pt at large

Walter Mosley Reads At The Brattle Theater

Walter Mosley Book Reading at The Brattle Theater, Cambridge, MA
March 24, 2010
Sponsored by The Harvard Bookstore, Mass. Ave., Cambridge,MA

Walter Mosley's got game. He’s in the first inning of a coast-to-coast book tour promoting his detective fiction novel “Known To Evil” and Boston’s one of his first stops. He’s smart, spontaneous, energetic, funny, and candid.

Listen to him when he gets rolling and you see where his characters come from. One minute he’s talking about Balzac and Zola, the next he’s riffing mile-a-minute street smack. The man straddles two worlds, white and black. Mosley could mix company in a cocktail party on the Upper East Side or in a sweaty gym in Harlem. He’s used to being the only black man in the room.
 
Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins, the character he invented for “Devil In A Blue Dress,” knew how to make his way through both worlds in post World War II America. The black private investigator was a WW II veteran who lived in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles (where Mosley was born in 1952). The book was made into a movie starring Denzel Washington. Mosley’s books, including ten more Easy Rawlins stories, have perched on the NY Times Best Seller list since then.
 
Those early novels were homage to his father's life in post World War II Los Angeles. “Black men have no history in literature and I wanted to write about them because their lives deserve discussion,” he says.

"In post WW II America, Easy Rawlins knew what was behind every door," Mosley says. "Black men knew where they fit in and where they did not. After writing eleven books in the Rawlins series, I said all I could say about him. He became anachronistic in the 21st century, ” he says about beginning a new series.
 
That’s where Mosley’s new character Leonid McGill got created. “I needed a 21st century hero. Leonid is like me. He’s built like me, he thinks like me. He doesn’t know what’s behind every door. The world of possibilities is more complex than Easy Rawlins’ world. I think we’re living in meta-racial America and don’t know it yet.”
 
By the time Mosley’s read the first two chapters of his latest book “Known To Evil,” the second book featuring his new hero Leonid McGill, we see exactly what he means.
 
Complex personal relationships, family constellations tied together by blood and circumstance, mixed racial marriages and affairs, plot lines including a younger generation with Leonid’s 17 year old step-son, and the New York underworld - we can see this is going to take a score card to follow - and be worth it.
 
Publisher’s Weekly said this about Known To Evil:
"Bestseller Mosley scores a clean knockout in his excellent second mystery featuring New York City PI Leonid McGill. Still striving to atone for some of the lives he’s ruined, the 54-year-old McGill laments that there are ’no straight lines in the life or labors of the private detective.’ Instead, crises crowd him at every turn. A powerful, shadowy city hall official wants McGill to locate and protect a young woman named Tara Lear, a task complicated by a murder. Older son Dimitri is involved with a Russian hooker whose pimp doesn’t want to let her go. Younger son Twill, trying to help his brother, risks violating parole restrictions. Relations with wife Katrina and lover Aura Ullman, ’with her Aryan eyes and Ethiopian skin,’ are in flux. The ex-boxer has an eclectic group in his corner, including computer whiz Tiny "Bug" Bateman, but McGill is the one taking the blows and meting out punishment in this contemporary noir gem."

Here comes the Q and A part of the reading. This might not be every writer’s idea of a good time but Walter’s up to it. "I love to expound,"he quips.

“Leonid’s living in the 21st century, the world is changing and how we live in it interests me,” he says. Those first two chapters show that Mosley's absorbing the change like a sponge and wringing it out on every page.

He’s frank and wryly quirky. In response to one question, Mosley says he’s like a politician and if he doesn’t like the question he just bends the question to talk about something he really wants to tell you.
 

‘When authors tell you who their influences are, I guarantee you they’re lying. It’s hard to be honest and be a writer," he says with a twinkle in his eyes. "You pay them to make stuff up."

Then he gives you his fictitious list of influences, naming “dead writers, you have to have some of them, like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and a few established live ones like Alice Walker and Tony Morrison, and a few younger ones like Zadie Smith, maybe Kevin Powell.” The beauty of it is, we don’t know whether he’s fibbing or not.

Mosley says he doesn’t do research. He writes three hours a day. “The other 21 hours the story is percolating and when I come to it the next day it’s more shaped and I rewrite and keep writing. Somewhere around the 8th or 9th draft I read the story into a tape recorder so I can hear what I really wrote.”
 
 Mosley knows something about a meta-racial life. His father Leroy was an African American school librarian who worked as a clerk in the segregated U.S. Army during WW II. His mother was a Polish Jew who worked as a personnel clerk. He attributes his philosophical and story-telling bent to his father and his love of literature to his mother, who introduced him to Zola, Dickens, and Camus.
 
He writes to give African Americans a place in literature and to give others “outside the community” a window into understanding the complexity of African American life. Mosley matter-of-factly weaves the role of racial inequalities in America through the story lines in the entire Easy Rawlins series.

His manner onstage tonight is totally assured. His middle class background notwithstanding, you get the feeling Mosley could live on the streets packing his high caliber brain and trash-talking mouth.

Don’t fence him in. He won’t like it. He poked fun at a recent New York Times story leading with “Crime fiction writer Walter Mosley…”

“I’m a writer, period!” he says with mock irritation. He cites 34 books - non-fiction, mysteries, science fiction, a young adult novel, a recently completed play, and screen plays for TV and films he’s been cranking out for years.  He won an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and a PEN America Lifetime Achievement Award and has been translated into 21 languages. He’s got a point about being pigeon holed.

When he was a 34 year-old bored computer programmer, he wrote a sentence on his screen, and read it aloud.  “'Hey, that sounds good', I said to myself, and, since Californians have no sense of their limitations, I decided I’d become a writer and published my first book at age 38.”

Meta-racial America is all the better for it.

Photo top by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. , bottom by Mr. Mosley's press agent.

