Fighting terrorism at The Prince Theater

Weekly Press• Wed, Jun 24, 2015

By Thom Nickels
Contributing Writer

When two Philly film society friends offered me and a friend two free tickets to see Magic Mike XXL at The Prince Theater at 1412 Chestnut Street, I had to ask, "What is Magic Mike?" Could Magic Mike be the story of a gay magician who pulls off Marriage Equality in Russia, or could it be a movie about a magical millennial named Mike who changes craft beer into tattoos?

The Prince Theater, of course, was almost lost to the city when it went bankrupt several years ago. The theater’s legacy brightened when it was sold to The Philadelphia Film Society. I’ve visited The Prince many times in years past when I would attend film festivals.

In the lobby we picked up our free tickets then proceeded towards a lineup of ushers and serious looking men in suits. What was this? The men in suits were arranged widthwise across the floor like a chorus line of border guards, only they didn’t look very happy. As a frequent Ritz Theater movie patron, I’ve certainly never seen a lineup of suited security there, or at The Roxy or anywhere else for that matter.

Here’s what happened next: I was asked to stand still with my arms out at which point one of the unusually tall men had me spread my legs so that he and another man, who was also over six feet tall, could pat them while yet another man ran one of those little counter-terrorism brush gizmos over my crotch and pocket area.

Were they checking for weapons, bombs, or tubes of nitroglycerin, or did they think that some members of the audience had something against Magic Mike XXL? I suppose what spooked me the most was the fact that these suited no-nonsense men went about their job with the cold, unfeeling precision of TSA agents.

Since when did The Prince Theater become an airport?

As I’m wont to do in such situations, I said something vaguely humorous like, "Is this movie really a non-stop flight to the Middle East?" But nobody was laughing. The suits had no sense of humor and even seemed to resent the collective enthusiasm among patrons in the lobby that often precedes Showtime. Even the stoic looking Asian woman who collected my ticket after the suits had their way with me and who I recognized from past film festivals, had a glum, worried look on her face.

Inside the theater, I noticed additional lines of security near many of the aisles. At the entrance to our aisle a security guy who looked to be seven feet tall had his eyes glued in our direction. Here and there I noticed more relaxed looking guards, most of them women with long, curly hair. While some of these women didn’t seem to be taking their job as seriously as the men, they were still eerily "Watchtower" watchful.

When my friend decided that he should go to the men’s room before the start of the film, one of the security guys told him that nobody was allowed to use the rest rooms "at this time."

Now, I’ve been going to the movies for some forty-five years but I’ve never been told that the urinals are off limits.

"It’s not like Hilary Clinton is in the lobby," I said to my friend, "This is just a movie, after all!"

Finally, the lights went down and movie goers heard a faux theatrical explosion as ten male strippers appeared on stage while a few others popped up in the audience area. They were vastly overbuilt muscle thug types with huge arms and torsos but skinny legs. They proceeded to rip off their T-shirts and throw them into the audience as the screaming women collectively raised their cell phones to take pictures. The strippers then proceeded to gyrate, somersault, twist, twirl and dance, as one or two even leapt out into the audience and crawled over the seats. One guy in a bikini bottom or codpiece crawled past me in a paroxysm of ecstasy. I had to duck to avoid a body slam.

Then, as suddenly as it all began, the strippers disappeared and the movie began. It was Magic Mike time, meaning the story of "a male stripper teaching a younger performer how to party, pick up women, and make easy money."

Like the on-stage strippers, the movie strippers had overbuilt disproportionate bodies and talked as if they had bubble gum stuck in their mouths. Magic Mike, the star, even wore a backwards baseball cap as if it was 1995. These beefy guys had all left their jobs and private lives to take time off to be with their stripper buddies for one last road trip before their bodies fell apart or turned to fat from weightlifting.

In the story they travel around in an old food delivery truck straight out of Philly’s Vendy Awards, and camp in out of the way places. On a beach they macho it up by passing a football around but then suddenly they find themselves in Mad Mary’s, a drag queen hangout where, inexplicably, the toughest of them consents to dressing up like Carmen Miranda during the group striptease.

Throughout the film I looked for a correlation between police or suited security men and the action on-screen. Despite the fact that the men have wild escapades and even get into an auto accident on a country road, not one cop surfaces. These guys do what they want, crashing southern society parties and building bonfires in open fields, but the face of authority-- totalitarian authority-- is strangely absent.

The on screen absurdities get even zanier, especially when it came to scenes of the female audiences at the striptease shows. The women are presented as "ordinary" women you might see at CVS or Applebee’s although many are overweight and quick to giggle, blush and scream when the overbuilt male torsos strut their stuff. One might describe these ladies as readers of romance novels on methamphetamine.

The erotic mayhem on screen had the effect of loosening up the Prince’s security system because my friend was finally allowed to go to the bathroom. Yet as soon as he returned I noticed a security usher (a suit?) aiming a bright flashlight over a certain segment of the audience. Was something amiss? Did they find that nitroglycerin?

Most likely the suit (or usher) was investigating a potential cell phone violator who was attempting to film the Warner Brothers production from an iPhone. In any event, it proved to be a false alarm, especially since this crowd was really well behaved. Large groups of young women in business attire carrying expensive iPhones and on a major giggle tare don’t need an Israeli-Palestinian style clamp down.

