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I’m back. And so is this column. I stopped writing and publishing it in June 2003, when the last “Island Living” column appeared in print in the North Shore Star Reporter, a local giveaway paper here on Staten Island that accepted some editorial content, my column included. In the paper’s February 5, 2003 issue my […] My mother’s life spanned most of the twentieth century. It fell to me, as the writer in the immediate family, to draft her obituary. What a strange and solemn task — to sum up someone’s existence in a handful of words. Here’s what I wrote. […] As I described in my last column, a car accident on Tompkins Avenue in Rosebank put me in St. Vincent’s Hospital here on Staten Island over the last Fourth of July weekend. That was my first experience with being hospitalized, but my second experience with a hospital named after St. Vincent dePaul. The first took […] I’m now carless. Here’s the story: It was Friday afternoon, June 30, about 5:30 on a lovely, sunny day. I was heading home to pack and otherwise prepare for my departure Monday evening to France for the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles — to which my complimentary plane ticket and hotel room had […] When I was growing up small and skinny in New York City, prey to the aggressive males of my species and an avid reader of escapist fantasies, one location where these aspects of my risky boyhood social situation coalesced were the advertising back pages of comic books. There — amid the sales pitches for “X-ray […] I’m proposing Dave’s Law: No establishment serving food shall be allowed to list on its menus or announce via its waitpersons more than a maximum of four ingredients or preparation methods involved in any one dish — upon penalty of having to serve the entire party burgers on the house. […] (Continued from the March issue. In the first part of this tale, I recounted some of my experiences on a summer 1988 group tour the Soviet Union, and the experience of one member of the group, Ari, a 14-year-old from the U.S. of Jewish descent, at Babii Yar, site of a mass grave for 200,000 […] From the daily press, the radio, the tv and the Internet comes the constant updating of changes in eastern Europe: disintegration, upheaval, power structures collapsing and reforming, old boundaries coming down, new ones going up. And, underneath it all, an ominously familiar drone: a steady rise in the incidence of anti-Semitism in the former Soviet […] (In last month’s column, I spoke about a large photography show I’d curated almost two decades ago, in 1980, for the Newhouse Gallery at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center; titled “Silver Sensibilities,” it included work by Roy DeCarava, Allen A. Dutton, Richard Kirstel, Michael Martone, and Julio Mitchel. One Islander raised objections to the show’s […] The malignant, lingering spectre of Puritanism stalks the land today, rattling its chains everywhere from the Senate floor to our exhibition spaces for contemporary art. Contemplating this revenant has reminded me of my own encounter with it here on Staten Island, back in the fall of 1980. The Island’s indefatigable champion of the arts, Dan […] |