Sunset Marina and Anchorage in Stuart, Florida: Green and Clean

Sunset Bay Marina & Anchorage
615 Anchorage Way
Stuart, FL 34944

Whether you ply the seas with a motor or sail power, the Sunset Marina and Anchorage in Stuart, Florida is a fine destination. The developers thought like sea going types when they designed the marina on the St. Lucie River. The layout for slips has wide approach fairways and plenty of cleats and pilings when you enter your slip. One fixed pier and three floating docks accommodate 198 slips and the mooring field accommodates 69 boats.

This place is clean as a whistle in and out. Spartan it is not. The marina’s nerve center, directly off the piers, offers a ship’s store; clean, handicap accessible bathroom/shower/laundry facilities and the marina office on the first floor and a comfortable lounge with a huge plasma TV on the second floor.

The place is wired for WiFi all the way out to the anchorage. There are chairs and benches under the building’s wraparound porches filled all day long with sailors swapping stories of varying degrees of veracity.

Someone from up high makes sure that staff members, from the gas dock to Salty’s Ship store, are knowledgeable and customer oriented. You’re a guest at their hotel and they want to make sure you enjoy your stay and that you return. Many of the boats are here year round.

You have a car?  Park it in the lot behind the office. Need a ride somewhere nearby? Take the shuttle service. Want to take your doggie for a walk? There are special waste bins along the walkway for disposing of doo doo. Hungry? Take a three-minute walk to the Sailor’s Return restaurant, owned by Bob and Tracy Davies (of the former Jolly Sailor), for food, drink, and nightly entertainment.

The Sunset Marina and Anchorage is seriously Green. The marina was recently recognized as the 200th member of Florida’s Clean Marina Program.

Pumpout station (below). Pumpout boats serve the anchorage as well.
The program aggressively promotes petroleum control, boat cleaning (lists alternatives to commercial cleaning agents that are washed into the water - and the harmful effects they have once introduced into the water), solid waste management, pump-out programs, hazardous waste management, fish waste management, mitigating boaters impact on vegetation and sea life (manatees in particular).

There are receptacles for rags at the fuel dock and fuel attendants are extremely careful about fuel spills. Any boat workmen must report to the office before heading for boats they’ll work on and adhere to strict rules regarding sanding, painting, and detailing.

A bluewater sailor friend of mine asserts that education is the key to the program’s success. I’m more regulation oriented but hope he’s right. A compact booklet designed by the Florida DEP is distributed in the marina’s office, lounge, and ships store. Signage throughout the marina keeps the message in front of mariners. Two self-serve pumpout stations for marine heads (bathrooms) are at the gas dock. Pumpout boats routinely service boats in the anchorage. Disposal bins for fishing line, recyclables, and trash are clearly labeled and on the piers.

Even boaters, handbook in hand and who embrace ‘green’ have trouble following all the proscriptions. I am one of them. My Boston Whaler’s ancient two-stroke Evinrude outboard motor does its share of adding gas/oil to the Westport River. (Newer four-stroke engines run much cleaner but weigh and cost much more.) There’s no safe repository at my local boatyard for rags I use to clean and degrease the motor, and the ThinX I use to clean paintbrushes after I apply bottom paint to the Whaler. I work hard to properly dispose but would welcome a “greener” system in the boatyard, which is not required by law to have them on site.

With immense coastal perimeters that are the draw for most of its residents, Florida cannot afford to neglect its assets. According to the DEP, Florida has 8400 miles of shoreline, 7000 lakes covering 3 million acres, and 51.000 miles of rivers, streams, streams, and creeks. Eighty percent of the population lives on the coast and more than 800 people per day move here. No one is more than 75 miles from water no matter where they live here.

Last week, Governor Charlie Crist used the marina to bring attention to its pro-active program and used it as the base for his tour upriver to bring attention to the Everglades Reclamation Project. One of the project’s benefits would be to reduce harmful discharges from Lake Okeechobee caused by “back-pumping” to the St. Lucie River watershed when lake levels are high.

 “The water here was lovely blue before they diverted water here instead of to the Gulf, now it’s the brownish caste you see right out there now,” said a long time secretary in the marina office.

The state’s waterways and coastlines need protection and regulation. Marinas like the Sunset Marina and Anchorage do their part by making it easy to comply. Their livelihood depends on it. Mariners who love the Florida’s fragile waters should get with the program. The health of their heavily used recreational playground depends on it, too. 

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

The Pelican Café: Stuart, FL, Just Right When The Sun Is Bright

The Pelican Café
Casual Waterfront dining, Downtown Stuart, Under the Roosevelt Bridge
31SW Flagler Avenue, Stuart, FL 34994
Open 7 days a week for breakfast. lunch, dinner 

That cold breeze from the northwest and temps in the fifties weren’t my idea of The Sunshine State in the middle of March. If it weren’t for the sight of palm trees on the drive to the Sunset Marina and Anchorage, I might as well have been in Boston.

Today, dear friends, was much more like what is generally described as Florida. One of the first warm days in weeks brought out the populace in droves, eager to sit in the sun, dine al fresco, without wearing windbreakers, sweaters, and socks.

The Pelican Café, a casual eatery on the riverwalk route around Stuart, Florida was just the ticket. Plenty of tables on the lawn outside were bathed in sunshine, glorious sunshine, and I planted myself on one of them, luxuriating in solar rays. I had plenty of company.

The little joint serves apps, salads, sandwiches, wraps, items from the grill, from the fryer, side dishes and desserts plus a kid’s menu and a beer and wine list.

The tiny interior is taken up by the open grill and prep station manned by two busy cooks, a small bar with access window for waitresses to call in drink orders, and a couple of picnic tables. Being Florida, no one wants to sit inside when the weather's right.  The rectangular, concrete depot is surrounded by a deck with picnic tables and plastic chairs and tables with oilcloth tablecloths.