They really….don’t.

As one who has seen hundreds of plays in the city, I’m used to requests to audiences to "please turn off all cell phones and gadgets before the show begins." Usually these requests are made politely and/or humorously, but when the announcement was made at The Prince it had emotional echoes of The Red Guard in old Russia.

So what, dear readers, has happened to the venerable Prince? Has it turned into a frog? Or has the theater, unbeknownst to us, merged with Philadelphia International Airport?

When this overlong, unedited movie was finally finished, guests had to make their way through another ring of security, only this time the suits seemed more relaxed, no doubt happy that the despicable, terror-prone crowd was finally going home.

The Confederate Flag (The Local Lens, Spirit Newspapers)

As a kid I was a Civil War buff and I loved visiting an old burned out Civil War era chapel near my parents’ house. This old stone chapel was set off by itself in a small clearing in the middle of a forest.

Next to the chapel were two graves. Buried there were two Civil War soldiers, both from the Union army, with their names and dates of birth and death barely distinguishable on the disintegrating grave stones.

These two, long-passed Union soldiers captured my imagination, especially since the area around the chapel was not an official cemetery.

Civil War inspired imagery and pop culture was everywhere in the 1960s. There was even a popular half hour television show called “The Rebel” starring Nick Adams—a friend and alleged lover of actor James Dean. The show centers around a displaced ex-Confederate soldier, Johnny Yuma, who wandered from town to town after the defeat of Robert E. Lee. Displaced Johnny didn’t seem to have a job, possibly because he refused to take off his gray Confederate uniform, which he wore on nearly every show. He would wander into a strange town, find a place to spend the night, adventures ensuing along the way—and with his rebel status, not all of them pleasant.

What made the story of Johnny Yuma so compelling for me was his incessant journal writing. Throughout the drama the viewer saw him sitting under a tree or in a hotel room writing in his journal. At the end of the show he would gather his few personal belongings, hop on his horse and then head out into the wilderness, a lost soul without a home.

The Confederate flag played a big part in “The Rebel.” As a Yankee identifying kid, I had little respect for the Confederate flag. Chester County, where I grew up, was hardly the South; But one you could always find a Confederate flag or two in a few sections of the county—painted on the side of barns or found on pick-up trucks.

The message I gathered was that the lovers of this flag were bitter over the South losing the war. But I found great irony in the fact that the people who brandished the Confederate flag were also the most vehemently patriotic Americans. In the late 60s these same Confederate flag bearers would go on to support the Vietnam War and many of them were adamant followers of the My Country Right or Wrong philosophy. There were bumper stickers then that read: “America: Love it or Leave It.”

Watching the Democratic National Convention on television as a boy I saw scores of Confederate flags on the convention floor.

Growing up, the Confederate flag represented ignorance and a ruinous southern redneck mentality. I didn’t like the flag and I couldn’t understand how it was allowed to fly over various southern state capitol buildings.

But can one loathe the Confederate flag without wishing to ban it from public display

As a kid, I used to canvass the neighborhood with a petition from my parish church which urged the banning of certain movies. These were the days when Catholics had to abide by the Church’s list of condemned movies. Of course it makes no sense why the Church would want everyone in society to abide by its in-house movie decency rules. “The Pawnbroker,” with Gene Hackman, was a big offender in those days because it was the first American mainstream film in which a woman bared her breasts. “The Pawnbroker” was a condemned but I went and saw it anyway.

Books like Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” “Candy” by Terry Southern and numerous poems by Allen Ginsberg were also being banned. These were the days when Banned in Boston was known throughout the nation. In the early 1990s, I even got my own taste of censorship when a book I wrote, “The Boy on the Bicycle,” was banned in Ireland.

It is no secret that flags can be strangely multi-symbolic. They can represent different things to different people at different times in history. For the Vietnam War protesters of the 1960s and 70s, the Stars and Stripes stood for genocide, imperialism and napalm; while, to others it stood for freedom, fighting Communism and democracy. Each side had its own definition of the flag’s true symbolic meaning.

When Puritan preachers in New England held bibles high as they hung or burnt witches they saw the bible as a symbol of righteous punishment. There are those who have used scripture to condone the horrors slavery, the subjection the women or the persecution of gay people. But what do we miss when we attribute the source of this hate onto the object itself rather than ourselves?

When certain passages in The Quran lead some in the Muslim world to blow up buildings, does this mean the text itself is evil and should be banned? Or do these actions say more about ourselves than they do about any object.

And what about those who endlessly consume Nietzsche only to  commit suicide because, like Nietzsche, they came to the conclusion that life is meaningless and futile? Should Nietzsche’s writings be banned for the actions they inspire?

Because my mother’s youngest brother, at 18 years of age, was captured, tortured and killed by the Japanese in a South Pacific island during WW II, should I incorporate that tragedy into a hatred of the Japanese flag? Should I avoid Japanese restaurants?

How should we navigate between our actions, our history, the powerful emotional symbolism that we bestow onto objects, our various and diverse stories?

I say, don’t ban the Confederate flag but work to make that flag’s sinister implications (or symbol) archival and irrelevant.

Let’s work to give a new meaning to those crossbars of stars.

