From a friend who refuses to get a blog: New York City tells it like it is. While walking out of Grand Central I saw a large woman fall in the middle of the road. One of her shoes (possibly the cause of her fall) was a few feet away. A man rushed to her [...]
Category Archives: New York City
New York, New York…
03-Apr-13Our Lady of Loreto on Easter Sunday.
01-Apr-13Saint Paul on the facade of Our Lady of Loreto church in East New York, Brooklyn. The church, designed by Paterson sculptor Federico Gaetani and one of the finest examples of neo-Baroque architecture in New York, has been shuttered by the diocese of Brooklyn.
Last month, after having lunch with a friend in Dumbo, I decided spontaneously to take a tour of the Watchtower buildings – the Jehovah’s Witnesses World Headquarters in Brooklyn Heights. It’s one of the things you grow up with in New York City – you tell the time and the temperature by it whenever you’re [...]
The World’s Coolest Movie Theater.
29-Jan-13So who knew that the world’s coolest movie theater was in Jamaica, Queens? All its detailing is preserved too. Pretty amazing. It’s now a church, and by a curious but understandable law preventing the state from landmarking church interiors it is not a landmark.
“We Flavor Kids’ Medicines.”
23-Jan-13The S&M Pharmacy. I really do love Queens. On Main Street, Kew Gardens Hills. Full name is Shalom and Mecheieh Pharmacy.
“Life Imitating Borges.”
03-Jan-13That’s how Steve Boykewich described the first chapter of Ingrid Rowland’s book about Athanasius Kircher and Baroque Rome: That strange, bitter Jesuit, Melchior Inchofer, who as censor of Kircher’s Coptic Forerunner had expressed such enthusiasm for the work, seems to have soured on his colleague’s enterprise some years later. Inchofer’s 1645 satire of the Jesuit [...]
Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung, Death.
20-Dec-12I had the sudden conviction that I should finally more fully explore the writings of Marie-Louise von Franz, a second-generation Jungian whose writings I have been impressed by in the past. I am in general always partial to people who have some kind of redemptive salvific Messianic purpose in their work: ‘Like all of us, [...]
Chance led me, as it sometimes leads the prepared mind, to Plutarch’s Life of Marc Antony not long ago, and I was struck by the following incident. After the collapse of Marc Antony’s fortunes and his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Actium, knowing that the assassins of Augustus were on their way and that [...]
Names like Freelove Titus, daughter of Bathsheba Titus. From Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, where I was pleased a few days ago to find a number of old Kuhner family graves.
From the Nutty Catholicism Department…
26-Sep-12A friend tipped me off to the story of the “monkey Jesus,” a botched fresco-restoration effort by an elderly woman in a Spanish parochial church. ”The once dignified portrait now resembles a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic,” the BBC story reports. This is fine: paintings sometimes get destroyed. But [...]