#Hart Island

[scholarofgloom]

[thoughtportal]

A few years ago, a man who called himself Stephen became a fixture in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. After his body was discovered, a woman who knew him made it her mission to bring his story to light.

{listen}

[thespiralstaircasewriter]

A MADONNA OF THE WILD SIDE

Beside my bed, the last image and the first I saw everyday, back when I was a young girl, was a poster of Lou Reed and Rachel Humphreys.

I have to say that, more than him, it was her that I looked up to.

Her styled, wavy dark hair, her perfectly plucked eyebrows, her remote Monna Lisa composure.

To me she looked unexplicably calm, her limbs draped around her man, the composition of the tableau as majestic as any Renaissance Madonna portrait.

I couldn’t help but study her polished fingernails and her mysterious half-smile.

I really didn’t know a thing, in my closed up world, all alone with myself and my innate instincts. Which said: look, and learn. Look, and try to seize that secret. Look, and try to understand for yourself what life is.

Here, basic reality: Man, and Woman. So it seems. Like Father and Mother, but different. And it concerns me too, I thought, because I am a woman too, by birth. But I am and feel completely different from this Woman. Perhaps that might be because she is said to be… a Man? But she doesn’t look like one. The matter requires investigation.

A woman, I observed, was some role to interpret by serious rules, and at the same time, a nature, as evident as the one expressed by a thriving plant, or by a tiger, calmly licking her paw.

Rachel looked like a woman, in a pair of jeans and a black shirt. So a woman was obviously the essence which radiated through her person: it spoke to me, but I couldn’t make out the words.

Time passed, and I grew up. The poster went, and something else took its place.

I seemed to forget everything about Lou and Rachel, and if the sun had come out for the two of them, on one day lost in time.

And in time, I had my own chances to throw my bones at the world, to take long life digressions, to bore myself in well-thought out perspectives, to fuck and get fucked by my own quiproquos.

I went along what looked like my own way.

And you could say I turned around one day and found I had gone full circle, to be back to the same perplexity, and to the same attentive observation, this time surrounded by a modern, multi-faceted world, speaking in tongues, where a million oracles, high or low, just wait on every corner, to dole out any sorts of revelations you might ask for.

So I learned in detail the human story behind the lore I had picked up passing by, through the years, of how Rachel Humphreys was, in Lou Reed’s own words, ‘something else’, oscillating between a masculine and a feminine identity, and still retaining some man traits.

From what I found, Rachel had wanted to make her choice, and to be called a ‘she’. No ‘he’ days, anymore.

But that didn’t come true for Rachel. And we’ll never know exactly if she was denied that, or if she just put it on hold, busy on drugs, adventures and misadventures, thinking she would have the chance later. Later…

Likewise, we’ll never know if she left, or the way she held her head when she left, although I have a whole movie in my mind about that. Or if Rachel just lost her game and her man, and she was actually the one to watch him go, his heart closed for her, uncomprehending.

I’ll never know.

But I know that she fell from grace, that she suffered her own ordeal in the cruelest, unmitigated years of a modern Plague, and that she died a miserly death, like so many artists’ models. A sure death, the only biographic detail we possess about the mysterious beauties who look at us from ancient portraits.

And I know where her bones rest, I read, in a ‘pauper burial site’ on Hart Island, off the Bronx coast.

There she is, among many, many others, over one million souls, it says.

All the same, I feel as if I might just find her, in a dream.

Then I would know her in the multitude, and walk up to her.

Touch her shoulder, tell her I remember her.

Give her this story.

[peashooter-in-exile]

Why this tiny island in New York City is inaccesible

from SideNote

[puretopia]

moving to Windenburg

[marykatewiles]

And so it begins! Anne of the Island, chapter one, is out today on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Tune in each week for a new chapter or join us on Patreon to get the entire book! This third book in the series was my favorite to create and read and I'm so excited to finally be sharing it with the world. Thank you for listening!

This chapter features @hartgracesarah, @seanpersaud, and Lauren Lopez.

[sinnaminie]

Some of my The Terror plushie fellas went to Beechey Island ☺️

Many thanks to Zoe & her mum for the photos

[coochiequeens]

Since that post about Martha Gellhorn is popular here's a post about another writer who is more interesting than Hemingway.

Dawn Powell on the beach, circa 1914.

Tim Page, the Estate of Dawn Powell

This is the third story in The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island series from Radio Diaries. You can listen to the next installment on All Things Considered next Monday, and read and listen to previous stories in the series here.

Dawn Powell infiltrated the writing world by hanging out in bars and taverns around New York's Greenwich Village in the 1920s, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Edmund Wilson.

"She came from nowhere, she was no one," writer Fran Lebowitz told Radio Diaries.

But Powell had a voice. She had style. And she rose from obscurity by turning her gaze on the city of New York itself and its cast of characters. Over the coming decades, Powell wrote novels, diaries and more than a dozen plays — earning her renown, and even a National Book Award nomination.

