Month: June 2011

INSANE. I went swimming in the outdoor pool yesterday and it was chaos! No lanes blocked off for lap swimming, kids all over the place who were completely oblivious to those around them, which is fine, I remember being a kid in a pool. But I basically had to zig zag around them, and still they kept crashing into me. The solution is to go at kid-adverse hours, which is whenever the pool opens, 7am-ish? Ugh. I loved swimming outside though, the inside pool seems so dreary in comparison.

This was the line for the evening hours (4 – 7pm, I think). It looks like there might be more kids waiting to get into the pool than could comfortably fit. I wonder if there’s a time limit or something? Okay, this is a downside to city life, the lack of swimming options. I feel bad that there isn’t a giant pool for these kids or more pools, or something.

A tequila truck? Really? I went insane my one night of drinking tequila and I’ve been terrified of it ever since. Shudder. Seriously though, how can this be legal?

Before I forget, there was some great, great writing on the tv show Burn Notice this week. One of the characters, Michael’s mother, mocks the idea of closure. She said something like, “I don’t buy it. When someone blasts a hole in your life it tends to stay open.” The truth of it, I could have cried with relief! I think sometimes the best you can do is do your best to walk around and avoid those holes.

My pool opens today and they still haven’t posted what the hours are. I’m going to try to swim today. Thing I’m afraid about (yes fear, not concern, it’s my fall-back reaction, how do I get through my life? I don’t know): the water will be too cold, there won’t be lanes for lap swimming, they will reinstitute “family hours” and “family hours” will be all the normal waking hours and I can only swim between 5:35am and 5:55am or from 11:45 pm to midnight, or the pool will be crowded with people who make swimming impossible.

I’m on a quest to find out something about a coal miner named Gwilym Amos. In 1919, he started a singing society named the Orpheus Glee Club, he retired in 1924 or 1928 (there are conflicting reports) he worked at the Lehigh & Wiles-Barre Coal Company, and he died on May 14, 1929.

I found a Welsh newspaper called The Druid which the New York Public Library got for me via interlibrary loan, but we didn’t get all the reels, we only got up to 1925 and so far I haven’t managed to uncover anything that gives me a sense of who he was. Mystery man! Well, mystery man, I’m going to keep looking. There’s got to be something to a man who works in the mines, then founds a choral society that The Druid barely deigned to notice (while at the same time reporting about other singing groups in every paper) and then nurtures that choral society into one of the best singing groups in the country, winning all the big singing contests, and finally making it onto the front page of The Druid.

This is New York City. Can you believe it?? Some lucky person (or persons) lives here. Except now I forget where I took this exactly. Somewhere in my neighborhood, 7th Avenue-ish.

I intended to put together a movie about yesterday’s parade, but I just don’t have the energy!

A couple of shots though. This is looking down 5th Avenue.

This is looking down ON Fifth Avenue.

On the day after the gay marriage bill passed, I was walking around intending to take pictures to reflect the mood of the city, and I posted the video of the Dyke March.

But the first picture I took was this one, at Christopher and Hudson.  It’s a poster asking for information for the 2005 murder of 19 year old Rashawn Brazell. It was sad to see it on such a happy day, knowing that someone’s son wasn’t here to celebrate it with us.

I also wondered if there was some sort of gay angle to the story.   The poster showing up all of a sudden, on this day seemed like it might be more a coincidence.

Then I went to the Stonewall Inn and there was his picture again, directly across the street. You can read his story here. Yeah, he was gay. The wikipedia entry says the case didn’t get a lot of attention because the boy was black and working class and gay. I can’t answer to that, but the reward posters are a bad sign. They generally mean the detectives have followed every lead they had and they’re at a dead end.