendance in the upper church was also noticeably scant, despite the fact that Saint John’s is not run by the Archdiocese but by the Franciscans.

Are Philadelphians really deserting their parish churches because of the scandal? Time will tell.

While priests who abuse minors or young people should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, I draw the line at people who use the scandal as a means to enflame anti-Catholic bias or hatred.

While the public outrage expressed over the Philadelphia area abuse cases is justified, lines get crossed when people castigate the Church for its beliefs on a wide range of subjects, say women priests or abortion,. “These people believe they are eating the body and blood of Jesus Christ at Mass for God’s sake!” one message board commentator wrote. This is just one example of crossing the line.

Of course, Catholics who choose to renounce their faith because of the sex abuse issues have every right to do so, but I would then ask them: Where are you going to go? If that answer is “To some Protestant denomination,” I would remind them that, at least according to an AP report in 2008, sexual abuse among Protestant clergy may be higher than among Catholic clergy.

The 2008 report, published by ethicsdaily.com, states that Protestant abuse statistics “are harder to come by because the hundreds of denominations are less centralized than the Catholic Church.”

Similarly, should an ex-Catholic hope to find refuge in [a sex abuse free] Orthodox Church, he or she would be sadly mistaken. The problem of sexual abuse has no denominational boundaries. Several years ago, the Hellenic Communication Service stated that not only has the Orthodox Church been affected by such scandals, but “in America, individuals have already contacted the archdiocese asking for monetary compensation in [the] millions of dollars.”

The clergy sex abuse crises in the Catholic Church doesn’t mean that there’s something inherent in Catholicism that drives one towards it, as if there was something in the wine at Mass that changed good priests into pedophiles or ephebophiles. Unfortunately, anything less than an outright condemnation of Catholicism these days is seen as being lenient or soft on abusers.

I experienced this first hand last week when, while leaving St. John’s, a passerby on the street gave me a disapproving look, as if just entering a Catholic Church in some way made me a sinister co-conspirator.

Give me a break.

The clergy sex abuse scandal refers to sexual abuse alone, not the Church’s doctrinal belief system.

As for the Church, it needs to get serious and practice what it preaches. After all, it was Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua himself who said in 2002 that, “All of the Cardinals are agreed on Zero tolerance, and…that no priest guilty of even one act of sexual abuse of a minor will function in any ministry or any capacity in our dioceses.”

Okay, now go ahead and do it.

One Man in Fishtown (From my Star Column)

2011-02-22T04:57:00.000-08:00

While not a beer drinker, I was interested in the story of Tim Patton, an Internet developer, who tried unsuccessfully to open a nanobrewery in his home on Richmond Street and Marlborough in Fishtown. Although Patton seems like a very careful and well intentioned guy, his proposal was voted down (36-32) by the Fishtown Neighbors Association recently.

Reports indicate that the majority of FNA members had fears about the smells that might come from such a brewery, even though Patton had gone to great lengths to prevent any odors from escaping into the neighborhood. Other objections to Patton’s plan included concerns about traffic, litter and public drunkenness.

The traffic complaint has become something of an all-purpose excuse. It was used when Sugar House was first proposed. At that time the prophets of doom warned that if a casino was built in the area our heretofore cozy streets would be clogged with stalled cars and exhaust fumes. That didn’t happen. If anything, Sugar House officials are worried because there’s a decided lack of traffic going in their direction.

The traffic boogeyman scare was also used in Port Richmond when Wal-Mart wanted to build a multiplex store near Northeastern Hospital. People cited the design of the proposed Wal-Mart parking lot as potentially interfering with pedestrian (or vehicle) access to the hospital.

“We don’t need monster Wal-Mart so close to our hospital,” many people said then. So Wal-Mart, which would have been an interesting commercial option for the neighborhood, was voted down in favor of a hospital that eventually turned around and “liquated” itself.

I call this an opportunity lost.

As for the litter and public drunkenness fears concerning Patton’s project, they also lacked substance.

Litter in every conceivable form has been epidemic in the neighborhoods for years now, despite well intentioned periodic community cleanups. Litter, in fact, has become as standard here as the corner mailbox or the local abandoned house. The stretch along E. Thompson Street by Rite Aid and Wawa that some in Port Fishington now refer to as Trash Boulevard, shows no signs of changing anytime soon. How Patton wound up being compared to people who litter is a mystery of the first order.

As for public drunkenness, I bet this argument was used decades ago when beer distributors first sought permission to open in the neighborhoods.

As for “smell” fears, need it be said that what makes life in the city so interesting is its variety of smells?

Whether it’s the smell of frying bacon, cedar wood, herbal soaps or Indian food along Girard Avenue, if you’re a person who wants the air to be as bland as milk toast, you’d better pack your bags and head out of town. (You could go to the country but then you’d risk encountering the smell of barns or cows). The city is all about a variety of smells, from sneeze-inducing women’s perfume, to the odor of spilled grape soda on the 15 trolley.

Take my tiny Port Fishington Street, for instance. Here there are likeable bakery smells, while further away there’s the steak sizzling aroma from Applebee’s. And while there may be no such thing as Dollar Store smells, or Citizen’s Bank smells, you’re sure to sniff a variety of odors en route.

Smells are so persuasive in the city you can’t even escape them in the comfort of your own home. I’m thinking of the pleasant aroma of brewing coffee that wafts into my house every morning from the neighbors next door.

Not long ago I discovered some information about a neighborhood named Fishtown in Leland, Michigan. Located on the shores of Lake Michigan, this other Fishtown seems to have a healthy tourist trade. One of the tourist draws, besides the water, is the town’s olfactory fame.

“Fishtown is small in size,” The Webner House Family website boasts, “but is still a real treat for the senses. The smells are the kind of smells you associate with the waterfront, like the smell of fish and decaying plants…or Whitefish being smoked.”
And yes, people love it.

I think Patton deserves another chance.

STAR column: A Miraculous Icon

2011-02-09T09:06:00.000-08:00

While researching my book, Philadelphia Architecture, I met with several Eastern Orthodox and Catholic priests in Northern Liberties to bone up on the history of area churches. One notable contact was Archpriest Father Mark Shinn of Saint Andrew’s on 5th Street.

When I met Father Shinn he told me that he converted to Orthodoxy years ago after a period of soul searching. Fr. Shinn’s story impressed me. I find that people who have a ‘conversion’ experience after a period of doubt have insights about faith that most other people lack.

Like most Orthodox (and Eastern Catholic) priests, Fr. Shinn is traditional when it comes to clerical dress. His long grey beard and black cassock are signature trademarks in the neighborhood. During my visit to St. Andrew’s in 2005, Fr. Shinn walked with me into his office but took time along the way to bow and cross himself before a series of icons. These prayerful gestures impressed me as being unselfconscious and authentic.

I’m thinking of St. Andrew’s because when I was in Helsinki, Finland several weeks ago, I had the good fortune to visit the Orthodox Cathedral there where I met a monk who could have been Fr. Shinn’s double. Although not a priest, Timo Mertanen had a special devotion to the monastic life and talked about going to the only Orthodox monastery in Finland in a few years to study for the priesthood. Brother Timo also followed Fr. Shinn’s routine when, as we walked around the cathedral, he bowed and crossed himself before certain icons.