                                    ICON City Beat June 2015

 Political correctness stunted honest opinions after PTC’s press opening of Brownsville song (b-side for tray) by Kimber Lee. People were afraid to say they didn’t like this tale of a teenage black boy from the ghetto who works at Starbucks but who is then killed in the streets. The play tries hard to be original but in the end its predictability (The New York Times lamented the play’s “well worn paths”) and erratic timeline juxtapositions made us think of the word juvenile.  More reality TV and Hallmark After School Special than classic theater, we realize that genius theatre companies like PTC must fail from time to time.  

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s annual 2015 Founders Award gala at the Union League brought us face to face with art critic Edie Newhall who told us about her ancestor, Charles Godfey Leland, Philly’s own Aleister Crowley who wrote books on witches, wrote for The Evening Bulletin and was a friend of Oscar Wilde’s. Novelist Sue Monk Kidd, author of “The Invention of Wings” (an Oprah Book Club selection) was this year’s award winner, while HSP board member Alice Lea Tasman walked away with the Heritage Award. Gerry Lenfest, fresh from his Attila the Hun Inquirer debacle in which he overturned the newspaper’s endorsement of Jim Kenny for Tony Williams, showed no remorse for his sins when he took to the podium. What’s this world coming to when money outshines integrity?  (Later reports indicated that the Kenny campaign had mispresented what happened at The Inky. It was NOT Gerry Lenfest who strong-armed the Editorial Board.) 

 Fran Lebowitz once said that she never reads the works of 22 year old writers. The idea is to go up the age scale, not down, she says, though she’s mum on the work of young, emerging visual artists. While soaking up art auction items at the recent Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) gala, we ran into the Switzerland-born Nadia Kunz, a board member of the Da Vinci Art Alliance Gallery, who showed us her bright as Easter hand made baby clothes. We hate baby clothes on general principal, but the twenty-something couple we caught eyeing Kunz’s cute as pie fabrications seemed to be having second thoughts about a commitment to childlessness. We chatted with Madrid-born artist Maria R. Schneider, and later ran into Deb Miller who spiced up Theater Exile’s superb Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Plays and Players when she insisted that her donated wine be served to patrons at the post production reception. While Plays and Players may love their cash cow bar, when wine is donated, the idea is not to pull a Gerry Lenfest.  

    

  

     On the scene of the Amtrak tragedy, Mayor Nutter was adamant: The projectiles that hit a number of trains on the same bank of tracks 30 minutes before Train 188’s derailment were inconsequential and irrelevant. As reporters continued to grill him on the subject he softened his tone but it was too late: His Honor’s old arrogance had returned like a boomerang. It’s called speaking before knowing the facts. Projectiles are thrown objects, stones or rocks, and one or more hit a northbound Amtrak Acela train while another smashed through the driver’s window of a Septa R7 Trenton-bound train. The R7 window smattering was so severe passengers had to be transferred to a bus. Acela train passengers recall hearing a huge crash when that train was hit. Septa’s Chestnut Hill Local has a rich projectile history: Two shattered windows a month has been this line’s monthly average for years. For decades the projectile problem has been dismissed as the shenanigans of “rogue kids,” but it’s time to up the ante and increase the penalties for open warfare.    

   At The Print Center’s Book Launch for poets Thomas Devaney and Joanna Fuhrman, we met Philly’s most famous woman poet, Eleanor Wilner and then chatted with poet Jim Cory before catching up with artist Diane Burko. From there it was a short ride to the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s Heritage Day where the flavor was definitely Saudi Arabian, since one of this year’s award winners was “His Excellency” Abdulaziz Al-Zamil, chairman of the Zamil Group Holding Company and a leader in Saudia Arabia’s chemical industry. The exoticism continued when we met a blonde American girl who now lives in Dubai and who said she has plenty of freedom there, including wearing her bikini to the beach. She corrected our misperceptions about the place and told us that Dubai freedoms were just as liberal as they are in New York, except that you can’t have sex on the beach, which also happens to be true in Florida.  Our evening ended at the Nationalities Services Center Global Tastes Award gala at the Reading Terminal, NSC has been helping immigrants and refugees since 1921. This year’s Margaret Harris Award went to Ballard Spahr LLP for their pro bono work in support of NSC.   

Spirit Newspapers: Philly's New Prison

Jails: If You Build It, They Will Come – The Local Lens

BY THOM NICKELS | JUNE 11, 2015

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“If you build it, they will come.”

I’m talking about a new prison for the City of Philadelphia in the Holmesburg section of the city. If you’ve ever traveled to Holmesburg in the Northeast, you know that this area has been heavily targeted as a blight zone filled with a waste treatment plant and a number of prisons near State Road.

While I feel sorry for the residents of Holmesburg—prisons tend to be ugly architecturally—I have to wonder where these residents were when the powers that be started to turn this section of the city into Prison Central. I can’t imagine residents of the Riverwards allowing this to happen in their neighborhoods.

Let’s go back to the year 2007. At that time, Churchill Development, a Bridgewater, New Jersey developer, announced plans to build Independence Point, a $460 million residential community. Sounds like a good idea, right? Churchill had purchased 100 acres of the State Road land from an organization called Northern Associates. Although the project was initially greeted with great enthusiasm, plans for that residential community never materialized. The property wound up in the hands of BNP Paribos of New York. At that point it was valued at $7.3 million.

