jogging down Ocean Drive
the patterns
on my Converse All-Stars
echo
the Art-Deco
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Sunday, May 3
8 hotels on Ocean Drive
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 03 May 2009 10:12 AM BST
Here's a collection of photos I took on Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, at the end of April (2009). I was fascinated by how tiny some of these art deco gems are. One morning, before the crowds and heat were up, I went for a run along Ocean Drive...
jogging down Ocean Drive the patterns on my Converse All-Stars echo the Art-Deco Wednesday, April 29
The Disco Haiga
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 29 Apr 2009 10:08 PM BST
So I'm in Miami at this swinging hot-spot and I see a business colleague – 'V' – to my side, and instead of dancing, she's texting on her Blackberry...
 Sunday, April 26
A little something extra for the weekend, sir?
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 26 Apr 2009 11:35 AM BST
I'm used to hotels providing free sewing kits but the Loews in Miami is the first one I've stayed in that also includes an 'intimacy kit'. However I think the wording on the back could be improved. Of all the chat-up lines ever tried, I think "Hello baby, come on up to my room, I've got 2 complimentary obstetrical towelettes and a tube of lubricating jelly" may be one of the least romantic on record. I should add that the kits are located in the mini-bar, between the vodka shots and the peanuts M&Ms – are we getting some kind of Freudian slippage here? Rest assured, the Gideons Bible is still in the drawer of the bedside table.
 Saturday, April 25
Back from Miami Beach
by
Charles Christian
on Sat 25 Apr 2009 12:05 PM BST
Just got back from a trip with the day job to Miami Beach. I'm in the process of putting together some words and pictures – but here are a first batch (in the recent photos column) – including a self-portrait. (Well it would be a self portrait if my name was Harley Davidson). If you want pictures of me getting visit, go to my Facebook page...
 Sunday, April 12
Saturday, April 11
Here's a new haiga
by
Charles Christian
on Sat 11 Apr 2009 10:51 PM BST
I took the picture in Miami International Airport this time last year – and have been wonderin' what to do with it since – the image just appealed – and then the idea for a haiku came along, so I photoshopped it into a haiga.
 Thursday, March 19
New haibun - I'm bitchin'
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 19 Mar 2009 01:42 PM GMT
Bitchin' after the gig And they were all ENORMOUS. There was one guy in jeans who's bottom must have taken up the entire stock of blue denim at the Levi Strauss factory for at least 6 weeks ! There was a woman, skinny as a rake, with two of the biggest daughters you've ever seen in your life. How come she never said "Hey girls, go easy on the Desperate Dan-sized portions of cow pie?" they were chowing down throughout the evening. Short smock-type dresses worn with solid tights or leggings were popular among the lurvely laydees – except everyone so clad was either self-consciously tugging at their hems to stop revealing their – in some instances planetary sized – arses or else trying to hitch up their tights to stop a bad attack of sagging gusset. Add in long pointy-toed shoes with Cruella de Vi high heels – causing their wearers to waddle, splay-footed like Charlie Chaplin's Tramp to avoid toppling over, and you can understand how the phrase 'fashion victim' originated. And when four of the biggest women got up to dance, I was just sooo glad we were in a basement bar... A grand night out Mmmm – the smell of fresh sweat and stale perfume Saturday, March 14
Instant karma
by
Charles Christian
on Sat 14 Mar 2009 02:13 PM GMT
 Karl Marx once wrote about religion being the opiate of the people. John Lennon sang about instant karma going to get you. Somewhere in between lies a reality where if people can't get high on what established religions have to offer them, they will create their own rituals and beliefs. And so we come to the Cross Bones burial grounds in the London district of Southwark. Fifteen years ago this was just another London Transport depot, lying on Redcross Way, which runs between Southwark Cathedral and Union Street. But, 500 years ago, it was an unconsecrated graveyard for 'single women' - which in those days was a euphemism for prostitutes. These working girls were known locally as 'Winchester Geese' because they were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester to operate in this area - which happened to lay outside the jurisdiction of the City of London authorities and so, as a consequence, became the capital's red light district. This lack of regulation was also the reason why Shakespeare and his players moved their