To those unfamiliar with Eastern Christianity, whether Orthodox or Catholic, I suggest you visit one of these churches and have a look. Better yet, try to attend an English-speaking Divine Liturgy, whether at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral or at Saint Michael’s Russian Orthodox church. (Saint Andrew’s services are in Old Slavic.) If you’re anything like me and admire tradition, you’ll find much to admire in these ancient rituals. And if you’re lucky, you might even find it difficult to go back to your plainer, more modern form of worship.

When I visited Saint Andrew’s I asked about the many icons in the church. I wanted to know if there were old icons or icons that were considered miraculous. By miraculous, I meant icons that shed tears or blood or that “help” in unexplained healings.

In Philadelphia there’s already one such icon, the icon of Saint Anne, the Mother of the Holy Virgin Mary. Although this modern icon was commissioned in 1998 for a convent in Jerusalem, it ended up in the Orthodox church of Our Lady, The Joy of All Who Sorrow, on North 20th Street. In 2004 the icon began to stream myrrh, or liquid streams and droplets. The flow continued for 3 years and increased on feast days. This icon is famous throughout the Orthodox world.

In Helsinki, I asked Brother Timo if his cathedral had a miraculous icon. He told me the story of the famous miracle-working Mother of God of Kozelchan icon that parishioners had decorated with precious gems and mementos in thanksgiving for answered prayers. The icon, however, was stolen by robbers who broke into the cathedral one night. The thieves wanted the icon for its gold and silver, not for its healing properties, since healings and theft are incompatible. The icon has not been recovered.

In 2005, I asked Fr. Shinn if Saint Andrew’s had any miraculous icons. I was hoping for a sensational story but none was forthcoming. Icons don’t become miraculous just because you want them to.

Philadelphia, of course, could use many powerful miraculous icons since the all too human forces here seem incapable of doing the simplest things like clearing the streets of snow or making Septa run on time.

While we’re at it, we could also use a divine hand to help change the weather. “We could use any kind of help,” as an old timer said to me one night at the Front and Girard Avenue trolley stop.

My story ends on a high note. As I was saying good-bye to Brother Timo on the other side of the world, I asked if there was an icon I could purchase as a memento of my visit. Brother Timo then handed me a 6”x 5” replica of the miracle working icon, sans the jewels, that had been stolen.

“It’s yours, no charge,” he said, “but get an Orthodox priest to bless it.” Of course I thought of Fr, Shinn and Saint Andrew’s. Perhaps I’ll get down there one of these days.

I’ve positioned the treasured icon in my house by the front window so that it’s “close” to the street. The street, of course, leads to Center City and to the world beyond, “places” that could use a miracle.

STAR column: Philly Snow Removal Agnst

2011-02-09T08:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve lived through a lot of Philadelphia snowstorms, but I have to say that last week’s storm was one of the worst in terms of city cleanup.

Twenty-four hours after the storm there was still significant snow on Market Street and in other parts of Center City. The same was true three days after the storm. That’s when I had to travel into Germantown. While both the 15 trolley and the subways were running smoothly, once I hit Broad and Erie I had to look twice to believe what I saw all around me: masses of people waiting for the 23 and 53 buses, just to name two. My bus, the 53, hadn’t come in hours, and the word on the street was that it was suddenly discontinued because of icy conditions.

Remember, this was a good three days after the storm. It was also well after Mayor Nutter announced to the news media that street conditions in the city were great because the plows had been out in force.

Conditions in the city were not great but this fact was ignored by a mayor who prevaricates in the manner of a seasoned politician. If by plowing Mayor Nutter means going over a street once, then he was correct. There were plow track marks to be sure, but underneath the marks were layers of ice and snow. I’ve never seen the city look so bad. Indeed, the time I spent traveling to and from Germantown that day took me almost 5 hours. The return trip on the 23 along Germantown Avenue was even worse than the trip from the Riverwards. Passengers waited an hour for that bus on an otherwise busy Saturday afternoon.

On my way to Germantown I had no choice but to hail a hack cab from Broad and Erie because there was no 53 bus. The passengers waiting with me wanted answers, however. They began calling Septa in search of an explanation but all they got was confusion and conflicting information. One Septa operator said a bus was on the way; another insisted one had already come and that the lot of us had mysteriously missed it. Perhaps the bus was wearing cologne called Invisible?

Frustration at that little bus stop was at an all time high, just as it must have been at hundreds of bus stops throughout the city. It had been a frustrating snow week, period, especially in snowbound Center City. At a local Wendy’s I witnessed customers lashing out viciously at one another for “breaking in the front of the line,” while I encountered other outbursts of temper on the street and elsewhere.

While riding the hack cab, I could see that Germantown was in worse shape than the Riverwards. The driver was a little old guy who’d seen a lot over the years. He talked about the condition of the streets as he swerved the cab to avoid ice or mountains of snow. At one point he had to slow down to a snail’s pace to avoid hitting a woman in her Sunday best who had to walk in the middle of the streets because there was nowhere else to walk. Every street we turned down was covered in snow and had significant ice patches.

“The Nutter man has done nothing, look at this,” the driver said. “He’s not getting my vote next time.”

The driver said he’s never seen the city look so bad, either, despite all the pats on the back the mayor has been giving himself and his friends-- the plow truck people.

The plow trucks are another story. Forty-eight hours after the storm hit a friend of mine was driving in the city when he noticed a procession of plow trucks parked in a long line with their flashes on.

“Hey, why aren’t you guys plowing the streets?” he good naturedly asked a driver.

“We’re waiting to see which jurisdictions we’re assigned to!” one driver said.

Have you ever seen that play called ‘Waiting for Godot” where the characters spend a lifetime waiting for someone who never comes?

Philadelphians are waiting, Mr. Mayor.

In the meantime, I’m glad for the people on my street who have those mini scooters that can double as snow plows. The day after the storm they were up early blazing trails up and down the street. I know the neighbors were grateful.

This nightmare of repeated snow (and synchronized shoveling) stands to be repeated on Wednesday (when this paper hits the streets) when an Arctic storm, twice as big as the last one is predicted to hit the area. When one thinks of new snow on old snow or old ice the result is… crippling.

Not a time to quibble about jurisdictions.

.

2011-02-02T08:14:00.000-08:00

THE BLACK MASS WITHIN VATICAN WALLS

A recent US Catholic bishops meeting in Baltimore made a claim that there were far too few active Catholic priests familiar with the rite of exorcism.

The old rite, as it turns out, has fallen into disuse, and it’s no wonder. The modern age has redefined evil along abstract lines. There may be evil thoughts and evil deeds like murdering newborns or slitting the throat of one’s grandmother, but to say that there are distinct evil entities who have influence over our lives has become the punch line of late night TV jokes.

It’s considered unsophisticated to talk about “Satan” or “Lucifer” as if they were “real” presences with authentic power. This is so despite the willingness of people to mention God as a force for “good.” References to God garner no awkward glances.

Conclusion: Belief in God is acceptable, belief in Satan, is not.

For many today, even Christians, so-called possession by the devil is usually seen as a ‘misreading’ of a psychological condition. Epilepsy for instance, used to be cited as evidence for demonic possession until medical science proved otherwise. But one mistaken classification by the Catholic Church does not mean that all possession is a myth.

After all, in Matt:25:16 Christ himself addressed demonic possession when he chased unclean spirits out of human beings and “transferred” them into the bodies of pigs. The pigs, poor things, hurled themselves over a cliff. Living in the computer age as we do is no reason to suppose that demons have suddenly vacated the premises, a death by modernity if you will.

But images (or the idea) of devils have always evoked special attention. Unlike werewolves or mythical Frankenstein monsters, the legacy of devils is not relegated to the realm of the mythical.