There was no movement for a number of years until Philadelphia City Councilman Bobby Henon had a “dunghill mountaintop” vision (this would be the opposite of a Martin Luther King, Jr. vision) to engineer a City Council bill giving a green light to the city’s Commission of Public Property to buy the land for another prison. Apparently, Henon sensed he would get city support because Mayor Nutter had already earmarked $7.8 million for the Philadelphia Prison System to replace the House of Corrections, which had been in use since 1927.

City Council’s Committee on Public Property, having swallowed the Henon Kool Aid, voted to approve the bill to buy 58 acres of the riverfront land to build a new prison to replace the old jail.

The news of City Council’s initial approval for another prison caused me to rewrite that famous Emma Lazarus line:“Give me your tired, your poor, your johns and prostitutes: Give me your weed, Oxycontin and Percocet peddlers, and all deadbeat dads. Give me also the wretched refuse of the littered streets: hard drug dealers, parole violators, obstructers of sidewalks and traffic ticket non-payers….Send even the homeless to the Tower of Philadelphia (modeled after The Tower of London), so they can lift their lamp beside the Holmesburg waste treatment plant.”   

The city was eager to spend $7,265,299 for the 7777 State Road purchase from the company that now owned the land, a carpetbagger operation called Philadelphia Loan Associates, LLC, a New York-based group that should be fined for using the name Philadelphia.

But here’s the creepiest rub of all: The New York carpetbaggers bought the property for $100 (the price of a one way Amtrak ticket to New York) last year, and then sold it back to the city for the 7-digit figure mentioned above.

Is this not the most Machiavellian of backroom deals, perhaps completed with cigar smoke, poker chips and thuggish guards carrying loaded .45 revolvers?

After a public outcry, Councilman Henon suspended Bill 150406. But suspended does not mean eliminated—the Bill could be acted on before Council’s summer recess. Whatever happens, it is almost too late to save this section of the Northeast, which has seen their old factories and warehouses east of I-95 torched, and the implementation of so much public housing that much of the old tax base there had fled for greener shores.

A few questions worth asking are why the city needs to build so many prisons, who are we throwing in jail, and why?

While I don’t have any friends in prison, many years ago I once spent a night in jail when a police van picked me up in Center City because the cops were looking for a red haired suspect. Faster than you can say “climate change,” I was ordered into the back of the van where I was shocked to find ten other confused-looking guys, all of them with red hair. Together we were taken to the Roundhouse then put in a lineup while a witness behind a one-way glass panel examined our faces. There I stood nervously until the witness in question decided that she could not identify anybody in the lineup. Then the group of us was summarily dismissed and told to find our way home.

In those days I was naïve and expected an apology like, “Sorry to have inconvenienced you. Would you like a lift home?”

Being in a lineup was everything I’d seen on TV: You stand on an elevated platform or stage with the other suspects. You look straight ahead. You do not smile or grimace. In front of you is the big, dark glass panel behind which the victim or victims of the crime scrutinize your face. Tension mounts like the buildup of steam in a shower stall. If there are chorus lines in Hell, this was it. I don’t recommend it as an “experience.”

In my travels around the Riverwards, I’ve heard far too many people say that they know somebody on parole, or in prison. I think it is sad that so many people are behind bars for drug related offenses.

While the United States accounts for just 5 percent of the world’s population, it houses 25 percent of the world’s prison population. That is an astounding amount. These numbers do not reflect a rise in violent crime but in the number of drug offenders. In fact, the numbers of incarcerated drug offenders has risen 1200 percent since 1980. Today there are more than 500,000 people in the nation’s prisons for drug-related offenses. The booming state prison population in Pennsylvania has grown by 21 percent in just 6 years: From 37,995 in 2001 to more than 49,300 in 2009. It is far higher today.

Meanwhile, as the economy continues to nose dive, petty (potentially violent) crime seems to be on the upswing. Last year a neighbor of mine was stopped on the street by three people who lunged at her from a parked car. As a side note, beware of people seated in parked cars pretending to be listening to music. These interlopers from another neighborhood pointed a gun at her and demanded the groceries she was carrying, a small bag of snacks from the local deli. They also took three dollars. Had she resisted or screamed for help, God knows what would have happened to her. People have died for less than three dollars.

These are the people who belong in prison, not the Oxycontin and Percocet dealers who pass their tiny discounted plastic bags behind parked cars in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot.

Obviously, the criminal justice system needs massive overhauling. A good first start would be to not build prisons in just one area of the city.

The Wide, Wide World of Independent Internet Churches

You can thank the Internet for the birth of so many independent Catholic churches. Google the phrase and you will get a huge configuration of church names like Liberal Catholic, Apostolic Catholic, the American National Catholic Church, Independent Old Catholic Church of America, United American Catholic Church and the Anglican Catholic Church. These don’t even scratch the surface.

Most of these churches are generally progressive, “inclusive” churches with female priests and bishops; married clergy; lesbian archbishops, and so on. Some independent churches will be traditional and conservative, but this is generally not the case.