My Key Largo Shrimp and Grits was the perfect lunch. Soft garlic-flavored alouette cheese added body to the grits. The cook sautéed Canadian bacon, deglazed the pan with butter and lemon juice and a splash of white wine, added the tiny cubed tomatoes and thyme and sautéed the shrimp. The tomatoes and country ham were ladled onto the top of the grits. The shrimp were circled around the grits with the remaining lemon butter reduction. Ooo, laa laa. The ingredients did a happy little tango once I forked them into my mouth. I swept that plate clean in five minutes.

Nestled next to a well-maintained Stuart city park and near one of the loveliest bridge spans in Florida, the towering Roosevelt Bridge that crosses the broad St. Lucie River, the café has a picnicky feel to it, casual and comfy.

The café has a salty pedigree. You’d never guess you were dining in a decommisioned Coast Guard Station that did a short stint as a bait shop. An astute local restaurateur saw potential in the government owned parcel and leased it three years ago.

Good idea. It is smack on the Stuart Riverwalk, a smartly designed scenic walkway that winds its way from the newly developed Sunset Bay Marina and Anchorage into downtown Stuart, a leisurely fifteen minute walk away.

Paul Daly and his wife Linda own the Zagat rated Flagler Grill ten minutes away in downtown Stuart. The Flagler Grill boasts a terrific menu and exceptional food. Paul Daly thought former coast guard station would be a great outpost for a casual, well-presented food. He leased it with a partner. The Key Largo Shrimp and Grits is on the appetizer list in Flagler Grill.

Downtown Stuart is a lovely laid back little Florida town with plenty of eateries, chi chi shops, and an old time theater, The Lyric Stage. Matter of fact, these few blocks have a lyrical sunny appeal. Just right when the sun is bright.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Stick Fly: Gem at the Calderwood Pavilion

STICK FLY
Play by Lydia R. Diamond
Directed by: Kenny Leon. Set, David Gallo. Costumes, Reggie Ray. Lights, Allen Lee Hughes. Sound, Timothy J. Thompson. Presented by: Huntington Theatre Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts Wimberly Theatre, through March 28.
Tickets, $20-$60, 617-266-0800

If you’ve been waiting for a good reason head to Boston to see a really good play, Lydia R. Diamond’s “Stick Fly” is the one. This Huntington Theater Company production at Calderwood Pavilion’s Wimberly Theater is the most fully realized production I’ve seen this year. You want to stand up and cheer when the footlights go up. I did.

Actors, set, themes, pacing, rich complex plot lines - they’re all in.

David Gallo's inventive, visually appealing, cutaway set that allows scenes to take place simultaneously and without the other actors onstage aware of them is the engine pulling the play down the tracks. The acting is the coal burning brightly in the engine’s firebox. 

The sons of a well to-do-African American family bring a fiancée and a girlfriend to their parents’ upscale Martha’s Vineyard summer home. The unexpected early arrival of the son’s father, a wealthy self made man and successful Boston neurosurgeon, starts the plot ticking like a time bomb and it doesn’t relent until the last scene.

The plot is has more layers than a wedding cake. Class divisions within the African American community, sibling rivalries, generational conflicts, the unearthing of secrets that shake a family to its roots -  could be the basis for an entire play unto themselves. They’re all here and a few more for good measure.

Every one of the characters is smart, accomplished, and fully developed. Diamond doesn’t hit us over the head with a sledgehammer of a sociological treatise. She lets the plot come to us through the characters’ back stories and dialogue. The interplay between them deftly highlights the biases and assumptions and perceptions about class, skin color, interracial dating, stereotyping, and gender biases. This isn’t about black issues or white issues. It’s about our issues

Taylor (Nickkole Salter) is the brainy insecure etymologist (scientist who places a fly to a pin and examines it from every possible angle); Kent (Jason Dirden), aspiring novelist, her fiancé, is trying to find approval from his father; Flip (Billy Eugene Jones) is cut out of his father’s cloth and tries to straddle black and white worlds; Kimber (Rosie Benton) his white girlfriend, is a liberal minded nonconformist who has an academic understanding of how the system fails her black students but a few cultural blind spots of her own; Cheryl (Amber Iman), the daughter of LeVay’s longtime maid, sent to fill in for her at LeVay summer home by her ailing mother, is making her way through high school; and Dr. Joe LeVay (Wendell W. Wright) is the father who has made the concessions he had to make to rise to wealth and status and browbeats his sons for not following his strategy of finding what they want and grabbing it by the neck. His ascendance has had its secrets.  Their struggle to “fit in” to a multi-racial society is the spine of the play’s narrative.

An aspect of the play for a white audience (at least for me) is the guilty pleasure of having the impression of listening to black people talking to each other as if we white folks weren’t there. Diamond’s brilliant stroke to have Kimber present while they’re doing so provides both comic and sharp edged moments.

Where do you compromise? Where do you make a stand? How to you get comfortable in your own skin? What do you do when you can’t find approval from the ones whom you love?

While wrestling with these universal issues, Diamond deftly serves up a  comedy of manners that has the ring of a richly observed sitcom, a really good one, where the funny bone is close to a nerve. And are we ever glad to laugh out loud with the zinging repartee.

These gifted human beings are trying to find acceptance within their families and in society at large. People of every color can relate to that.

Photo: Scott Suchman

Free Enterprise in The Republic of Cambridge

If you live around here, you gotta love Haavaad Square…

What’s this on the corner near the Harvard Graduate School of Education? A crowd of intrigued pedestrians poring over two tables of paperback books. There’s no one in sight to take cash of a potential buyer. 

I thought I’d seen it all in Harvard Square - jugglers, magicians, folk singers, puppet shows, panhandlers, chess players, free spirits, story tellers, tight rope walkers (yep. on a twenty foot piece of rope about three feet off the sidewalk) but this is a new wrinkle in a locale known for its share of zaniness.

