More Life Stories and a new blogsite

Art Clokey. Credit: Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times

In this week’s collection of Life Stories there’s a late night talk show host with a following of occultists, conspiracy theorists and time travellers, a wannabe Warhol with his own hippie art collective and New York’s most honest cabbie.

Mies Giep, who helped protect Anne Frank, and later saved her diary is remembered. And in a fantastic essay in the Observer, Andrew Anthony explores the life and strange death of a Marxist academic, a cheerleader for Pol Pot.

There’s an eight year old boy abandoned by his mother and a presidential candidate behaving badly. A cyborg, a failed coup and a bizarre suicide. And two more deaths: both expected, both quietly heart-breaking when they come.

And finally, there’s a new home. This week I set up Life Stories. It’s here. If you sign up for the weekly email newsletter it will arrive on Fridays. If you like it, will you pass it on and spread the word. And if you have any suggestions for stories I should include or other comments about Life Stories I’d love to hear from you. Please email me: zoeblackler@gmail.com.

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Leftovers: Poker and pizza night

For a few years now I’ve taken photos of my dinner party leftovers. I posted some of those pictures here a few months ago. I haven’t done any entertaining since I’ve been in New York, I’ve barely even cooked, but last night was games night at Metropolitan Avenue.

Life Stories roundup (Jan 1-8 2010)

George Obama. Credit: Stephen Morrison/Corbis

UPDATE: My Life Stories project has a new home. For more of my picks of the best profiles and life stories from around the web visit the new Life Stories blog site.

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In this week’s round up of profiles and life stories:Squatter and freegan Katharine Hibbert; grown-up adopted children; Zadie Smith and her father; Sadie Frost; Barack’s brother George Obama; Van Gogh; double agent Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi; angry AIDS activist Larry Kramer; son of South Korean abductee Choi Sung-Yong; chess genius Magnus Carlsen; Vic Chestnutt; double atom bomb survivor Tsutomu Yamaguchi; redeemed poet John Burnside; reluctant bride Elizabeth Gilbert; hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger; flasher Ian Drury; exasperating lover Warren Beatty; Tiger Woods in the buff; centenarians; design blogger The Sartorialist and a mugging seal

To pickles and a movie: Toasting my first New York Christmas

Another New York revelation

I’d thought it would be easy to find somewhere to volunteer here on Christmas Day. I’d expected to come across a New York version of Crisis at Christmas – a city wide organisation that matches volunteers to soup kitchens. Instead I found a disparaging piece in The New York Times that suggested trying to volunteer at holiday time was as indulgent as it was unhelpful. I persevered. I rang the Salvation Army and followed up a couple of other suggestions I’d come across online, but nowhere seemed to want my help.

By Tuesday I was feeling despondent. I called a friend. “Even if I find somewhere that will take me I’m not sure how I’ll get there with the subway closed,” I said. Which was when she gave me yet another reason to love New York. The subway would be open, she told me. And the cinemas and shops, bars and restaurants.I had assumed – how stupid of me – that New York would suffer the same transformation as London on Christmas Day. That it would turn into a hideous ghost town. But New York is not a Christian city – for the many Jews living here, I discovered, the traditional way to spend the day is to eat Chinese food and go to the movies.

This sudden revelation changed everything. It really didn’t matter what I did or where I went now that I knew a great chunk of my fellow New Yorkers weren’t bothered either. So it wasn’t until late on Christmas Eve, when Laura from the Volunteering Meetup Group called with the address of St Mary’s Church in the Lower East Side, that I even knew what, if anything, I was going to do with the day.

Life Stories roundup: #3

UPDATE: My Life Stories project has a new home. For more of my picks of the best profiles and life stories from around the web visit the new Life Stories blog site.

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In this weeks’s roundup of profiles and life stories:  Serial failure Alec Baldwin * author Anna Blundy * hostile Panto character Mickey Rooney * Katherine Mansfield * father of Esperanto LL Zamenhof * criminal and escapologist Ronald Tackman * Whole Foods boss John Mackey * Palestinian prisoner Amneh Muna * child schizophrenic January Schofield * the software guy who conned the CIA * Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab * Brazilian president Lula * photographer and jazz obsessive Eugene Smith * genius journalist Arthur Koestler * gay Arab artist Ali Jabri * Mark Fidrych * The Rain Man * illustrator David Levine * Jimi Hendrix

Life Stories roundup: #2

UPDATE: My Life Stories project has a new home. For more of my picks of the best profiles and life stories from around the web visit the new Life Stories blog site.