I once wrote a column for another newspaper about my ordination to the priesthood in July of 2001. This may sound like a funny thing coming from this newspaper columnist; I hardly qualify for sainthood. Still, it remains a fact that in 2001 I took an Amtrak to New York state and received the traditional laying on of hands from both a bishop and an archbishop, from Israel, with Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, Anglican and Russian Orthodox ties.

The name of the Church that ordained me covered the waterfront for umbrella inclusion: the Anglican Catholic Byzantine Orthodox Church. How’s that for a mouthful? I came across ACBOC after an intense Internet search and sent an email to the presiding bishop, inquiring about ordination. The bishop who ordained me said that my ordination was valid, despite the fact that the church had a primarily Internet-only presence with priests whose home doubles as a parish. For the most part, these home parishes include a basement or a garage that has been converted to a small chapel. While I never went to seminary, I’ve spent half a lifetime reading theological and church history texts, so becoming a priest didn’t seem that far-fetched. After ordination, my bishop gave me a chalice, a friend in Montreal made me a chasuble and a stole; I was ready to go!

But go where?

Shortly after moving to the Riverwards from Center City in 2002, I started saying Mass for the Sister Peter Claver Catholic Worker House in Kensington. These were home table Masses in the bland and predictable Novus Ordo rite, and they always preceded dinner. While I had great affection for the CW crowd, the liturgies were a hodgepodge of influences reminiscent of the scattered method of writing used by William S. Burroughs. Pop music CDs often supplemented prayers and chants, and generally the Mass prayers were altered to fit the latest theological fashions: God the Father became Mother and Father God, and some celebrants even called God “She” or  “Cosmic Mother.”

Depending on the personal style of the priest saying Mass, you could expect almost anything when it came to communion. Use of traditional communion wafers was rare. Often it was seedless rye bread or chunks from a Thriftway Kaiser roll, reports of occasional oatmeal cookies, and grape juice for wine. Despite these innovations, the CW participants were role models when it came to practicing what you preach, like loving your neighbor as yourself. When I said Mass at the CW House I came equipped with real communion hosts, a crucifix and a traditional stole.

In time, the CW house became so theologically out-there that anyone with a sincere intention to say Mass was allowed to do so; the thought was that every person sitting around the table was a member of the priesthood of believers, suggesting that everyone was a priest.

The bishop who ordained me would periodically ask how I was getting along in my new role.  “It’s lonely.” I would tell him. “Saying Mass for a congregation of one is weird. It’s like the sound of one person clapping.” Initially, the bishop had hoped that there would be lines of people outside my house on Sunday mornings. “Look,” I reminded him, “nobody is going to leave Saint Anne’s parish on Lehigh Avenue for my humble coffee table church. I don’t even have acolytes.”

Other difficulties arose when people quizzed me about how ACBOC worked. Many were perplexed when it came to the “mechanics” of the independent Catholic movement.

“Oh,” they’d say, “So it’s Catholic but it’s not really Catholic as in part of the Archdiocese or under the Pope?”

“No, our bishop is in upstate New York. We respect the Pope, but we’re not under him necessarily; we follow the Catholic tradition.”

“You follow the Catholic tradition but you are not 100 percent Catholic? I don’t understand.”

Others wanted to know if ACBOC was headquartered in a city cathedral and I’d tell them that the only cathedral was a large garage chapel in a New York country split level home. Things got worse when people wanted an explanation of what I meant when I said that our little Internet church had a valid apostolic succession. All too often I faced empty, incredulous stares.

Nonetheless, I was still a priest prepared for anything. In my house I had a ready stock of communion hosts that I purchased from a religious goods shop in South Philly. The unconsecrated hosts had IHS inscribed on them. At one point I even debated buying a cassock but, in the end, decided that I didn’t want to walk around the neighborhood in it; it would only cause more confusion.

“What do you mean you’re not a Catholic priest but a priest with Catholic, Anglican, Old Catholic and Russian roots? What does that mean?”

“It means,” I could have answered, “that my little church contains multitudes.”

One day, I was asked to attend a Mass at an Old Catholic Church in Lansdowne. This was a traditional  church with a large congregation, mostly families. Some weeks later,  when the parish priest was away, I said Sunday Mass for the entire congregation. Most of the Masses in the Lansdowne church were Catholic-Evangelical hybrids, a Catholic liturgy with Methodist music and an occasional female priest thrown in for good measure. The parish was up on the social, cultural and political issues of the day; it was politically correct to a fault. My first homily wasn’t bad, but I ended up wishing that I could have read a short story instead. I hated pointing fingers and preaching to people. I knew I had to find a new way to preach.

Meanwhile, my bishop was sending me disturbing news about the interpersonal wars going on among the hundreds of independent Internet Catholic churches. These churches were like jealous siblings or vengeful spouses intent on destroying the competition. The stories I heard were quite shocking, everything from the intentional spreading of malicious gossip, tarnishing the reputations of competing churches to full-on lawsuits. Our own church was even being sued by another independent church with a similar name. Under threat of a lawsuit, our church had to come up with another name; the bishop was hard at work trying to think of something that could work.

The small mindedness of all this shocked me and, in a single moment, I understood why I once considered myself agnostic; there were just too many Pharisees in the world of organized religion. It was astounding to me how a group of people purporting to believe in the message of Christ could act like the corrupt corporations in an Ayn Rand novel.