In the past month, the students in the Harvard Theatricals’ Hasty Pudding Society marched through nearby streets to honor Anne Hathaway as Woman of the Year and Justin Timberlake as Man of the Year. Dressed in drag, the boys had a grand time roasting celebrities and awarded them with the famed Pudding Pot.

The only pot around today is the kryptonite cash box lashed on to the two tables and labeled HONOR SYSTEM. “Books are priced as marked with a white sticker on the cover.  If you find a book you like please put the money in the box. Your patronage is welcome and appreciated. Thank you!!”

Honor in the mercantile system. How quaint. Just what we need when every day brings a scandal about money managers and Wall Streeters, many of whom just might have graduated from the university next door.

Leave it to a small business entrepreneur in the middle of Harvard Square to try to right the ship.

I ask the fellow leaning against a street sign what he knows about the setup.
“It’s mine,” he replies.
“You have to have a permit to do this?”
“The way I set it up, it’s considered free speech,” he says. “as long as I’m not in the way and pick a good spot, I don’t have any trouble.”

He’s a Gutenberg road warrior, says he’s done this “around two or three hundred times” in the past three years.

“I usually shop for books after I set up the tables. It's such a beautiful day, I decided to stick around. My main business is reselling the more expensive textbooks. I look for them in auctions, thrift shops, and used bookstores. That’s also where I pick up the books for these tables.

They’ve been on the New York Times Best Seller list so I’m sure they’ll sell,” he says with an assured smile. “The money I make today, maybe two or three hundred dollars, pays for my trip and for the some of the books I buy.”

What better place to set up an “en plein air” bookstall, just like the ones on the Right Bank in Paris. Strollers are out in force on a day like today. This one-man Barnes and Noble sets up his tables summer through winter unless it rains.

There are over a hundred thousand books for sale inside the walls of The Harvard Coop and The Harvard Bookstore nearby.  The books on the tables on this sunny day in March are chirping to customers as sweetly as the early arriving songbirds overhead.

It’ll be beach time before you know it. Not too early to have some good lit on board for your first trip to the shore.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Paradise Lost at the A.R.T. Loeb Drama Center

PARADISE LOST
Play by Clifford Odets
Directed by: Daniel Fish. Set, Andrew Lieberman. Costumes, Kaye Voyce. Lights, Scott Zielinski. Sound, Clive Goodwin. Video, Joshua Thorson.
Presented by: American Repertory Theatre.
At: Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, through March 20.
Tickets, $25-75, 617-547-8300

Look, I really want to actually love a production by the A.R.T. at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge. The theater architecture is fabulous: a proscenium that can stretch out into the audience if necessary, a stage deep enough to contain the four horsemen of Notre Dame, wide enough to hold a whole Chorus Line, and high enough to feature aerial acts. So much potential. 

I don’t mind that A.R.T. directors push the envelope. I do mind if they crumple it so it’s too much effort to make use of it.
 
The current production of Clifford Odets' Paradise Lost is a challenge for audiences in any form it’s delivered. Over 2 1/2 hours long with two intermissions and a large cast, it requires stamina to appreciate under the best of circumstances.
 
Odets (1903-1963) had Eastern European roots, lived through the Great Depression, and flirted with Communism. He had a bone to pick with America’s economic collapse. His anger seemed equally distributed between the people who accepted the Depression with equanimity and the government that seemed incapable of doing much about it.
 
In the play’s program, Clifford Odets is quoted as saying, “It is my hope that when people see Paradise Lost, they’re going to be glad they’re alive. And I hope that after they’ve seen it, they’ll turn to the strangers sitting next to them and say ‘hello’.”
 
I sat next to my theater companion and said, “What…?”
 
The play opened with nine members of three families sitting around a dining room table in an American city on Armistice Day in the early 1930s. One way or another, all of them are being ground down by the Great Depression.
 
We have handbag manufacturer Leo Gordon, his wife Clara, their two sons Ben and Julie, and their daughter Pearl. We have Leo’s business partner Sam Katz, and his wife Bertha. We have Gus Michaels, a family friend, and Libby Michaels, his daughter, who marries Ben. We have Kewpie, a friend of Ben’s. We have Mr. Pike, a furnace man, given to perorations. We have Mr. May, Phil Foley, Felix, and a few others who appear only on videotape. A couple of actors play dual roles.
 
We have patrons scanning their programs to figure out who is who and piece together how this web fits together.

Director Daniel Fish’s choice to video scenes taking place on the wide stage's perimeter and project them onto a huge screen directly over the stage adds punch to those scenes. It's distracting when he videotapes action at center stage and projects it right over the actors performing it. Our video savvy eyes gravitate to the projected imaging on the screen. Our theater eyes keep saying, whoa, watch the real live action right in front of you on stage.

Some of the most rousing soliloquies come from populist laborer Mr. Pike, who seems to fill the role of Greek chorus. Pike does a good job of standing on Odets' soapbox but the rest of the play rambles.

Leo and Sam’s business is going down.  Ben’s marriage to Libby is failing. Leo’s relationship with his family is loving but distant. Sam has secrets that emerge in the final scenes. The fact that none of this is pretty is beside the point. The problem is there doesn’t seem to be an emotional core to the play that we can relate to, or worse, care about.
 
Odets’ themes of inter-generational family clashes, middle class struggles to gain economic footing, and the effect of money and greed on relationships, are worthy. They just do not gel here.

I’m not asking director Daniel Fish to sugar-coat Odets' dramatic pessimism. I’d just like to see a play that delivers a clearer vision of what Odets was trying to say.

Photo courtesy of American Repertory Theater website

News from Chile: Earthquake 2017

Earthquake in Chile, February 27, 2010

Dozens of people have asked about my friends Susaan Straus and Ricardo Ceriani, whom I've visited - and written about -  for two weeks every January for the past five years. They live in Chile from November to May every year.

