Manhattan Island’s newly reopened urban greenway “High Line Park,” perched on an abandoned “el” track stretching back into time, boldly reclaims renewal by rescuing ruins. * * * “It’s a piquino paradise in the sky: I love it!” raves Zoraida Robinson, a hard-working Puerto Rican immigrant with an eye for al fresco retreats. “Here we can get away from the city without leaving the city.” The aerial Eden Zoraida is praising is Manhattan Island’s recently revamped High… Read more

In Haight-Ashbury, once the center of the 1960s Hippy Flower Power Movement, I came upon a hawker selling unique chicken-claw pipes. I purchased one and held it up in the light as he passed me a tape of Ry Cooder, the famous slide guitarist who taught Keith Richards a special open tuning so it would be “easier to play on smack.” And why it’s such a bitch to figure out Rolling Stones songs in the first place. This is what San Francisco is like. Never to be called either “San… Read more

May 2010 – While visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art during a recent trip to New York, I came across three narrative sculptures created by great French sculptors Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Auguste Rodin, and Antoine Bourdelle. Ugolino and His Sons / Ugolin et ses fils Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875) Marble of 1865-1867 based on plaster model of 1860-1861 The story for this sculpture is derived from Dante’s Divine Comedy, specifically a story from Inferno in which Dante encounters… Read more