That’s why When the US bishops called for more priest exorcists, I thought of film Rosemary’s Baby. The Polanski film of 1968 had at its theme secret rituals and ceremonies as well as a secret society of Satanists masquerading as contemporary humanists who would no more admit to a belief in Satan than they would Martians inhabiting the bodies of humans. Satan, it’s been said by saints and theologians, does not want people to believe in him, and therein lies his greatest power.

While the Catholic Church claims it needs more exorcists, according to Papal insider (and now deceased) Jesuit theologian, Malachi Martin, the Catholic Church may need an exorcist.

Martin, who died in 1996, says that at the height of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, there was a ceremony to enthrone Lucifer in the Vatican (and the Chair of Peter). The church in question, Saint Paul’s chapel within the Vatican walls, hosted a very different rite of Mass on January 29, 1963, just one week after the election of Pope Paul VI. (Years later, according to Fr. Martin, Pope Paul VI would write a note to his successor, John Paul II, and tell him of this ceremony.) Paul VI is also famous for his statement, “The smoke of Satan has entered the sanctuary.”

For decades this statement has been the source of much confusion and controversy, but when paired with Fr. Martin’s testimony, it fits like the lost part of a puzzle.

The ceremony, Fr. Martin is on record as saying, was a black Mass, or the Traditional Latin Mass said in reverse, complete with an animal sacrifice and a drugged young girl who may or may not be the victim of ceremonial sexual rituals. The ceremony was not the Novus Ordo Mass because, in Fr. Martin’s words, “even the Satanists know that this Mass is not valid.” The Black Mass was attended by high ranking prelates in the Church, important layman, business leaders and politicians. At least one Cardinal was in attendance. A concurrent “Enthronement of Satan” black Mass was also held in South Carolina on that date.

In his novel, ‘Windswept House,’ which Fr. Martin always maintained was 90% fact and 10% fiction, the opening chapter describes this Mass.

“…In an atmosphere of darkness and fire, the Chief Celebrant in each Chapel intoned a series of Invocations to the Prince. The Participants in both Chapels chanted a response. Then, and only in America’s Targeting Chapel, each Response was followed by a Convenient Action—a ritually determined acting-out of the spirit and the meaning of the words.”

The presiding Bishop then considered the Victim. “Even in her near unconscious state, still she struggled. Still she protested. Finally, the Bishop began the Great Invocation: ‘’I believe that the Prince of the World will be enthroned this night in the Ancient Citadel, and from there He will create a New Community: the Universal Church of Man.”

Fr. Martin’s best selling book, ‘Hostage to the Devil,’ described the priest’s years as an exorcist. Some Vatican insiders insisted that Fr. Martin had an axe to grind, while others attempted to destroy his credibility with stories of immoral behavior and illicit affairs with the wives of friends. Towards the end of his life, despite a liberal sojourn when he worked for Cardinal Bea during the time of the Council, Fr. Martin maintained that the Catholic Church was in apostasy. He pointed to liberal, heretical theologians like Charles Curran and Hans Kung, as being given slaps on the wrist for ascribing to heretical doctrines but still allowed to practice as Catholic priests, while those whose only goal was to preserve tradition, such as Archbishop Lefebvre, was excommunicated by then Pope John Paul II (that excommunication was summarily lifted by Pope Benedict VI).

Martin is not the only authority to confirm that there’s a secret cabal of Satanists and Freemasons high up in the Catholic Church.

Father Gabriele Amorth, the one time Chief Exorcist in Rome wrote in his book, “Memoirs of an Exorcist: My Life fighting against Satan,” that there are active Satanic sects within the Vatican “where participants reach all the way to the College of Cardinals.” This infiltration of Satanists and Masons forms what Martin calls the Vatican “superforce,” or an organization of powerful prelates who work to destroy the Catholic Church from within.

In Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow’s character has to deal with doctors and psychiatrists whose mission is to trick her into believing she’s having a normal baby. As the mother of Lucifer’s son (for some kind of New World Order), she must be never know the facts about the true nature of her baby until after its birth.
Like Mia Farrow, the Catholic Church has been tinkered with by forces that have snuck inside the gates. The Church has been fed Rosemary’s chocolate mousse laced with Tannis Root.

The slow and insidious impregnation began as early as the 1930s and 40s when former United States Communist Party member, Bella Dodd, testified before the House on Un-American Activities in 1952 that the Communist Party in the 1930s “put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within. ”

Dodd told the Committee, “Right now they are in the highest places, and they are working to bring about change in order that the Catholic Church will no longer be effective against Communism.”

The change, Dodd asserted, “Would be so drastic that you will not recognize the Catholic Church.”

Confirming Dodd’s testimony, another former American Communist Party official, Manning Johnson, told the HUAC that, “…the Communists discovered that destruction of religion could proceed much faster through infiltration of the Church by Communists operating within the Church itself.”

While the Council itself did not call for the radical changes and abuses that occurred over the last 40 years, “the spirit of Vatican II” led bishops to implement changes not authorized by the Council or the Pope. One such change was that regional conferences of bishops were given new powers that would later work to distort and change the original intention of the Council. One example is the Council’s insistence that Latin be retained as an essential part of the Catholic Mass. Conferences of regional bishops kicked this mandate to the curb in the name of “the spirit of Vatican II”

The last forty years has not been the greatest epoch in the history of the Church.

And it may all have to do with Malachi Martin’s claim that there once was a Black Mass within the Vatican walls.

Thom Nickels

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Facade-Vatican-Novelty-Catholic/dp/1890740101

THE PRESIDENT'S HOUSE (from ICON Magazine, February 2011, The Last Word)

2011-02-02T05:33:00.000-08:00

Not only does the President’s House at 5th and Market Streets resemble a half constructed modular home but this skeletal tribute to Washington and Jefferson might also double as a SEPTA subway stop. The structure’s minimalist frame, while pretending to take smart cues from the (nearby) Robert Venturi-designed Franklin House, is a disaster on all fronts. The 10.5 million dollar design tragedy, which incited an eight year ideological war between the National Park Service and various black community organizations, could have been a success if political squabbling had taken a back seat to architecture.

This Kelly/Maiello Architects & Planners structure should be laid bare and another architect, like Robert A.M. Stern, brought in to redo the project. Stern, the recent recipient of the 2011 Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture, could at least be counted on to deliver a substitutive building that would give Philadelphians and tourists alike a “real” Presidents house.

The present structure with its nine open air slave reenactment videos, and grade-school like “teaching” storyboards fastened on the brick and granite walls, is an intellectual embarrassment. Visitors get quick Readers Digest-style sound bites about the lives of presidential slaves. That’s pretty much the entire enchilada. Call it the President’s Slaves House, but mixing oil and water like this comes close to false advertising. As it is, the only “President” we get is the down under, glass enclosed archeological dig showcasing the foundations of the real house built sometime between 1790 and 1800 (but demolished in 1833). While the framed “dig” works very well as a centerpiece, everything else on the ground floor—the representational door, window and fire place frames of the original house—points to a curious flip flop as the slave narrative dominates and “enslaves” the story of the presidents-- or the evil oppressors in the archeological hole.

It’s not that the story of slavery in Philadelphia shouldn’t be told. Tell it by all means but don’t superimpose it onto another story. The design-message of the President’s House seems to be nothing but a judgment of 19th century pro-slavery views by “enlightened” 21st century standards. As a result, the visitor leaves knowing nothing about the important people that lived in this house, namely Benedict Arnold and Robert Morris.