Globe Theatre to Southwark. By the mid-Nineteenth Century however, the graveyard was totally overcrowded and closed for further burials. And that, apart from occasional desultory attempts to gain planning permission to redevelop the site, was it. End of story. Or, at least that would have been been the end of the story, except that in 1996, local writer John Constable revived the story of the Cross Bones graveyard, the Winchester Geese and what he called 'the outcast dead' for cycle of poems and plays known as The Southwark Mysteries. Performances of the Mysteries struck a chord, to the extent that every year since 1998, the gates leading into the London Transport depot have become the venue for a Halloween festival - complete with processions, candles, ribbons, flowers, shrines and offerings for the dead - that seems to have more in common with the Mexican Dia de Los Muertos day of the dead festivals (that and more than a smattering of neo-paganism and the Samhain festival) than anything a 16th century Bishop of Winchester would have ever envisaged taking place in his diocese on All Saints Eve. And so a new religion is born... supplying a fresh source of ecstasy to satisfy our age old cravings – and magical realism enters the real world. Saturday, March 7
Keeping things in perspective
by
Charles Christian
on Sat 07 Mar 2009 01:18 PM GMT
At a time when the western world is heading for financial meltdown - and that we'll soon be all existing on a level of BarterTown in the Mad Max III movie - except this time around there'll be no Tina Turner in a chain-mail frock - it's important to keep a proper sense of perspective - which is why I'm glad to see that this week my local newspaper devoted its entire front page to a story about an OAP who believes he owns the world's oldest living bunny - a rabbit that's 16 years old - the added irony here being in this part of the UK, rabbits are a pest and we have to hire trained sociopaths to trap, poison and/or shot them. It's all about perspective. Saturday, February 28
Don't look back
by
Charles Christian
on Sat 28 Feb 2009 08:43 PM GMT
In a 1989 interview, Bob Dylan commented that "The worst times of my life were when I tried to find something from the past. Like when I went back to New York for the second time. I didn't know what to do, everything had changed." Earlier this year I was on a business trip to New York and – having managed to blag myself a storytelling gig at the Cornelia Street Cafe – took advantage of some free time (and some halfway decent weather – my visit fell midway between two blizzards) to spend a Sunday exploring Greenwich Village. Unlike Dylan, this was my first time in the Village – however a lifetime of reading about the Beats, the folk-revival of the early 1960s and, to a lesser extent, the crime club novels of Kinky Friedman, had left me with an impression of what the Village had been like – and how I hoped it would still be. Armed with a copy of Bill Morgan's excellent 1997 but already frighteningly out of date guide book The Beat Generation in New York - a walking tour of Jack Kerouac’s city (City Lights Books) I made way down through Times Square, on past the Flat Iron Building and Madison Gardens and finally on into the Village, by way of New York University (NYU) and Washington Square.  Here’s a photgraph taken by Kaoru Sekine showing Allen Ginsberg reading poetry to a crowd in the park in the early-mid 1960s – there are even people sitting up in the trees, listening to him. Bob Dylan gave impromptu performances here when he first arrived in New York. It was also around this time that the police started to get heavy with unauthorised gatherings because 'folksingers have been bringing too many undesirable elements into the park.' Undesirable in this context meant primarily blacks and beatniks.  And now? When I got there, most of the park was off limits, the scene of a major landscaping, reconstruction and gentrification project – tho apparently the project has been stalled by legal disputes, because the plans involved cutting down some ancient trees. Like there should be trees in a park anyway! The small part of the park that is open is the circle of permanent chess tables on the south side – and a scruffy patch of earth on which New Yorkers take their dogs to shit. There was nobody playing chess that day – and by the look of the tables, now mainly occupied by sleeping tramps, nobody had played chess there for a long time. In fact New York’s attitude to parks and open spaces in best summed up by this sign. They could have saved themselves some paint by just writing Keep Away - and don’t even think of having any fun.  