my new york manifesto

I wrote the following comment on a friend’s LinkedIn post earlier this morning and then spent the rest of the day on the streets of my City:

I came to New York in 1989, met my husband within two weeks of both of us arriving for art school, and have called this amazing City home ever since — to the point that I cannot imagine living anywhere other than this tiny cluster of islands. The brief time we lived away from the City confirmed that, and we got ourselves right back here as quickly as we could.

I’ve watched the City change so much over the past 31 years, sometimes for the good, sometimes not. Lived here through 9/11, hurricanes and nor’easters, blackouts, financial slumps, service strikes, and now a pandemic, and watched a resilient community return time and again.

The real estate developers will tell you glass towers and shopping malls full of franchised boutiques are what make NYC better and better. But, to me those are what dumb it down, homogenize it, and make it too much like everywhere else in our strip-mall-paved world. And those glass towers and malls are most failing to do anything for the City through this pandemic.

nyc recommendations

I was asked recently on Instagram for my NYC recommendations. They aren’t what you’d expect:

whatsup.tony
Hey jimkempster! Are you based in the NYC?? 🙂 I’m heading there to make Facebook videos and was wondering if you have any recommendations?! Thanks!

jimkempster
@whatsup.tony Recommendations?

Explore every minute you’re here. Eat whatever smells good. Attend anything hosted by artists or groups of artists.

Come up with the most idiosyncratic list of unique, bizarre, exotic, uncharted, beloved things you’re interested in and then Google them with “NYC” attached, and you’ll have 100 days worth of things to do.

It’s all here.

mandela’s peace and 1960s christmas

Jim and Jane Henson’s handmade Christmas card from 1960.

Nelson Mandela’s death reminds me of all the great men and women who put their lives on the line for peace and justice, especial those of my childhood.

As a kid in Catholic grade school in the 1960s I was very aware of what the “reason for the season” really was. It was something more powerful than Santas kneeling before a manger, a fish on a bumper sticker, or a fight in a mall parking lot over being wished the wrong happiness.

We were taught that the message of the first Christmas was the longed-for good news of the coming of peace and justice to those who needed it most: the poor, the war-torn, the oppressed, and to ourselves when we recognize our humble role in the story. The great messengers of my childhood were not just from MY church or MY country, but from all over OUR world, and these men and women literally risked their lives for it.

love songs to blue skies

With art school, parish duties, and New York at my doorstep, I barely had time to be homesick for California, that first autumn in 1989. But I was. I missed Berkeley’s temperate climate and dramatic landscape, the way nature entered everyday life, how people treated one another, the forward-thinking politics, and my friends. Oh, my friends. And the deep, clear blue West Coast sky that saturated Berkeley’s daylight, the shadows, and my mood most of the year.

Having in the past only visited New York during its damp springs and hazy summers, I had no idea that crystal blue skies were a trademark of New York autumns.

rembrandt’s gaze

I’ve visited, off and on over the past 35 years, this self portrait Rembrandt painted as an older man. It hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York.

He has always stared just past my left ear, as if he has something on his mind, sometimes concerned about me, sometimes engrossed in his own thoughts.At times he has seemed wistful, other times melancholic. When I was young, I imagined more than a few times that he was perturbed with me for not putting enough time into the painting studio. His younger portraits were more playful, confident, self-possessed, proud. This one looks resigned to the current situation…whatever it may be.

one more for the new york time capsule

Years ago, when one of my sisters and her husband were visiting New York, she returned after a long day of tourist activity still wearing the little tin Met button from her morning visit to the museum.

“Do you know what the ‘M’ stands for?” I asked.

“Metropolitan Museum of Art,” she replied cautiously, aware that the question was too elementary.

“No, that’s inside the museum,” I insisted, “but do you know what it means outside?”

She stared at me curiously.

seeing god naked

Fontana del Nettuno, Bologna

The handsome Italian flight attendant unfolded the cloth napkin and rested it across my lap, with big smiling Caravaggio eyes that toyed with me for the moment. Bob and I had left Verona at 4 a.m. to race through the foggy Northern Italian countryside in our rental car and arrive at Milano’s Malpensa airport just short of two hours ahead of departure, only to find that Alitalia had overbooked our flight and we might not have seats.

Bob was miserable. He had picked up a cold in Verona, or Modena, or possibly even in my favorite Bologna. So driving through the dark and the fog to arrive at an airport that seemed to be accessible only by a series of farm roads with foreign names like “deviazione” and “non accessibile” had been stressful, to say the least, and multiplied when we learned at the ticket counter that we might not get on the plane at all.

a eulogy for our friend ruth

Ruth, Bob, and me on Ruth’s warehouse rooftop in Williamsburg. Circa 1990. That’s the Empire State Building peeking up over Ruth’s shoulder on the left.

I had the honor of offering reflections at the memorial service for our dear friend Ruth Van Erp a year ago today. I first read the following reflections from Bob (who to our surprise had known Ruth longer than anyone else in the room other than her family) and then followed them with a poem I’d composed over the three days since we’d received the news of Ruth’s death.

The day I first met Bob at NYU 23 years ago, he was excited for me to meet his friend Ruth. He spoke of her like they had known each other forever, a year or two already. Turned out it had only been a week. But the first day they met they had spent seven hours together talking and had became instant friends.

Here are some of Bob’s memories of Ruth:

the hairy pendulum swings

This piece appears as one of the two introductions to the art anthology Hair, published by Bruno Gmünder in 2010. The book is in its second edition, and the introductions themselves received callouts in reviews.

The Hairy Pendulum Swings:
How culture has embraced male body hair over the past century

When I was a child the world was warm and furry, from shag carpeting to suede bean-bag chairs to shing-a-ling trim to the long manes on everyone young. No one but competitive bodybuilders and drag queens would have considered shaving or waxing their bodies back then, and actors and athletes, like Sean Connery, Joe Namath, Burt Reynolds, and James Caan bared their luscious chests proudly on screen and in the pages of the magazines as often as possible.

In 1960s and ’70s America, chest hair was not only popular, it defined masculinity. The opposite of idealized stone-cold waxed muscle, the mysteries of adult male sexuality lay hidden deep within the thick matted diamond of hair between a workman’s pectorals, or under an athlete’s arms, or in furtive glimpses of bushy crotches in locker rooms. Hair softened the hard parts of men’s bodies, gave shape and expression to those that would otherwise have been shapeless, and suggested raw animal attraction waiting to be discovered.

And then came the 1980s.

meeting someone in new york

East Village, circa 1989.

I had that classic shot of Manhattan from the airplane window as I flew up the Hudson on the way into LaGuardia, parallel to the City’s skyscraper grid, as if the flight pattern had been directed specially for Continental Airlines and the City of New York by Woody Allen or Nora Ephron. I swear I heard Gershwin playing, possibly on the crackly airplane headphones, but I can’t say for certain. As I watched the World Trade Towers, then the Woolworth, Con-Ed, Flatiron, Empire State, Pan Am, and Chrysler buildings rise and fold below me like a pop-up book, the words passed through my head: “I could meet someone there.”