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In this week’s roundup of profiles and life stories: Kambodian war criminal Duch * former duchess Sarah Ferguson * angry peacenik John Lennon * Dr Beetroot * photographic pioneer Larry Sultan *  Hitler plot conspirator Inga Haag * America’s rogue agent * Gerry Adams‘ father * temperamental starchitect Zaha Hadid * humorist turned science writer Bill Bryson * a death-defying skydiver * call-girl blogger Brooke Magnanti * TIME person of the year Ben Bernanke * premature babies * Franz Kafka * the famous as you’ve never known them * Adolf Eichmann and New York City’s favourite rat 

Coloured music at ITP’s Winter Show

On Monday afternoon I went to have a quick look at the ITP winter student show. Here was a musical project that caught my eye. Perfect for synaesthetes, the interactive sound triangle matrix by MinWoo Bae uses triangular die to generate colour-coded musical notes.

Snowmen sunbathing on the High Line

We came across two snowmen sunbathing up on the High Line on Sunday afternoon. Or rather a snowwoman and her child. The child is wearing a bikini (and what looks like a mustache oddly) but mum is in the altogether. She must be a guest at The Standard. 

On our walk were Sophie and James and their daughters Ava and Nesta who just managed to fly in from London on Saturday evening before the blizzard hit full force and the airports shut down and Tom, who just failed to fly out about half an hour later. (There were no hard feelings.)

No crisis, just Christmas

When I wake up tomorrow, I will feel, in a certain respect, entirely different to the way I felt when I woke up today. Today is Saturday and tomorrow is Sunday, and though practically that means almost nothing to me, emotionally it still adds texture to my state of mind.

It’s been over 18 months now since I’ve had a regular full time job attached to a particular place and more or less defined days and hours. What I consider work now spans a broad spectrum, from that which I do unpaid for pleasure, to that which I am paid to do with pleasure, to that which I do primarily for money. As long as enough of that work falls into the last two categories such that my rent is paid with enough left over for large skimmed lattes, it matters little to me which bits come with cheques attached.

And since pretty much all of this work can be done according to my own working pattern, and since my preferred pattern involves working when and where I choose, there are days when I will have three hour lunches, others when I will work from first waking to dropping into bed and others, when I’m working to English time, when I’ll be up until 4 am to meet a deadline or up at 5 am to make a call.

So why should it be that Friday afternoons still feel like Friday afternoons and Monday mornings like Monday mornings? That Saturdays induce a restlessness and Sundays a sense of calm? The emotional rhythm of everyone else’s week still sets the tone for my own and the rhythm of everyone else’s year still defines my own. I’m referring, in particular, to the most emotionally weighted day of the year. I’m talking about Christmas Day.

A tour of NYC’s finest photo lab

At a certain point during my Nail Soup take-out evening with Esteban a few weeks ago, I reached for my camera to take some photos. After scrabbling about in my bag for ages (anyone who knows me will recognise the position) I realised it was not there hidden in the mountain of stuff I always carry about with me. Which meant I’d lost it at some point during the day, either in the Museum of the City of New York (which would mean some vague hope of getting it back) or the Cake Shop bar in the Lower East Side (considerably less hope).

So to give him something to do while I quickly called the bar, I handed Esteban my notebook and asked him to write down the names of some of the artists he works with. We’d already talked a lot about Ecuador and his house by the lake and his Dalmatian but had barely touched on his work as a photographic printer.

It wasn’t until a few days later that I looked at the list, to see that it included Andres Serrano, Jeff Koons and Mitch Epstein amongst other prestigious names. It turns out that Esteban Mauchi is a master printer at the famous Laumont Studio on W52nd Street. One of the first things you find when you google Laumont is a piece in The New York Times travel section from a few years ago, with a dozen suggested stops on a photographic tour of New York City. At Number One is Laumont.