First of all, they are safe. Their little town of Nogales is 600 miles north of Concepcion, the epicenter of the 8.8 earthquake. They’ve been without electricity and running water from the day of the earthquake until a few hours ago.

Susaan agreed to let me send along emails she managed to send me intermittently during the last two weeks, when she was  able to find WiFi access in La Calera, a small city about ten miles from their home in Nogales, Chile. Ricardo was born in Quillota, about twenty miles from Nogales.

First message received March 1.
March 1 (3 days after the quake)
"Yes, we're fine, property damage only, but what an adventure. We just tonight thought we got our electricity, internet and water back on - but alas we've lost it all again - don't know when this message will actually "send".  We've been getting our drinking water from the stream, and Ricardo's been bathing in the pool which is now full of soap! Too cold for me, so I'm just being dirty!"

"I've been in these earthquakes here before but this one was different. It kept getting stronger, and lasted forever - well, a full minute, but when everything is jiggling and roaring like an oncoming train, when the lights have flashed off and you're in the dark, and everything that you'd placed on every shelf in the house is crashing all around you, it sure seems like forever!  It opened all our windows and shook half the grout out of the shower."

"The bridge into Nogales over Rt 5 has been closed because it has big open spaces in it. The Nogales and Melon pedestrian bridges crossing Rt 5 came down onto the highway,and the aftershocks were endless, but all in all, we lucked out - as you can see from these photos from our neighborhood that I've attached."

"Just a little bit of property damage, some real inconvenience with no water or means of communication (no cell service either) for 3 days, and we lost everything in the refrigerator, but we're fine, and so is Ricardo's family.  We don't even know what's really going on in the south - we have no TV or radio - so we're pretty isolated... What an experience!"

"Here's our bridge to Nogales over Rt 5."



"This bridge sidewalk used to be a straight line."


"This is the pedestrian bridge near us that came down - actually the 2 nearest us fell onto the highway."

"Remember the wall in Ricardo's family house in Quillota? - his father built it long ago."

"We are about 600 miles north of Concepcion where this huge quake was centered.  We got off really easy. You can imagine how powerful the quake was to do all this 600 miles away.  Our thoughts are with the folks who got the worst of it."

Second message March 5
"Still without power/phone/water/internet.  But the good news is Le Central in La Calera has WiFi - Ricardo is enjoying his completos.  Because I have a connection now, I've just started seeing pictures of the devastation and hearing about it from chilespouses (Susaan’s friends throughout Chile)..  Terrible.

Third message March 8
We're still getting aftershocks today. To sense what the aftershocks feel like, imagine you're in  small sailboat  and a very big dingy bumps into the boat a few times.  Kind of a bump, a lurch, and then back to normal." 

"The aftershocks are quiet, but the earthquake was roaring - you can tell the big ones are coming because you hear them before you feel them."

"It helped to be protected from the images, the reality, of the disaster unfolding to the south of us.  But now we have our TV back and are seeing it full bore.  We in the US could take some lessons from these Chileans.  The country mobilizes itself - doesn't wait for the government - people jump in their cars and trucks, hit up their neighbors and local businesses for supplies and drive down to the effected area - at least as close as they could get, some roads and bridges are impassable."

Fourth message March 9
"Hi!  I'm at my WiFi station in La Calera having tea.  Let Warren know that this was our most serious fear - that no water for a week would damage the orange crop. We're back in business with the pumps now and our agronomist has counseled us on how to ease back into the water for the trees. He says we should be OK. Phew."

"We now have electricity - but still no phone.  It was great to take a hot shower.  
RE your question about what we ate: We didn't so much eat things right away, as cook things (gas) that I had on hand - lots of beans and stuff from the garden."

"The big stores were closed for a few days after the quake - cleaning up the aisles of the broken merchandise - but they've been open and after the first day, there was no crush. Things are back to normal in our area, though heavy earth moving equipment is working to remove the rubble from the houses (old) that didn't survive."

"I have some newer photos, but they're still in the camera - things are getting fixed, though we probably won't have the phone/internet for another week. Thanks for staying in touch, my friend!"

Fifth message March 10
"I went to a meeting of our bookclub in Santiago on Sunday and one of the gringas has married into an old Chilean family. After the quake, her husband went to the city of their ancestral home, Talca, where his mother had been buried 2 years ago to see that everything was OK." 

"Background: in Chile, the dead are not buried, but their coffins are placed in mausoleums made of cement.  These structures stand several meters tall with the dead in 'drawers' built into the structure. When the husband arrived in Talca, he found that the mausoleum crumbled, the coffins were open and strewn about, and he found himself viewing the remains of his mother."

"At the end of this message I've attached a pdf from a chilespouse who is a geologist working for the mining companies. Background on what went on."
"In the week since the quake, the cracks in bridges and roads have continued to appear."

"Here are the wires, coiled and ready for repair, that snapped as the poles wiggled back and forth."

"As the electricity was being repaired, somehow a surge caused the transformer on our road to explode igniting the brush under the wires and frying whatever was left of the telephone cables.  Every day Ricardo calls the phone company and every day they say, you'll have your phone by 9 pm tonight.  So far, nada."

March 10

pt Question
You said you heard the quake coming, yes? What did it sound like?
S answer
"In the beginning it sounds like the tractor starting up in the barn.  A low rumble.  Then it gets louder and at the height it sounds like a train.  It's really loud.  Imagine a mammoth plate of the earth scraping along against another plate.  Not quiet!"

pt Question
The grout shook out from tile in bathroom, did your bed shake, furniture move, structure of house shake?
S answer 
"All of the above."

pt Question
Is all countryside around you w/o electric or just  your neighborhood? Is it b/c lines are down or power plants are offline?
S answer
"We were ALL - as in all of Regions 5,6,and 7 the whole center of Chile - without power for the first few days.  Then gradually sections came back.  Our area, La Pena, was among the last in Region V.  BOTH lines down and power plants off line at the start.  Also cell phone services off line.  Nothing worked. Nada."
   