If the mission of the architects was to cast aspersions on the presidents the house is supposed to honor, then they succeeded in equating the guys in wigs with rabid Klu Kluxers. But even this message is delivered with overblown evangelical zeal. Visitors are hit with one hammer blow after another in those instructive billboards. The most egregious, “The Dirty Business of Slavery,” wins the Captain Obvious Award for its feel of a ruler-holding third grade teacher standing by to make sure that every visitor pays attention.

Philadelphia deserves better.

******

Just before the hard won Senate victory relegating “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the trash heap of history, something else came out of Washington that was virtually overlooked by the mainstream media. The so-called Obama compromise tax bill, which extends tax cuts to the wealthy for another two years, and which reduces the Estate Tax (which benefits the wealthy) was passed with huge Democratic Party support. Besides increasing the costs of maintaining our society onto the backs of middle income and lower income Americans, the bill also addressed Social Security. The president and his advisors proposed a 2% Social Security tax cut (from the standard 6.2% rate) for one year. While the average American paycheck will now see a slight increase, the Machiavellian move to dismantle the financially healthy Social Security system is built on the insidious presumption that the American public will be in no mood to reinstate the 2% loss on the 6.2 % tax a year from now. Why? Because at that point people will be used to the extra money in their paycheck and they’ll balk at giving it up. Republicans in 2012 will address Obama’s promise to return to the 6.2% tax by insisting that the Democrats want to raise taxes.

Political support for Social Security will then begin to diminish.
This almost surely spells death for the Social Security system as know it, because in 2012 Republicans will suggest making both the tax breaks for the wealthy and the Social Security adjustment tax, permanent. “Obama wants to raise your taxes” will become the new Republican campaign slogan, and from this we will see political support for Socials Security diminish.

“This is the nature of compromise,” President Obama said in support of this bill. But some things are not negotiable. For our seemingly Trojan Horse of a president to use Social Security as a bargaining chip is a major betrayal of progressive values.

*****

The hunt for the so called “Kensington Strangler” has caused a lot of people to offer opinions about what’s wrong with the area. On one hand, you have busloads of Penn academics traveling through Kensington streets on sightseeing tours. As reported recently in The Philadelphia Inquirer, a group of professors and anthropologists took a ride through “rough and tumble” Kensington to get a first hand look at prostitution and open air drug transactions.

Images of an Ivory Tower bus filled with Margaret Mead and Jane Goodall types staring at the natives through binoculars would be amusing if it weren’t such an exercise in futility.
“It’s not hidden from view. You can see it along many streets. People scattered as the bus passed,” The Inquirer quotes one “in the bus” professor as saying.

Of course the natives are going to run. Nobody likes to be on the statistical end of an anthropological study. “Oh, look at that one will you!”

“Get a load of her—no teeth!”

While I realize it’s the business of universities to do studies-- often these tomes wind up in glossy binders or as graphs in textbooks where the print is too small—they rarely if ever produce any kind of change.

So what kind of change would ‘the experts’ want for Kensington?
Some say that Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood should be Kensington’s role model. Kensington advocates, in fact, like to talk about “tipping points,” and a “positive transformation of the area led by artists and entrepreneurs.”

It amazes me how people are so quick to call for a massive immigration of artists, as if this group constituted a financially stable demographic. Generally, the opposite is true.
Artists, as a rule, don’t have much money. If a thousand artists move into an area you’re going to have people looking for a cheap lifestyle. A neighborhood filled with only artists would quickly fall apart. Kensington needs a vibrant business influx. A lot of people sitting around in “green” spaces making pottery won’t be enough to change a neighborhood.

But Northern Liberties, or Philadelphia’s “New Hope-style” neighborhood, is populated by stock brokers, lawyers, physicians and other “young” professionals. It’s an area where even the corner restaurant is a pricey affair. Pop into a Northern Liberties or Girard Avenue Fishtown bar and chances are you’ll pay $9 to $10 for a glass of wine. If you’re a woman and want your hair done, the typical NL hair salon will charge you $40 more than a “normal” salon in neighboring Port Richmond.

If Kensington is to change it should change in the manner of (humble) Port Richmond. In Richmond, you have clean and stable neighborhood businesses without the overpriced “chi chi” Liberties elements.

(From the February issue of ICON Magazine, The Last Word.)

The Abortion Doc Vs. Eddie Savitz (from my STAR column)

2011-01-30T05:38:00.001-08:00

Philadelphia hit the news big time last week with the still-evolving story of West Philly abortion doc, Kermit P. Gosnell. Gosnell’s “house of horrors” abortion factory is like something out of a gothic novel.
While most people and government officials expressed shock at the stories of poor, immigrant and minority women at Gosnell’s abortion mill, many were even more shocked to learn that during the 1990s the unsanitary death factory—with litter pans, animals, and unsanitary instruments in the clinical extraction rooms—operated freely and openly without so much as suspicious glance from then DA Lynne Abraham.
The early 1990s, if you recall, was a time when DA Abraham was busy prosecuting the notorious “Uncle Eddie,” or Alec Schwartz Edward Savitz, a University of Pennsylvania alum (Savitz was a social services honor student Penn), for allegedly molesting several hundred teenage boys in his Center City apartment house. (Many of these boys, by the way, were from Riverward neighborhoods). The date was March 1992, the time that historians refer to as the “AIDS hysteria” years when medical myth and misinformation often masqueraded as fact. DA Abraham, acting on leads and tips, had Uncle Eddie arrested for possible sex with minors and for (potentially) spreading the AIDS virus to his numerous contacts.
Uncle Eddie’s exploits, while scoring a place of honor in the Hall of Shame, did not—as the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania later ruled at the time—involve sex acts. Furthermore, the Project stated that the vast majority of Uncle Eddie’s contacts were above the age of consent. Uncle Eddie’s “crime,” then, was a rather peculiar and decidedly disgusting fetish for storing unspeakable things in pizza boxes.
So as the DA’s office and the Philly press fixated on Uncle Eddie, in West Philly Dr. Gosnell was busy performing second and third trimester abortions, operating with the blessing of the law as if he was running an ice cream parlor. This was happening despite the fact that a former Gosnell employee had already gone before the state’s Board of Medicine and described the horrors she witnessed inside the West Philly clinic.
The former employee’s report was ignored, however.
In the 1990s, Uncle Eddies’ stuffed pizza boxes ignited more curiosity and outrage than the possibility of fetuses being stuffed into toilets. It helped, of course, that in the 1990s Gosnell had the law on his side. At that time the murder of 7 (and possibly hundreds more babies that Gosnell is accused of killing) was probably legal.
The Partial Birth Abortion Law, which bars abortions in which the baby is delivered, wasn’t signed into law until 2002 by then President Bush. But until that time abortion was rather a free-for-all activity, when a woman’s right to choose was tantamount to “Anything Goes.”
This is why, when questioned by the press about the charges leveled against him, Gosnell said he didn’t understand the murder charges related to the babies (or ‘fetuses’ in Gosnell’s mind). Gosnell, obviously, is still living in the 1990s, and no doubt had come to believe that if you can kill a baby in the womb, why can’t you kill it outside the womb, especially when the original intent was the former?
The Gosnell case has given me new respect for young girls in the neighborhood who opt to keep their babies rather than have an abortion. While kids having kids is still a sad thing in my book (who wants to be saddled with a baby in the prime of youth?), at least these girls (and their boyfriends in some cases) have chosen not to end a life just because the timing of a pregnancy was inconvenient for them.
DA Seth Williams, whom I did not support when he ran for office, is to be commended for not avoiding the sensitive political football called abortion. He could just as easily have turned the other cheek like his predecessors and ignored Dr. Gosnell. But his decisive action has lead to a lot of embarrassment in City Hall and in the corridors of Harrisburg.
“How could this have happened? Who knew? We are shocked,” politicians are saying.

