Mama Doesn't Live Here Anymore by Arlene Ostapowicz

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

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

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

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

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)

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)

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

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.