"We just now got the phone back - and internet.  Back to normal."

South End Pita: Magic Carpet to Morocco

South End Pita
473 Albany Street
Boston, MA
Monday - Friday 6 AM - 10 PM, Saturday 10 AM - 10 PM

Every so often your taste buds have a ‘died and gone to heaven’ surprise when you venture into a new restaurant. So it was with my first visit to Pita in the South End, not far from where I’d been exploring the wild world of art down on Harrison Avenue in Boston.

After two hours of gallery hopping, I was fried - and hungry. A sleek little tri-fold brochure I picked up in 450 Harrison Avenue’s giant foyer advertised “Pita - Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner” on Albany Street. What the heck.
 
Four blocks and a ten-minute walk later, I found myself entering a tiny jewel box of a restaurant that could double as an inspired installation piece in one of the galleries a few blocks away. The mustard and saffron painted walls, rich burgundy banquettes, warm oak flooring, and an order counter lined with pressed tin panels was a bolder artistic statement than the exhibits in several of the galleries I’d just visited.
 
Traditional and popular Moroccan music softly streamed from somewhere.  The tantalizing aroma of Moroccan spices floated from the serving area in front of me and from a kitchen that I suspected lay behind it.
 
I stared at the Lunch and Dinner Menu neatly printed on a chalkboard mounted behind the counter. The salads with lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, olives, feta cheese with special house dressing served with either falafel, or hummus, or grape leaves, or chicken shawarma ($6.95-$7.25) would have to wait.
 
So would the pita roll ups ($5.95-$6.25) with diced tomatoes, cucumbers and home made tahini sauce even though the Falafel roll up (deep fried patties of seasoned garbazo beans mixed with chopped parsley, onion, and garlic and spices) was tempting. So were the chicken or beef shawarma, seasoned meats cooked slowly on a vertical rotisserie then sliced thinly and added into roll ups.
 
I sure wasn’t going to order an American chicken or meatball or tuna sub ($6.95-$7.50) - I could find them anywhere. The combo plates of lamb, chicken, or kofta shish kabobs each served with seasoned rice and Mediterranean salad $6.95-$8.95) - that’s what I had in mind.
 
My combo plate of lamb shish kabob was cooked to order, medallions of lamb, slightly chewy, pinkish in the center, drizzled with a thin ribbon of tahini sauce, arrived plated with rice and salad and fresh, soft pita bread. One bite of the lamb and I was hooked.
 
The lunch crunch long gone now at 3:00 PM, I was the only patron, sitting regally on one of the burgundy banquettes that line the 24 seat petite palace. My lip smacking didn’t go unnoticed.
 
“You shouldn’t leave without tasting our hummus,” says a cheerful woman with a bright warm smile.
 
The colorful piece of crockery in her hand contains creamy, rich hummus topped with a squiggle of tahini sauce and small saffron-colored pool of Moroccan spices. A plate of warm pita bread, made right here, is in her other hand. Pride in culture doesn’t come from a jar but is present in everything that crosses the threshold of the kitchen on the way to your table.

A few “oh my oh my”s later, she drifts over and leaves a small plate of chicken shawarma for me to swoon over.  Moist, aromatic, tender with a hint of marinade, it is exquisite. I’m about to ask if I can live here.
 
Wafaa Ouassaidi, the friendly woman with the big smile, has been helping her brother Rod Ouassaidi run his small eatery since September, 2009. The limited menu is no problem for the clientele.
 
“We have lots of regulars, many of them from the nearby hospitals,” she says. “We don’t have to educate them about how healthy our food is, they already know. We make a special dish every day so our regulars will have variety and will want to keep returning.”

Her brother Rod Ouassaidi and his wife oversaw the renovation from a former sandwich shop to this sunny little gem with splashy colors, pretty sconces, comfy banquettes, and a vibrant mural depicting Ouarzazate, Morocco that stretches over the order counter.

Wafaa brings me a piece of homemade baklava while answering my questions about the business. “We make this with only honey, no other added sweeteners,” she says. Clearly, they don’t go in for shortcuts here. Oh my, oh my.
 
“My brother knew people would like the food but I was surprised at how much they liked it,” Wafaa says. “We have a big following from South Boston, too.”
 
Perched on the perimeter of the South End in the midst of an industrial zone, Pita is worth looking for. Trust me, you’ll feel like you’ve been whisked by magic carpet to Wafaa’s mother’s Moroccan kitchen by the time you leave.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Jess T. Dugan's Exhibit "Coupled" Tells, Doesn't Ask

“Coupled”
Polaroid Images by Jess Dugan
Gallery Kayafas
450 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA 02118
Opened March 5, 2010


Jess T. Dugan’s photography exhibit at Gallery Kayafas isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but hey, what else is new.  Depending on your tastes, that might be the case for several of the other shows opening at various galleries at 450 Harrison Avenue this week.

Titled “Coupled,” Dugan’s show turns gender identity upside down, or at the very least, sideways.

The way Dugan describes it, what the individuals that form each couple have in common is “ some connection to a female identity. For some of them that meant they were both female-identified; for some of them that meant they were transgender-identified in one way or another - male to female or female to male. Everyone in the project has some type of queer identity and some connection to a female identity.”

Newbury Street may not be ready for this show but gallery owner Arlette Kayafas got past the subject matter that’s a challenging draw for a gallery audience generally perceived as heterosexual.

“It’s remarkable to think how young she is and the quality of her work. I feel fortunate to present this show. I presented a collection of black and white photographs of her family and friends in 2009. This is the first show of its kind in Massachusetts.”

Dugan has a BFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and in 2010 earned a Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies, with a concentration in Museum Studies from Harvard University. She graduated with distinction and departmental honors.