The evidence, however, was there all along but everyone opted to view Gosnell’s chamber of horrors as just another clinic in a land where abortion has become a casual, “get it over with” affair, like going to the dermatologist to get a blemish or a wart removed.
Strange but true, stuffed pizza boxes is child’s play by comparison…

O Holy Kensington (From The Star)

2011-01-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, while helping a friend to organize a moving expedition, I wound up near East Somerset Street in Kensington. It was a bright summer afternoon, so I didn’t think twice about lingering on the sidewalk for a cool twenty minutes. During that time I was approached by no less than five people offering to sell me heroin, crack cocaine, and an assortment of prescription drugs. The blatant, in-your-face salesmanship of the dealers went beyond being ballsy. It had an end-times sci-fi feel, like I had walked into a Philly redux version of Mad Max.

It was sad to see so many people on drugs, and to realize that little can be done to correct the situation outside of giving all the “problem people” one way tickets to a far-off island, then leveling the area and starting over.

How do you encourage people to change their lives when they have no interest in doing so?
Government-funded help for drug addicts is not coming anytime soon. The nation’s economy is well beyond any sort of new Marshall Plan or federal subsidy, and with the election of so many Tea Baggers and Republicans to Congress, they’ll be no new FDR-style programs to lend a helping hand. Private organizations and churches can help, but often this sort of assistance is nothing more than food, overnight shelter, or a short term recess from addiction.

This brings me to the recent media focus on Kensington because of the ‘Kensington Strangler.’ The hunt for this killer has created a lot of commentary about what’s wrong with the area. On one hand, you have busloads of Penn academics traveling through Kensington streets on sightseeing tours. As reported recently by The Philadelphia Inquirer, a group of professors and anthropologists took a ride through “rough and tumble” Kensington to get a first hand look at prostitution and open air drug transactions.

Images of an Ivory Tower bus filled with Margaret Mead and Jane Goodall types staring at the natives through binoculars would be amusing if it weren’t such an exercise in futility.

“It’s not hidden from view. You can see it along many streets. People scattered as the bus passed,” The Inquirer quotes one “in the bus” professor as saying.

Of course the natives are going to run. Nobody likes to be on the statistical end of an anthropological study. “Oh, look at that one will you!”

“Get a load of her—no teeth!”

\ While I realize it’s the business of universities to do studies-- often these tomes wind up in glossy binders or as graphs in textbooks where the print is too small—they rarely if ever produce any kind of change.

So what kind of change would ‘the experts’ want for Kensington?

Some say that Northern Liberties should be Kensington’s role model. Kensington advocates, in fact, like to talk about “tipping points,” and a “positive transformation of the area led by artists and entrepreneurs.”

It amazes me how people are so quick to call for a massive immigration of artists, as if this group constituted a financially stable demographic. Generally, the opposite is true.

Artists, as a rule, don’t have much money, so if a thousand artists move into an area you’re going to have people looking for a cheap lifestyle. Artists may be peaceful and creative, but they are not likely to help the locals find jobs. A neighborhood filled with only artists would quickly fall apart. Kensington needs a vibrant business influx.
Even a Wall mart would help.

Northern Liberties, or Philly’s “New Hope-style” neighborhood, has become an upscale enclave filled with stock brokers, lawyers, physicians and other “young” professionals. It’s an area where even the corner restaurant is pricey—gone is the classic and cheap “mom and Pop” diner. Pop into a Northern Liberties or Girard Avenue Fishtown bar and chances are you’ll pay $9 to $10 for a glass of wine. I don’t know about you, but I call these, “stockbroker” prices.

A Northern Liberties woman friend of mine often complains about the cost of getting her hair done in the neighborhood. “The second a hairdresser moves here they up their prices 30% because they acquire a Northern Liberties address,” she says.

I’d like to see Kensington change in the manner of Port Richmond. In Richmond, you have clean and stable neighborhood businesses without the overpriced “chi chi” Liberties elements.
You also have a good cross section of people, a seemingly harmonious blend of new residents and old.

A CHAT WITH SAM KATZ

2011-01-01T10:45:00.000-08:00

While the 90-mile divide between New York and Philadelphia would seem to suggest a close resemblance between the two cities, that’s hardly the case at all. Yes, there are streetscape similarities that often excite the Hollywood film industry, but any relation other than the strictly cosmetic is in large part imaginary.

The world of politics offers ample proof of this. New York’s strongly Democratic electorate has a fluidity Philadelphia’s Democratic majority lacks. New Yorkers can vote for an urban liberal Republican like Bloomberg and then go back to voting for a Democrat. Philadelphians, however, find it much harder to switch-hit in the voting booth. They prefer staying put in a machine-dominated political vortex that rarely thinks outside the box.

Consider the political legacy of Sam Katz, three-time liberal Republican candidate for Mayor, three time loser and a one-time ‘almost ran’ in the 2011 Democratic primary against Mayor Nutter. Katz’s aborted 2011 mayoral stint came sometime after he realized he wasn’t going to get anywhere in Philadelphia as a Republican, so he switched political parties. In the end even that didn’t work. The machine in charge had its own hierarchy of “favorites,” and Katz wasn’t among them, despite the fact that nobody seems more suited for the mayor’s office. Well read, articulate, conversational (sans arrogance), tall and urbane, Kat has all the exterior attributes that would put him in the running in any big city in America--except Philadelphia.

Philadelphia’s Democratic roots, after all, go back to 1951, a year when the local press made a point of lamenting 60 years of boss Republican rule. Republicans were the machine then, with Mayor Bernard Samuel’s ten year term as mayor ending a cycle that was largely broken by FDR’s New Deal and the ensuing massive immigration of southern blacks into the Quaker City. Realizing that the influx of new residents could provide a windfall of votes, city Democrats courted the newcomers to help win city elections. The strategy worked and helped elect Democrat Richardson Dilworth as mayor in 1951 and presto, a new machine was born.

. Katz’s political withdrawal from the 2011 mayoral race had the markings of a NASCAR race car coming to screeching stop. The press reported he was dropping out for “personal and political reasons.”

“But never say never,” the man himself told me in his offices in the beautiful Frank Furness-designed J. Gardner Cassatt house of the Library Company of Philadelphia. The mild mannered Katz has done what few seem to manage successfully: He’s reinvented himself Arthur Rimbaud-style: “You must change your life,” the 19th century French poet once wrote.

“Philadelphia is my passion,” he asserts, a slight redness around the eyes seeming to indicate overwork, perhaps exhaustion.

‘Passion’ in this case refers to a new project, “Philadelphia, The Great Experiment,” which will consist of a series of documentary films focusing on the history of the city and possibly expanding to include historical subjects outside city and state boundaries.

The endeavor has received a significant amount of press these days. The showing of the pilot film, “The Floodgates Opened, 1865-1876,” in a theater in Radnor last year was one of twenty local screenings. To date, the response has been robust and enthusiastic, and the former politico “also ran” couldn’t be happier.