When the bishop emailed me the new name of our church, I had mixed feelings. Yes, the bishop was a good person. Yes, I liked and respected him; but the name he came up with sounded almost farcical.  The Orthodox Church of the Near Isles just didn’t sound right and I couldn’t take it seriously.

I emailed the bishop, “Please, do not use this name. It makes me think of Hobbit stories by J.R.R. Tolkien or the hair washing scene in the movie South Pacific.” But my protests went unheard. The church website was changed and from then on everything went downhill. ABCOC is now a shadow of its former self.

Not long after this, strange things started to happen in the independent church world; there were schisms and breakaways every five minutes. A priest would have an argument with his bishop and then leave in a huff to join another church. Or bishops would make their best friends bishops, then outfit them in lavish pectoral crosses and red robes. It didn’t take me long to realize that I clearly had entered a lunatic asylum where the inmates were merely playing Church.

I wanted out. I had had enough. But along the way, really good things happened. I married three nice couples. One was near the creek at the Inn at Valley Green, another in a large Center City church with over 200 invited guests. After this, I folded up and put away my faux chasuble and joined an established Northern Liberties parish as a pew occupying parishioner.

                                              May City Beat 2015

We spoke with Lenny Bazemore, Manayunk’s unofficial mayor, about his gallery on Main Street, and whether being a businessman has affected his own work as an artist. Lenny, who rarely seems stressed, told us that the gallery has allowed him to expand his skills to use design as a medium in addition to his painting, sculpting, drawing and photography. “Having the gallery, gives me tremendous joy in helping other artists promote their work,” he says. “My focus on developing the gallery and working with other artists has diverted my attention away from doing my own art.  Now that I have a full-time sales person in the gallery, I intend on devoting more time to engaging in my own artistic endeavors.” Lenny sees The Bazemore as a “peaceful space where all people can come and experience diverse forms of art,” and says that this is reflected in the gallery’s programming. But while The Bazemore seems to have it all, what about longevity in a world where galleries close everyday? The answer may have something to do with ownership. “Owning the building,” Lenny says, “has helped us have a more sustainable business model.”  Be on the lookout for Lenny’s new endeavor, an organic juicery and café called The Juice Merchant. “We will serve juices, smoothies, salads, soups, sandwiches, wraps, hummus and specialty deserts. Our mission is to provide organic, healthy food options that are affordable.  The Juice Merchant team will be led by our head chef and manager  Monica Sellecchia. Monica is a holistic foods chef who trained at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York City. Her speciality is in all-natural, vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free eating.   

  

  Can Love Park’s flying saucer building, or the Fairmont Park Welcome Center, be saved? In the 1970s this Mid-Century modern structure, then called the Philadelphia Hospitality Center, was a “first aid” station for stranded travelers who needed emergency cash and/or a one way ticket home. This iconic, quirky UFO building opened in 1960 and represented Philadelphia’s crawl out of Blue Law obscurity and downtown blight, when the City of William Penn boasted that it did not have a night life. City Officials today anticipate the reconfiguration of JFK Plaza but they’ve left the door open for bulldozers to level the Saucer if a new purpose for the building can be found. Mayor Nutter and Council President Clarke both say that the Saucer “may or may not be included in the final design.” That doesn’t sound hospitable to us at all.  

New York Magazine’s senior art critic Jerry Saltz had audience members howling at the normally sedate Barnes Foundation. The ex-truck driver’s salty critique of art and life included Zen advice bombs like: the worst thing any artist could do is to feel envy or jealously at another artist’s good fortune. It was while driving cross country that the self educated Saltz realized he could call himself an art critic. This was easy to do, he said, because the art world is so disorganized that nobody in it knows what they are doing. He mentioned the excessively macho and alcoholic Abstract Expressionists and Andy Warhol. Warhol described the Expressionists as “hard-driving, two-fisted types who’d grab each other and say things like ‘I’ll knock your f--king teeth out’ and ‘I’ll steal your girl.’ The toughness,” Warhol wrote, “was part of a tradition; it went with their agonized, anguished art. They were always exploding and having fistfights about their work and their love lives.” Despite his soft voice, Warhol never ran from a confrontation. This is why his pals dubbed him Drella, a name that was a mix of Cinderella and Dracula.

  

At UArts Art Unleashed 2015 we hung out with E-Moderne Gallerie’s Edward Fong who told us he needed to escape the bands of roving artists tracking him down for exhibition space. Fong joined us in an obscure nook near the kitchen where the food servers congregated. He told us he was looking forward to E-Moderne’s world class Haiti exhibit in May but expressed reservations about why Philadelphians buy the kind of art they do. International art doesn’t go over big in Philly, he said; what sells in Berlin or Paris stays unsold on the wall in Philly, but put up a casual art show and these popular pieces fly off the wall. “I don’t understand it,” he mused, just as another artist drew him out of hiding. What to say to this fine man from China besides hang in there, baby?  Will “Don’t flee to New York yet, Ed!” work?       

