Stacy Horn

Except for West Side Story. I’m still warming up to Leonard Bernstein’s Missa Brevis, which a member of my choir, Brent, said was originally written for a play about Joan of Arc. I meant to remember that and see how I felt to sing it knowing that, but of course the minute we started singing it my over-riding thought was, “This is hard.”

I saw some tweets about a truck full of bees that over-turned in Utah, but I can’t find any pictures. I understand that people were getting stung, but come on. There’s no one nearby with a camera out there?? Which reminds me, I have a couple of YouTube videos I wanted to post.

A lovely film from Occupy Wall Street of muslims using the people’s mic in a nice way.

For Bones fans, outtakes [the video I linked to has since been removed].

This is one of my books (The Restless Sleep) at a library in the East Village, (the Ottendorfer, at 2nd Avenue and St. Mark’s). Thank you, New York Public Library and Ottendorfer librarians!

I found these on Talking Points Memo. These are from Buchanan’s new book, the chapter “The Last Chance”:

“Our intellectual, cultural, and political elites are today engaged in one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments in history. They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth. They have dethroned our God, purged our cradle faith from public life, and repudiated the Judeo-Christian moral code by which previous generations sought to live.”

On the segregation era:

“Perhaps some of us misremember the past. But the racial, religious, cultural, social, political, and economic divides today seem greater than they seemed even in the segregation cities some of us grew up in.”

“Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.”

A man with balloons on Fifth Avenue.

I don’t do this often, because I have a tendency to be too easily influenced. I read Tolstoy and whatever I write the next day has the flavor of War & Peace. But I copied this line from Jessica Mitford’s book Hons and Rebels, and made a note to myself to try and make observations as wonderful as this in my book:

“Debo spent silent hours in the chicken house learning to do an exact imitation of the look of pained concentration that comes over a hen’s face when it is laying an egg.”

This is a building on Bleecker Street. Halloween! As fun as Christmas.

It seems like every time I walk out the door I pass by a march of one sort of another. It could be a protest or a celebration. Today it was a protest. After choir rehearsal I walked out into Broadway and a march against police brutality.

I stood talking with a cop, and he characterized it as an anti-police protest and I said, “No. There are a few bad apples and they are protesting those guys, not all of you.” I brought up DI Bologna as an example of a bad apple. He didn’t quite buy it, but said he realized not everyone thinks they are all bad guys, but that some people do. That’s probably true, I said. Then we both agreed that this would be a pretty small number of people. Still, there are larger, over-arching cultural problems within the NYPD, but I didn’t bring that up.

It just upsets me. I’m sure everyone has now heard about Terry Thompson killing himself after releasing dozens of wild animals. All except six were later killed. I’m not faulting the individuals for responding this way, but given the state’s laws about exotic pets, they should have been more prepared to deal with this. Please change the laws. And in the meantime, please provide training and equipment to local authorities so they can handle things like this differently in the future.

A friend came to visit and she wanted to see the Wall Street protesters so we took a walk downtown. It was a chilly night which got even chillier.