Gender ambiguity extends to Dugan. She identifies herself as  “a queer variant - not as trans but existing in an in-between space.” She’s active in LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender) and Trans-sexual communities and is totally comfortable within them.

(Personal note. I’ve known Jess’s mother for about ten years and met Jess, now 24, when she was a teenager coming to grips with her sexuality. Make no mistake about it, these transitions take guts to navigate. Jess uses her talent to document and celebrate people who happen to be lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, or transgendered.)

“People trust Jess will portray them in a non-judgmental way,” Kayafas says, “she’s so comfortable with herself that her subjects feel at ease with her.”

That’s a good thing for her subjects. Feeling at ease with a 20 x 24 Polaroid camera (one of only five in the world) almost eight feet high with a bellows that stretched out five feet could have been intimidating. Waiting for the bank of six strobe lights to illuminate the room with the intensity of “the big bang” might have been like waiting in line to get on roller coaster.

Dugan’s set up is brilliant. She asked the couples to look directly into the camera with a neutral expression. Something remarkable happened. They let go. What you see is not only the positive image of the Polaroid photograph but also an intimate image that seems to bore into their souls. Vulnerable, brave, loving, friendly, bonded, they clearly trusted Dugan to tell their story.

Each of the 19 photos is the same size (22x26 inches), hung with the same framing, the same distance from one another. The rich burgundy background she uses for every photo imbues them the aura of warmth that seems an extension of the connection between each couple.

"These are one of a kind photographs. It isn't possible to manipulate the image with the Polaroid process," Ms. Kayafas says.  The images will be sold as a set, not individually.

"There are plans to photograph the originals with a 4x5 camera, scan the images, and print them 14x20 inches with a high quality Epson printer that uses ground up paint for color," she says.

Dugan’s work is quietly political. She’s not a bomb thrower. No matter what your response might be to these couples on the street, viewing them in the gallery’s quiet luminous space gives you the chance to see them on their own terms. The portraits reflect on the fact that the couples represent one of humanity’s most persistent manifestations - two people connected emotionally and spiritually to one another.

After a while I stopped sorting out who is who gender-wise and began to look at the pairs as a couple of people. I speculated how they connected emotionally and about their brave ongoing journeys. In the comfort of the gallery, it felt liberating to contemplate life choices that are so different from my own hetero culture. These are painful, sometimes dangerous choices. They’re also life affirming.

Today’s news stories about same-sex marriage and “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military remind me that these issues are ever closer to mainstream culture. Jess Dugan’s portraits represent part of a narrative unspooling in every city and town in America as individuals search their psyches and emerge as the person they were born to become.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Bartley’s Burger Cottage, A Glorious Throwback, Lives On in Cambridge

Bartley’s Burger Cottage
1346 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Monday - Saturday 11 AM - 9 PM, closed Sundays

You’re hungry. It’s past suppertime. You’ve just been blown away listening to a world-class storyteller rivet you with “Forged In The Stars,” his love letter to NASA celebrating its 50th anniversary. You hustle past the sandwich board sign on the sidewalk and your stomach overrides the automatic pilot zeroing in on your car. 

Next thing you know, you’re sitting at one of the communal tables in Bartley’s Burger Cottage in Harvard Square, blurting out “I want a bowl of that vegetarian chili you advertise on the sign outside.”  Yes, I know Bartley’s is famous, with a capital F, for their burgers. But when stomach speaks, owner listens.

The chili arrives in minutes. Wow. Good portion, topped with chunks of cheddar cheese. Hmmm, intense flavor, enhanced by little side of sour cream I ladled on top. Halfway through, stomach says “OK, you can pay attention to the surroundings now.”

This is as thorough-going a college joint as you’ll find anywhere. Formica tables, plastic chairs, terra cotta tile floor, the place seems to embrace you like a long lost roommate when you walk in.

Some of the memorabilia has been marinating on the walls since the class of 1964 began eating there when Joe Bartley opened the place in 1960. A prominent caricature of Ted You-Know-Who, vintage posters, Harvard/Yale pennants, and photos of memorable Cambridge moments hang in glorious clutter on the walls.

You watch waitresses step up to the chest high order counter and shout stuff like, “One Ted, medium rare, one Joe, well, and a side of rings!” then leave their slip on the counter. The young chefs get into gear.

One of those old fashioned silver bells that “clinnngs” when you push the plunger on top, pierces the chatter. Waitresses fetch and deliver orders. The burgers take serious muscle power to haul to the tables. Seven ounces of choice beef, ground daily, with fries or rings, they fill the plates, their edges spilling out of soft bulkie rolls.

And, for all those red meat eaters who like to see their fare still wiggling, you can order ‘rare’ here. Your plate will look like a piece of the set on a vampire movie when you’re done.

Salads, appetizers, home made dinners, gourmet burgers, celebrity wraps (“Yes, they’ve all been here!” says the menu), three deckers, frappes, dessert, and a kids’ menu fill out the menu. None of them rings in over $10.00. Cash only (“Real food, real cash”).

Someday, the only place you might be able to find such a fabulous throwback in time as Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage will be in a museum installation back at the Harvard Art Museum.

For now though, a trip back to those thrilling days of yesteryear is right down the street at 1246 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA.

By the way, if my enthusiasm is taken for homeboy booster-ism, The Wall Street Journal voted Bartley’s  “One of the best burgers in the U.S.A.”

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

 

Jay O'Callahan: NASA - Forged In The Stars

Storyteller Jay O’Callahan
“Forged in the Stars”
Performed at The Harvard Art Museum

Cambridge, MA

Tuesday, March 2, 2010, 6 PM, free!

Running time 75 minutes
https://ocallahan.com/articles-on-forged-in-the-stars

We’re putty in a storyteller’s palms. No matter how many gadgets and apps and iPods we invent, nothing will replace the immediacy of being mesmerized by a man or woman whose voice can create a universe out of thin air.