The National LGBT 50^th Anniversary Celebration will culminate with a Constitution Center exhibit (Speaking Out For Equality). There will be panel discussions and festivities from July 2-5 near Independence Hall. The movement’s come a long way since the 1970s when protestors shouted down passage of the city’s first Gay Rights Bill with cries of, “Gays have rotten teeth!” We find it strange that most of the panelists like Bishop Gene Robinson, Judy Shepard, Marc Stein, Eliza Byard, Michael Long and Eric Marcus are out of towners. They may be substantive voices, but a “localized” event of this magnitude should employ a few locally based historians, activists and writers.  

 When Philly.com ran a story about a protest at a college lecture because of that lecturer's views on rape, we wondered why the protestors were angry.  Left out of the report was a crucial element:  what were the lecturer's views that made her so controversial?  How could any reporter miss such a thing? The reader finished the story not knowing what made the protesters angry.  We also have problems with what passes as "breaking news” these days.  Do we really need to know about every high school teacher who exchanges mash notes or who has a love affair with one of his or her older students? Are these really mega stories on par with the latest ISIS attacks? Journalism, it seems, has yet to find a respectable middle ground when it comes to this topic.

We headed over to the All That’s Jazz Art in City Hall exhibit to find more than a hundred people gobbling up chicken gumbo, French fries, cookies and boxed wine. This was Philadelphia at its grassroots finest, despite the Moroccan street bazaar atmosphere. Curated by Richard J. Watson, we were delighted when the dead poet Allen Ginsberg “returned” in the form of a Philly artist, Alan Ginsburg, with his “java Jive,” a coffee table sculpture, and a charcoal drawing, “The Piano Movers,” inspired by a crowded, impromptu happening in a performing space.   

  

Midnight Journey: With Sam and the Homeless Pretenders

The Local Lens

Published• Wed, May 06, 2015

By Thom Nickels

I’m walking through Center City with Sam, a man from Reno, Nevada. It’s 2AM, the bars are closed, and Sam doesn’t want to call the night quits and go back to his hotel to prepare for his 7AM flight home. He wants more of Philly.

"The bars are closed, Sam," I said. "This is it, unless you’re a member of a private club."

Five feet away from us a cab is waiting for customers. The driver overhears our conversation and adds his two-cents:

"In New York City the bars stay open all night!"

"They’re open in Reno, too," Sam said, alluding to Reno’s casino life. "Closing down at two seems awfully early."

The cab driver and Sam start talking and soon the driver says he’ll take Sam to the airport when the sun comes up. They exchange numbers and, as a bonus, the driver promises to give Sam a wake-up call.

I’ve been with Sam for a total of four hours and I already feel like we’re best friends. When he suggests that I hop into the cab and take it to Fishtown, I do just that. The El has already closed for the night, and this is a much better option than waiting for the shuttle bus. Twenty-five minutes ago Sam put a twenty dollar bill in my hand for a taxi because I told him that I missed the last El but that the shuttle bus was "just fine."

"No it’s not," he said.

Not only did Sam, "The Stranger," give me taxi fare, he bought me dinner at Moriarty’s Pub on Walnut Street. We had a lot to share in Moriarty’s but it was mostly Sam who did the talking. I had asked if everyone from Reno was that nice.

As I hop into the taxi, I give Sam a hug and watch as the seventh or eighth homeless person of the night comes up to him and asks for help.

"What’s he going to say to this one?" I wonder.

Let’s backtrack a little:

Five hours earlier I was hanging out with my friends Lena, Jane and Brad at an art reception at Freeman’s Auction House. After the show, we went to Cosi’s near the Academy House for coffee and dessert.

When Brad leaves Cosi, Lena, Jane and I start talking about the relative nature of sexual attraction. We’re getting into it, French-café style, when a well dressed passerby, a dark haired guy about 35, turns in our direction and says, "What’s this about attraction?"

This is more than just a random question. The stranger is really interested, so much so that Lena offers him a seat and suddenly it’s a four-way with a new friend. Sam tells us that he’s a software engineer from Reno, and that he comes to Philly once a year on business and that he looks forward to the trip like a kid looks forward to Christmas. Philly, he says, is positively the greatest city. This is all Jane needs to hear. She invites everybody up to her 36th floor condo so that Sam can see some spectacular views of the city.

Fifteen minutes later the four of us are staring out over the city lights on Jane’s balcony with its bull’s eye view of the roof of the Academy of Music.

Sam takes our little group by storm. He’s a one man charisma machine. He has us hypnotized; we are thoroughly under his spell. We linger a long time at Jane’s place, but when we disperse it is only Sam and I who wind up back at Cosi’s.

"Let’s get some dinner, dude," Sam said to me. "I’m starving."

While deciding where to eat—it’s not easy at 1AM—Sam tells me about a homeless man who asked him for money earlier in the evening. "There he is right over there," he said, pointing to a guy in a North Face jacket and white sneakers, scurrying up a small side street to pee.

"I was going to get him something to eat," Sam said, "but then he started saying how he only wanted money for his hungry kids, lying, talking about how starved they were, and how he was evicted from his place and then fired from his job and forced to live on the streets without food. It’s bullshit. He’s got money. Just look at those hundred-dollar sneakers. I’d have more respect for him if he just said he needed the money for beer or drugs."

Not soon after Sam tells me the man’s story, the guy waves to us and crosses the street. Suddenly, it’s high-five buddy-time. North Face wants to know what we’re doing, implying he’d be happy to tag along. Sam toys with him, asks him if he’s gotten food yet for those starving kids but the guy says no, he hasn’t gotten the money to feed them, or money to buy himself something to eat.