It used to be said the battle of Waterloo was won on the playingfields of Eton. Perhaps the corollary is revolutions are lost when the bourgeoise pave over the old playgrounds of dissent. Elsewhere? Well it was just like Swindon or Basildon. Indifferent buildings converted into nail manicuring and skin tanning boutiques. Just what is it New Yorker women and their fingernails? I was there on a Sunday afternoon in February – there were dozens of these talon salons – they were all open and they were all packed. True, you can still buy bongs and hash-pipes in Greenwich Village – but they are all of the mass-produced-in-a-factory-in-China-last-month-for-the-New-York-tourist-trade variety and about as authentic as the plastic policemen’s helmets they sell in kiosks in London’s Oxford Street. Admittedly some places haven’t changed. Here’s a picture of Bob Dylan and his then girlfriend Suze Rotolo taken in Jones Street, just before it joins 4th Street – positively – on a snowy day in early 1963.  And here’s the same shot taken on a not-quite-so-snowy day in early 2009. Only the cars have changed.  Another place, also apparently cut off from the passage of time, is Patchin Place, where e.e.cummings lived and worked for the better part of 40 years. It even retains (according to another handbook) ‘its 19th century gas street lamp – one of only two in New York City, and the only one that still gives light, though the light is now electric’. (I know, surely that makes it a plain vanila electric street lamp.) It’s also worth noting that when it comes to the current denizens of Patchin Place, artists are now outnumbered by therapists.  The cummings' appartment was in the cream painted building at the far end of the terrace on the right – it has the American equivalent of a blue heritage plaque on its outside wall now.  In the distance is the tower of the old Jefferson Market Courthouse – a building scheduled for demolition but saved by campaigning conservationists and is now a library. And this, is the tragedy of the place. Having been abandoned by the bourgeoise in the early 20th century, Greenwich Village went into decay and, because of its cheap accommodation, became a bohemian enclave of artists’ studios, musicians’ pads, coffee bars, jazz cafes, folk clubs, poetry scenes and late night dives. But, this creative success carried the seeds of its own destruction as the area’s ‘character’ began to attract back the middle classes. And, they not only set about conserving and gentrifying the area but they also helped push up property prices, forcing out all the artists and musicians who had given the district its character in the first place. Not content with that, these incomers also started complaining about the few remaining late night spots – demanding they turn the music down, close early and have their licences curtailed so they didn't disturb decent folk asleep in their beds. CBGBs, the home of punk rock on the corner of Bowery and Bleecker, closed in 2006. And when I visited this year, there were just two ‘original’ poetry/spoken word venues still operating – the Bowery Poetry Club (pretty much opposite where CBGBs used to be) and the Cornelia Street Cafe.  The coffee houses have gone. The clubs have gone. The bookstores have gone. And when I left the Cornelia Street Cafe, just after midnight on a snowy Wednesday morning in early February, the people had gone – I could have been the only living boy in New York. Business and the returning bourgeoise have squeezed the life out of Greenwich Village, turning it into a sterile shadow of its former glory. (Joyce Johnson, the author of the Beat era memoir Minor Characters – and a one time girlfriend of Kerouac – describes the fate of Greenwich Village as condo-ization.) The saddest sight I saw was a mural – correction a ‘bohemorama’ – outside a MortonWilliams supermarket. Describing the painting as being 'dedicated to all aspiring dreamers, outcasts, and gypsies drawn to Greenwich Village life' – the accompanying display board goes on to say 'You won’t be alone when you sit outdoors lunching on your sushi or salad bar delights. Not with the likes of Thelonius Monk, Jackson Pollock or Edgar Alan Poe poised just a few feet away!' (The whirring sound would be Jack Kerouac spinning in his grave.)  In case you are wondering, this part of the bohemorama depicts, clockwise from the top right: Allen Ginsberg. James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Edward Albee, Edna St Vincent Millay and William S Burroughs. And the most hopeful sight? The top righthand window of this New York University building on Fifth Avenue just before it enters Washington Square. Fifty years on and students are still displaying the ‘peace’ sign. Still protesting – and still hopeful – after all these years.  And that, to crib the title of one of Dylan's earlier songs, is the end of Charles Christian's Talkin' Greenwich Village Blues. |
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