Give a guy like Jay O’Callahan a stool and an audience and he’ll take you to places just as magical as any Avatar or Star Wars movie.

The first time I heard O’Callahan was 1974 in the newly constructed John Pierce Elementary School in Brookline, Massachusetts.  We wanted to create a positive buzz about the school’s unconventional design. The three-floor, open space floor plan incorporated the library at its core. Every classroom was visually connected to each other and to the library. What a cool space to present a fellow like O’Callahan.

O'Callahan's launch pad was a small 3-foot high stage erected in the middle of the first floor, surrounded by the library and six classrooms. Over 500 kids (including my class of 4th graders up there on the third floor) and staff filled in around the stage and perched along every inch of the railings around the two upper levels to watch O’Callahan, a 34 year old just launching his career, tell stories about growing up in Brookline. Any guy who can command the attention of an audience of kindergarteners to 8th graders for the better part of an hour is some kind of special.

He was on the right glide path. By now, he’s told stories to audiences all over the world. Two years ago, NASA commissioned O’Callahan to write a story that would celebrate its 50th anniversary. During his preface to re-telling the story at the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge last night, O’Callahan recalled a moment in the middle of a planning meeting. Ed Hoffman, director of NASA’s Academy of Program, Project & Engineering Leadership, enthusiastically exclaimed, “Write a love letter to NASA!”
 
Mission statement in hand, O’Callahan steeped himself in NASA culture. He read over 30 books. He watched tapes of NASA’s historical achievements. He spent months interviewing scientists, astronauts, engineers, and computer specialists who’d worked with NASA since the beginning. “They were all engineers at heart, all numbers and theories," he said in mock exasperation during his opening remarks, “what kind of stories could they have?”
 
“What brings you to work?” he asked them in his visits to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The results floored him. Smart, driven, and inspired, many revealed they’d been hooked on space as children and that they were living out a dream of a lifetime.
 
“I ended up with 1000 pages of notes and facts,” he said.” When I talked to them about their work, they opened up like flowers.”
 
How will I ever tell this story, he wondered. One day, mowing the lawn at his home in Marshfield, MA, he got it. Invent characters and a story line that will synthesize everything he’d soaked up in his months of reading, viewing, questioning, and listening.

With that, O’Callahan blasted off - and took us with him. “It all begins on October 27, 2007 in Boston, Massachusetts,” he begins quietly.

Within minutes, he’s sketched out the four main characters, Kate Decordova, mechanical engineering student at Northeastern University; Jack Carver, son of a Maine lobsterman and now PhD candidate at MIT; Cynthia Moss of St. Paul, Minnesota, Kate’s eccentric roommate and music major at New England Conservatory; and Edith Whiteside, a clench-jawed but warm-hearted Boston Brahmin (“the empress of the streetcar,” O’Callahan calls her in Kate's first chance meeting with her).

The back story is that Kate and Jack have been engaged, then un-engaged, then at Jack’s request, join together to present a program about space exploration at a prestigious conference which he’s been invited to keynote. “You tell three stories twelve minutes long about NASA history and I’ll finish by citing the greatest moments of the Jet Propulsion Lab’s history,” he begs her.

They make a plan to meet on three successive Thursday nights during which Kate will tell Jack each of her three stories.
 
With that O’Callahan taps into the solid fuel of his story. Kate’s first NASA tale is about J. C. High Eagle, a Cherokee from Oklahoma who won't give in to discrimination and becomes an unlikely and successful NASA engineer in a career spanning 40 years.

By now, you can see O'Callahan's going to pull together the threads of data he’s gathered to weave a patchwork quilt telling the stories of the extraordinary cast of characters who made NASA a household name in the second half of the 20th century. “Forged In The Stars” is going to be about people, not algorithms.

Her second story is about Neil Armstrong being questioned about his 50,000 foot decent onto the moon in the lunar module by a fictitious somewhat dyspeptic admiral. I thought I pretty much knew that story. I watched the first moon landing happen on a TV set in Kalispell, Montana on July 20, 1969. Until tonight, I never knew that some scientists speculated the moon dust was a mile thick and the astronauts might sink in it. And I didn’t know the details of the human drama of the last 90 seconds of the lunar module landing.

“The work of 600,000 people went into this mission, the fire that lifted the rocket into space was boosted by the hopes of millions and the wonder of every child who ever imagined a world in space,” Armstrong says. "When we three astronauts toured the world after the mission, people kept greeting us not with 'You did it' but with 'We did it.'"
 
If you couldn’t tolerate risk and danger, you didn’t work at NASA. Kate's third story is about Christa McAuliffe, the teacher chosen to fly aboard the ill-fated Challenger that exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986. Her recounting of the failure of management at NASA and Morton-Thiokol to address the O-ring problems, poignant to this day, still evokes tears. So does the warm portrayal of McAuliffe, who contributed so much to her community, her school, and her students before being chosen as the first “Teacher In Space.”
 
The final section is Jack’s. O’Callahan delivers a surprising switcheroo as he has Carver abandon his fact heavy speech.  Instead, Jack tells the story of his father opening up the universe to him as they looked skyward when they were at sea when he was a boy. Jack finishes with the saga of the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, still plunging past our known universe as he speaks.
 
O’Callahan’s construct melds massive amounts of factual material and invents fictional characters to frame NASA’s history. At every turn O’Callahan fills the story with anecdotes about the ways these scientists and engineers were influenced by personal fascination with space as children. Their work was their passion. O’Callahan inserted wry humor to punctuate the dialogue every time the going got heavy.

“What’s your dream?” Kate recalls Edith Whiteside asking her early in the first story.

O’Callahan probably never dreamed of being offered a $50,000 commission by NASA to create a story that underscored the passion of the men and women who took mankind to the moon. His enthralling "love letter" took us to the moon and beyond.

 

 

 

 

Photo courtesy of O'Callahan's web site