“The Floodgates Opened,” concentrates on a divided Philadelphia immediately after the Civil Wars years, when Irish immigrants and former African American slaves came to blows on South Street. The film covers the time when the city was planning its most ambitious architectural endeavor yet, the building of City Hall. The story ends at the 1876 Centennial Exposition but does not include that story.

“There are a lot of different ways you can contribute to your city besides running for mayor,” he adds.

The sentiment, however, sounds a little bit like a self-help mantra in light of his reinvention of himself as a film producer.

With Katz, the subject often returns to politics.

“When I ran against Mayor Street in 2003, things were on their way to being a close election until they found the bug. It turned out not to be a close election. But had there not been a bug we would have been closer than 15 points, which is what I lost by.”

I ask him if he would care to get specific about those “personal and political reasons.”

“I kept those cards pretty close to my vest,” he says, the word ‘vest’ somehow conjuring visuals of classic Republican dress accruements like Brian Tierney’s bow ties or the “Chestnut Hill” suits of Thatcher Longstreth.

“It was my wife who suggested this was not a good year to run, and I’ve learned to trust her instincts. But now that we’re finished the pilot we’re going to use it to raise money for the other films. But we don’t currently have that money in the bank.”

Talk to Katz long enough and you’re likely to detect a not so subtle boyishness. He yawns and rubs his eyes occasionally, the result, perhaps, of media overexposure. He leans forward when a question, in this case about money, strikes a nerve.

“My wife loves the pilot film, and she would like me to make money. I’m not making money, not a lot of money, but I need to make money. I did put money away and if I was seven years older the answer might be different. But having lived through what happened in the last 3 years and what could happen again to assets…. My children are grown and I don’t have the private school tuitions, and even though I don’t have the lifestyle that needs a lot of money, I need to make it.”

He believes that the films will be successful, given the near- absence of historical films about Philadelphia. With his staff of one, namely son Phil, and two project workers—writer Nathaniel Popkin and Gregory Nickerson, a research assistant—it seems more than likely that this will happen.

Son Phil is stationed at a computer on the far side of the project’s war room, a resplendent book-lined Victorian office that’s a dead ringer for the interior of the former The Poor Richard Club, just across the street at 1319 Locust. Phil and company are busy at work chatting about actor resumes and debating who might play this or that historical character.
It’s painstaking work making movies, especially when you do commissioned films on the side to pay for the mother project.

The commissions include a short film for the Union League, another short film on the life of Stephen Girard for Girard College, and yet another short on the life of Richard Allen for Mother Bethel AME Church. These ten-minute snippets, while not part of the Philadelphia Experiment, could still become classic showpieces.

Katz traces his first thoughts about the project to 2005-06, with plans solidifying in 2007. Much like running for mayor, there were stumbling bocks, what Katz calls “the lack of a sustained, overview of the history of Philadelphia done by a historian who taught and did scholarship out of the local universities.” There was not, he says, a “definite narrative” on Philadelphia.

“New York and Chicago both had historians who taught and wrote this way, but not Philadelphia. Even the book, “Philadelphia, a 300 Year History,” is more of a reference book than anything else. It’s also the work of some 20 authors who specialize in different areas of history, like Dennis Clark from Temple who studied Irish history in Philadelphia. When you don’t have that voice that speaks with continuity throughout, there are problems.”

‘Philadelphia, The Great Experiment,’ will skip all-inclusive generic overviews for specific times in the city’s history.

“The Floodgates Opened, 1865-1876,” will be followed by “Capital in Crisis,” about the city during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793.

“We had two full days working with historians, notably Rob Armstrong, who helped us figure out how we were going to do the first pilot. With the Yellow Fever episode we had to ID 15 historians to be our “go to” people both in script writing, research resources and also as camera experts. They will significantly shape what our thinking is about the story.”
“Capital in Crisis” will tell the story of how both Jefferson and Hamilton fled Philadelphia, along with Congress and the Secretary of State.

“We are looking for those stories that become pivot points,” Katz says, mentioning how Yellow Fever was probably brought to the city on slave boats from Haiti a la Stephen Girard. “In 1793 there was a huge shift from earlier colonial times. The city was deserted, and the capital was permanently moved to Washington.”

Visual ‘footnotes’ from the film, known as Websodes, will be posted on the project website (http://www.historyofphilly.com/).

Right now, the man who was almost mayor could be making an historic legacy of his own, but that depends on promotion.

“It’s all about promotion, especially if you can get commercial TV to promote this film to its audience. I think we’re really going to create a good show geared to audiences of all ages. I hope it’s going to be quite good,” he says.
At least, as far as one can tell, there are no machines to beat.

Philadelphia's Managing Director's Dance: The Christmas Village Fiasco

2010-12-09T11:46:00.000-08:00

For an embarrassing twenty-four hours last week, Philadelphia looked pretty silly in the eyes of the nation. It was, as they say, not the city’s finest hour, when a dismissive high level bureaucrat, City Managing Director Richard Negrin, took it upon himself to suggest removing the word ‘Christmas’ from the Christmas Village display in Dilworth Plaza in front of City Hall, and replace it with that all purpose generic word, ‘Holiday.’

The ignoble deed was done in the name of multicultural diversity, or not wanting to offend anyone with the [Jesus Christ-laden] word, ‘Christmas.’ Negrin, for instance (who denies specifically putting out an order to remove ‘Christmas.) stated on November 30 that changing ‘Christmas’ to ‘Holiday’ “is more accurate, makes more sense, and is more in keeping with the sense of the holiday.”

What? The word holiday makes more sense in describing a holiday?

Negrin attempted a retreat when he stated, “I never specifically asked for the word Christmas to be removed.”

There were even news reports of a Jewish father and daughter who wandered into the village whereupon the daughter asked, “Do we have a village?” In yet another media report, it was not a father and daughter, but a father and son.

Meanwhile, after the story broke, a couple of Jewish merchants in the Christmas Village told the news media that they love the word Christmas.

So what was this all about? Who were the complainers, and why don’t they come forward and announce themselves? It isn’t enough to say that they were some people who worked in City Hall, and a few residents.

Whoever they are, they are hiding out till this thing blows over. When the mayor reinstated the word Christmas, the farce seemed to backfire on whoever was responsible because now everywhere you go people are starting to say the word Christmas again. Whether it’s in the pages of The Philadelphia Inquirer or onscreen at Action News, reporters and anchors seem to be taking a special delight in seeing how many times they can say the word, which leads me to conclude that maybe this crisis was necessary to finally flush out the P.C. sewage that’s been kicking Christmas around for years.

City Hall’s P.C. coup took a nose dive, and now it seems that Christmas is here to stay—at least until those clever Holiday SS Storm troopers regroup and come up with another plan. Stay tuned.

In retrospect, I wonder how Negrin and even Mayor Nutter thought they would get away with it. Philadelphians may be apathetic about a lot of things, but you can count on big time blowbacks when you tamper with sports teams, the Mummer’s, cheese steaks, or Christmas.

Let’s face it; whether you’re Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Shinto, or agnostic, the mark that Christianity has left on Western Civilization is all encompassing. Even if you wanted to escape it, you couldn’t. And why stop at eliminating ‘Christmas’ if this fact annoys or upsets you? I mean, to really do the job right you would have to attack other remnants of Christianity that color the secular world.

Like the common calendar, namely the Gregorian calendar, instituted by Pope Gregory XII in a papal bull in the 16th century. This calendar, can be found in a zillion homes all over the world, even has an official nickname-- the Christian calendar.

.
We live in strange times, so I guess it is entirely possible that years from now there might be a group of people insisting that the world is under no obligation to mark the passage of time according to the invention of some Catholic pope.