"So what you doin?" he asked Sam.

Sam says he’s on his way to eat, after which the man asks for money. "So what you guys doin’ later?" he asked.

In Moriarty’s, Sam tells me about his life as a foster child, how he was raised by a Catholic family, a Mormon family and then a Jehovah’s Witness family. He relates tales of alcoholism, abuse, drug addiction, and stories about how he used to have nothing to his name. Now he travels throughout the US with an expense account.

After dinner, we’re out on the street again because Sam likes to soak up the sights and sounds of Philly. Another homeless man approaches.

This one is all about "Hey, what’s up," but the good cheer ends at the mention of money. He’s an older guy, kind of doughy and soft looking, not tough at all. He has the look of a perpetual victim but underneath his sad eyes I detect a snake in the grass. He’s tall and big boned and looks extremely well fed.

Sam questions him. He lays it on thick. How did you arrive at this point in your life? What happened? The guy said he doesn’t have a job. His deadpan monotone is even more annoying than the look on his face. Like the first guy, his sneakers look brand new. I keep thinking Sam is going to give him something because of all the questions he asks, but this doesn’t happen. The guy doesn’t ask if he can hang out with us but shuffles off to the next person, his sad face even looking sadder than before.

Sam tells me about the time he was unemployed, although it wasn’t for a long time.

"These guys, you know," he said, "if they just put their willpower into finding work, any kind of work, they could do it. Even if that meant going down to the river and washing their face in the water in an attempt to get clean, then walking into a place and asking if there is anything they could do, sweeping floors, taking out the trash - anything, going from one place all day and never giving up and even going down to the river again and washing their face, over and over again, then looking for work the next day and the day after until something happened. They would find something if they did that. This kind of heavy focus would work. It would produce results but what happens with these guys is that they are not 100 percent serious. Panhandling becomes their career, and drugs or alcohol sidetracks them. Yeah, I like to play with them. I like to make them see themselves, but sometimes I will help them if I feel they’re real."

We take a walk up Latimer Street, then down Walnut and Locust and finally down 13th Street where we are interrupted by a skinny women in a ratty looking turban coming up the PATCO subway stairs. She catches Sam’s eye, and suddenly we are transported to the Wilma or the Suzanne Roberts stage.

"Guys, how you all doin? You know, this weather is nice but my husband beats me and my children have been sent away, and now I’m walkin’ around cause I can’t get home, everything’s been shut down, I’ve been goin’ around like this for hours, goin’ up and down these stairs, askin’ for help. I need to get back into singin’ and this band I was with…"

She mentions the name of the band but I am already not paying attention. I try to imagine her as a singer with a lily in her hair, or slanting a microphone sideways down to the floor as she belts out a jazz tune.

She unleashes more biographical information, but I have my back turned to her while gazing out onto 13th Street. The gay bars have let out and all hell is breaking loose. The quiet of the city has been broken. Sam and I walk up 13th Street, past Woody’s bar. Soon we are on Broad Street by the Doubletree Hotel, where Sam is staying. We stop and talk some more, getting philosophical now, when Sam notices another homeless guy sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk under a streetlight. "Who the hell would sleep there?" he asked. "Do you see the way he keeps bobbing his head up and down, like he never allows it to touch the ground?" To me it seems like just another Philly scene, but Sam is fascinated. "We don’t have anything like this in Reno," he said, "People sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk. It’s incredible. Do you think he’s a spy? Do you think these homeless people have a spy network? Is that why all these homeless people are coming up to me?"

"He’s not a spy, Sam," I said to him, "This is just…Philly."

When Sam suggests that we go over and talk to the guy, I say yes because I want to see where he’s going with this. Up close to the sleeper, I can see that this is a serious case, someone who’s been on the streets for a while and drugged or drunk into unconsciousness. He has his head flat on the sidewalk, as it turns out—the bobbing of the head was just a reaction to a drug. Sam leans over him and asks if he is okay. He calls him "brother" and keeps repeating that he shouldn’t be sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk.

"Hey brother, hey brother," he said over and over again.

Finally, the man rouses. He thinks Sam is an undercover cop or a big-shot restaurant owner who wants him off his sidewalk. He doesn’t know that Sam is just a well dressed pussycat (who poses as a killer-type) from Reno. The guy stands up obediently when Sam urges him to find a dark, private alley where he can be cozy and safe. The guy is so stoned it is hard for him to talk or walk, and his jeans are falling down. He wobbles towards the curb. He’s too out of it to say anything except to ask for money.

A few minutes later we bump into the North Face jacket guy.

"Hey, my friend," Sam said, "Did you ever find something to eat?" Sam knows he’s not after food.

The guys says no, and then, like a robot, adds, "what you doin? You got a dollar?"

Sam tells him that he’s spent all his money on me.

It’s a joke, of course, fit for a cheap laugh, but by the end of our walk around the city I lost count of the numbers of homeless men we met, these creatures of the night, or so-called "expensive sneaker people down on their luck." Men who can’t or won’t find jobs, and to whom it will never occur to go down by the river, wash their face off in a symbolic baptism so that they can try to get into a different groove.