As for our (sometimes) waffling mayor, he did a good thing when he restored Christmas despite his remaining firm about the tree in front of City Hall.

He has two names for that tree, holiday tree, or City Hall tree, both of which sound like sad sprigs dug up from behind the old Iron Curtain.

Thom Nickels

Suck in that Second Hand Smoke

2010-12-03T05:39:00.000-08:00

Wherever I go in the neighborhood, I am chased by ETS’s. I’m not talking about extraterrestrials but something called environmental tobacco smoke. The fact is, our neighborhoods are filled with too many smokers. I don’t know why this is. The packs of cigarettes sold everyday at the local Wawa on Aramingo Avenue would fill a warehouse in Hoboken. People here are smoking as if there’s no tomorrow.

Maybe there’s not a tomorrow for them if they continue on the smoking path. As a libertarian might say, “That’s their choice,” but does that mean I have to breathe in those ETS fumes and become a kind of honorary smoker myself?

ETS fumes penetrate house walls (and turn them a sickly yellow over time), so if your next door neighbor smokes you more than likely know how ETS swirls into cracks and crevices around your doors and windows, and then penetrates the walls of your house. The “gifts” of ETS-- airborne tar, nicotine, carbon monoxide and ammonia components-- increase your chances of lung disease by 25%. The flow of ETS fumes from one row house to another is no doubt exacerbated by the cold weather months, when smokers who would normally smoke outside on the sidewalk are lighting up in their houses instead.

People explain their smoking addiction with inane rationalizations like: “Life’s a terminal illness, and you have to die of something!” (Translation: Let’s end things today by jumping off the Ben Franklin Bridge!)

While it’s true that nobody gets out of here alive, that doesn’t mean that we have to rush towards the angel of death with open arms.

The beautiful girl with unblemished skin who lights cigarette after cigarette outside Thriftway doesn’t seem to realize that the fumes from her Newport or Marlboro will cause her face to wrinkle early and look older than her age. Cigarette smoke reduces collagen levels on the skin and tends to cause “sagging” on both the arms and the face. It also yellows the teeth and the eyes, hardly desirable traits if your intent is to appear sexy.

That Thriftway girl naively assumes that the damages caused by smoking will be problems for a distant day in the future. Unfortunately, her small child not yet a year old in the carriage next to her has no such choice. While Mother thinks she may be making healthy concessions by blowing smoke away from baby, baby is still getting doses of ETS. And if Mother happens to be smoking indoors, not only is baby getting full blast ETS, but so is the family pet.

ETS also “soaks” into the house furniture, rugs and upholstery and creates a cocktail of toxins or another “gift bearing” offshoot: Third hand Smoke, meaning tobacco smoke that lingers long after the cigarette has been put out.

Third hand smoke fumes can gestate for hours and are potentially dangerous for infants and children.

Still, if your intent is to kill a beloved house pet, the best way to do this is to “smoke” it to death.

A Swedish study found that 6 out of 7 cats in a smoking home had pathological changes in the lungs. These changes often indicated the emergence of cancer in most of these cats.

A Colorado State University study indicated that smoking homes can cause long-nosed dogs like pugs to increased risks of nasal cancer. Short-nosed dogs like Collies and German Shepards are subject to increased risks of lung cancer.

What’s even more shocking is that ETS even affects the innocuous houseplant.
The website for Americans for Nonsmokers Rights declares, “Chemicals resulting from smoking can affect plants by diminishing their carbon dioxide intake and clogging up the pores on leaves…” ETS has a negative effect on photosynthesis, a crucial part of plant development.
The upshot to all of this is: If you want to smoke, smoke, but think twice about lighting up if you live in an apartment or row house with thin walls.

I know we all have to go sometime, but only a madman wants to arrive early for that “party."

Opting for Winter Solitude (From my STAR column)

2010-12-03T05:35:00.000-08:00

Cold weather, as a neighbor of mine likes to remind me, means that people who live on my block don’t “see” one another until the spring. That’s a slight exaggeration, of course. We do see one another ‘quick glimpse’ style as this or that neighbor scurries back and forth to their car, the bus stop, or the corner store.

Winter means that the sidewalk conversations and impromptu meetings that occur during the warm weather months are at a minimum. Sidewalk gab fests and stoop sitting disappear. One can literally go weeks or sometimes months without seeing somebody they used to see everyday in the summer.

For some people in row houses, not seeing other neighbors on the street is a condition they’d like to make permanent. These Thoreau-style hermits are much like contemplative nuns in that when they do meet neighbors they keep contact to a minimum, offering a cursory “How do you do?” and then moving on as if further intimacy was a contagious virus. Some of these folks never even get to know the people next door. They live like those in detached homes in the suburbs rather than in a tightly knot fabric of row houses in the inner city.

While we all have occasional bouts of this sort of behavior, it does pay to know who you are living with.

Living in the inner city, after all, should mean that you are willing to experience a shared sense of community.

When I lived in apartments in Center City, I found that most apartment dwellers kept to themselves. Scores of people can be crammed into a high-rise but it’s not uncommon to find a tenant who knows no one in the building they can call a friend. Communication among tenants in large apartment buildings is often reduced to quick nods or ‘hellos’ in the elevator, nothing more.
But life on an urban street with row houses is different. This is the place where people put down real roots and can wind up living for years, even decades. Because this is the case, there’s a greater interest in knowing who lives across the street or next door.

Block parties are a great way to meet and keep the communication flowing with neighbors. While being neighbors with someone is no guarantee of a friendship, a superficial bond, especially in times of calamity and distress, is better than no bond at all. If a flood or massive hurricane were to devastate the area, not knowing anyone on the block could be a marked disadvantage. In disastrous situations, the man who is an island sinks rather than swims.

This “people need people’ cliché is true even in minor situations where house keys are lost or stolen and you need to walk through a neighbor’s house to get into your own. Ditto for borrowing your neighbor’s phone, or even a candle or flashlight when their lights go out.
Though every neighbor may not be your cup of tea (think personal chemistry, snob or socio-cultural background issues, etc.), building a bridge with those you may not necessarily invite to dinner is still a wise thing to do.

My neighborhood’s first block party occurred several years ago. While it wasn’t along the lines of a Northern Liberties Piazza spectacular, it did give everyone here a chance to roam from table to table and check out who lived where and introduce themselves. I joined the festivities by putting out a small café table and a bucket of wine and cheese. The music was tacky karaoke, but fun. While the party was hardly the social event of the season, I was at least able to see another “side” of my street.

There were no deaths, gunfights, arguments, untoward comments or glances, and this is why I was surprised when neighbors here turned down a request for another block party this summer.
Although I was out of town when the Streets Department petition came around to get 75% of the neighbors approval (or one signature per household), it bothered me when I was told that the petition handler couldn’t meet the quota.

That rejection, as small and insignificant as it seems, means that people didn’t want to be bothered, but why?

Closing off the street for one day or a long afternoon is not a troublesome venture, and should not be perceived as a threat to anyone, not even chronic party haters.

Likewise, small businesses on the street should also be willing to co-operate rather than object to an event that is essentially healthy for the neighborhood.

Closing the street once every four years for an afternoon will not destroy a healthy business, instigate a riot or, as Chicken Little so aptly put it, cause the sky to fall.

Thom Nickels

The Last Word (From December's ICON)

2010-12-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has ever had business at City Hall knows that Dilworth Plaza, that desert of concrete masquerading as a “welcoming” municipal plaza, has been a wasteland since its installation in 1973.

Dilworth Plaza, which had some design appeal on paper—an airbrushed design always has a certain appeal--soon became a squatter’s village for drifters and the homeless after its construction. As a haven for the down and out, the plaza soon became known for its “aromatic assaults,” due in part to the absence of public bathrooms.

Despite the best intentions of architect Vincent Kling, people rarely used Dilworth Plaza except as a walk-through space on their way in or out of City Hall. It has never been known as a comfortable place to sit and “linger.”

Why would anyone want to linger in a quarry of concrete?

The prevailing aesthetic in Philadelphia architecture in the 1970s-- utilitarian and modern—resulted in many bad ideas. Not only were drop ceilings added to Romanesque banks, but the city’s 1976 Bicentennial Chestnut Street transit way design proved to be a financial and artistic disaster. The design of Dilworth Plaza can also be seen as a reflection of the mood of the city under Mayor Frank Rizzo: City Hall as an imperialistic, barbed wire camp.

The plaza’s disuse by everyday citizens—minus, of course, the occasional political protest--can also be attributed to City Hall’s isolation as a “fortress” situated on an island surrounded by traffic. People might pass through “the island” from East to West Market Street, but most are not going to rest their haunches on one of Kling’s concrete benches that seem to rise out of the cement like tombstones. These uncomfortable slabs make the casual visitor feel conspicuous sitting amongst the drifters. One inevitably gets the feeling, warranted or not, that anyone sitting there must be up to “no good.

That’s certainly not the ca se in nearby JFK Plaza, where in the warm months, office workers and passersby think nothing of eating their lunch by the plaza fountain.
Ignored by the general public, it was only a matter of time before skateboarders discovered Dilworth Plaza. When that happened, the area was overrun with the sounds of crashing wheels and somersaulting kids. While Kling’s plan didn’t call for an urban roller derby, at least the plaza was being utilized for something other than drinking alcohol from a brown paper bag. Skateboarding, however, is a “sloppy” sport that tends to have a lot of rough edges.

It also creates “damages.” In this case, the city had to shell out $8,500 to replace 7 plaza stainless steel railings, thanks to the “ride ‘em rough” antics of reckless boarders. Realizing it had a problem on its hands, the city then told the skateboarders to take a hike after installing new cleats and discs on the railings and benches.

Dilworth Plaza once again was back to being what it had always been: a magnet for the down and out.

Throughout its thirty-eight year history, the plaza’s sunken tree and shrub-filled transit way spaces near Suburban Station became conduits for trash that seemed to blow in from all parts of town. In the 1970s, I wrote the mayor several times about the collected dirt there but rarely received a response. Nobody seemed to care that these shrub-filled gardens were a dragging vortex for litter. People in those days, in fact, would look into these sunken “gardens,” and remark, “Can you believe this?” Occasionally the city would clean the trash, but then it would go right back to ignoring it for weeks at a time.

Sound familiar?

When I heard about the new 50-million dollar plan to finally reconfigure and “clean up” Dilworth Plaza, I felt some ray of hope. Thanks to a generous federal grant given to transform public spaces, the improved plaza will replace the concrete desert with a large lawn, more trees, (the obligatory) café, and a fountain which will double as a skating rink in winter. The project is scheduled for completion in 2013.

City planner Edmund Bacon’s-inspired Penn Center had a sunken ice skating rink in the 1960s and 70s. The rink was designed so that commuters could observe skaters while waiting for trains in Suburban Station. It was a marvelous bit of Rockefeller Center in then dour downtown Philly, where strangers became friends, or where friends could spot friends watching amateur skaters fall or glide on the ice. The rink was closed when somebody in power decided that a skating rink was no longer relevant, and the area was covered over with—what else?—concrete.

Dilworth Plaza’s new design, which will include striking glass structures, looks very attractive on paper. Certainly, the rebirth of a skating rink in the area will only work if it isn’t allowed to dry up in the summer months and become a magnet for litter and trash. If that happens, the city can expect a new influx of vagrants.
Skating rinks, just like those sunken transit way gardens, need constant maintenance.

Is Philadelphia up to the task?

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When a major earthquake or disaster strikes a U.S. city or far off country, organizations and nations promise millions of dollars in relief funds. It’s a time when pundits tear up and when television news airs special reports about the tragedy. The intense talk dominates the public sphere to such an extent that the focus cannot help but fade as new disasters or concerns take center stage. The problem for the beleaguered country then becomes one of follow-up.

. When a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, killing some 300,000 people, 50 nations pledged a total of 8.75 billion in reconstruction aid. The United States was especially responsive, sending in troops, aid workers and supplies. In March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged 1.15 billion in United States aid for Haiti at a UN donors’ conference. While that money was released, United States money promised for the rebuilding of Haiti, some 500 million under the Haiti Empowerment, Assistance and Rebuilding Act, has been held up by a cantankerous Oklahoma Republican Senator.

Senator Tom Coburn, whom comedian Jon Stewart refers to as a “hole of mystery” because of his secret hold on this bill, objects to a minor provision in the legislation. Coburn has taken issue with the bill’s “unnecessary spending” in the appointment of a senior Haiti coordinator when there’s already one in place: U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten.

What Coburn is doing, in effect, is sacrificing Haiti’s poor in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Currently in Port-Au-Prince, just ten months after the disaster, about I million Haitians live on the streets. Buildings are still in rubble while a serious outbreak of cholera has hit parts of the island. The situation is so serious that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in October urged the Francophonie group of French speaking nations to remain constant in their pledge to rebuild the small country. “Your friends in the Francophonie will never let you down,” he told the members of the French speaking Alliance.

One should be grateful, perhaps, that there are no Oklahoma Republican types in Canada.

The months-long U.S. funding deadlock, meanwhile, shows no signs of abating, even as the hurricane season threatens to do more damage to the cholera-stricken island.

**

Angry Americans upset at “socialist Obama-Dems” but enamored of new political faces with no solutions to the country’s problems remind me of that cryptic political slogan, “Throw the bums and replace them with new bums!” Do Americans really think that electing Tea Party Republicans will fix the economy? Do they live on Mars? What’s been said a zillion times before is no less true today: President Obama did not create the bad economy; that economic down slope began under a different president. In campaign speeches, the president was careful to state that economic recovery would be slow and painful. Americans, however, want instant gratification. Many of us also have a messiah complex about presidents, as if one new person in office can—overnight--offer remedies to all the nation’s ills. The truth is that as the world becomes an even closer interdependent network of nations, a president may have less power over the economy than we know.

Come to think of it, November’s sizeable Republican gains have emboldened far less mysterious “holes” than Coburn. In Kentucky, Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell recently told the Heritage Foundation that he and his fellow Republicans should work to repeal “funding for implementation of Obama’s healthcare measure.” McConnell wants to deny poor Americans any healthcare coverage they may be able to leverage under the Obama plan. While the Obama healthcare plan is far from perfect, it’s a small step in preparing America for what it really needs: universal healthcare.

This should not be shocking to Tea Baggers or to those who call Obama a socialist. After all, McConnell and his Republican bagger cohorts in Congress all have “socialized” tax-payer funded universal health care, not only while they are in office but for life. My taxes and your taxes are funding their visits to the doctor, while funding for the poor and almost-poor is looked on as the spawn of Karl Marx.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Author/journalist Thom Nickels is the author of nine books, including Philadelphia Architecture, Out in History and the recently released novel SPORE.

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