Then, in 1965, she died. What happened next didn't go according to script.

A voice lost to the world

Powell had been clear in her will: she wanted her body to be donated to the Weill Cornell Medical Center for research. Yet five years after her death, when Cornell asked her executor, Jacqueline Rice, what to do with her remains, Rice left the decision up to the center.

So, unbeknownst to her family and friends, Powell was buried on New York's Hart Island — America's largest public cemetery. Then, all of her work went out of print.

A generational talent of New York was buried in its heart, but lost to the world and those who knew her.

Powell circa 1930, and an entry in her diary circa 1914.

Tim Page, the Estate of Dawn Powell

Hart Island, located off the coast of the Bronx, has no headstones and no plaques. It's often seen as a place for those who went unrecognized in their lifetime — not for well-known writers.

Powell had been writing stories since she was a child. Growing up in Ohio, she endured considerable emotional abuse from her stepmother and often used writing as an escape. In 1918, she left Ohio for New York City, with dreams of being a writer.

"She knew that she was smart enough, good enough to be very good in New York, which is the most competitive place in the world," Lebowitz said.

Powell's humble beginnings in the bars of Greenwich Village turned into a career. In the coming years, she wrote witty pieces on New York life for magazines like The New Yorker and Esquire. Her career picked up steam when she began writing novels about New York: satirical, risque fiction about people who'd come to the city from a small town and indulged in its joys and vices. Her most well known novels include A Time to Be Born (1942) and The Wicked Pavilion (1954).

"She was a very smart, tough, sarcastic, woman who put all of that into her books," said Tim Page, a critic and author of Dawn Powell: A Biography. "She made fun of millionaires and communists. She basically thought human beings were silly and frivolous, but she loved them."

Powell's writing reflected her personal life. Her characters were often young people who ached for success and recognition, but rarely got it. Though her work was in the public eye (her last novel, The Golden Spur, was a finalist for the 1963 National Book Award), she did not reach the level of fame of other writers, male or female, in her era.

"Some critics thought she was mean," Page said. "All the very famous women writers were usually ending their stories with a man and a woman falling in love and living happily thereafter. Dawn had seen enough of life to realize, well, sometimes that's the case but it's not what usually happens in the world."

Powell's diary, December 1932.

Tim Page, the Estate of Dawn Powell

Powell struggled with money for much of her life. She and her husband, Joseph Gousha, had a disabled son who needed costly medical care. By the end of her life, she also needed medical care of her own. She developed intestinal cancer, which led to her death.

While her will was specific about her body going to the Weill Cornell Medical Center, it didn't specify what to do with her body after its donation. In addition to being Powell's general executor, Jacqueline Rice was also her literary co-executor, largely responsible for her literary estate. When her client died, Rice simply stopped responding to inquiries from publishers and filmmakers. It was some time before Rice told Powell's family about where she had ended up.

Years later, Powell's great-niece Vicki Johnson was told by her mother about the burial on Hart Island, also known as a Potter's Field.

"My mom told me it was a Potter's Field, and it was just a place where people are buried who didn't have any money or no family to take care of them," Johnson said. "My grandparents would have certainly found a better resting place for her than where she was buried."

The effort to bring Powell's work back

Powell isn't the only well-known person buried on Hart Island. There's former child actor Bobby Driscoll, who starred in some of the most iconic Disney films of the time, like Treasure Island and Peter Pan — and even won a Juvenile Oscar by the age of 13.

Driscol fell into a pattern of substance abuse and run-ins with the law in his teenage years, ranging from drug smuggling to assault. He was found dead in his Greenwich Village apartment at 31. When no one claimed his body, he ended up on Hart Island.

The cemetery is also home to Rachel Humphreys — the muse and lover to Lou Reed, and the inspiration for several songs on his album Coney Island Baby. Though her official cause of death remains unknown, Humphreys died at the age of 37 at St. Clare's hospital, known for housing AIDS patients. Hers was among the many bodies sent to Hart Island during the AIDS epidemic.

Johnson and others insist Powell wouldn't have minded being buried at Hart Island.

"I think she'd be a little amused by the fact that she's buried with a Disney star and a rock and roller," Page said. "She loved New York. She told the truth about New York and I'm not sure she'd want to be anywhere else."

Dawn Powell circa late 1940s, early 1950s.

Tim Page, the Estate of Dawn Powell

Though Powell's descendants have chosen not to remove her body from Hart Island, there has been a considerable effort to unbury her work. In 1987, her writer and friend, Gore Vidal, published an article in The New York Review of Books, praising Powell as one of American literature's lost greats. The article ignited interest in Powell in the writing world.

Steerforth Press also published a volume of Powell's diaries, edited by Page, in 1998. The Library of America put nine of her novels back in print in 2001.

These days, Powell has gained a cult-like following. Celebrities like Julia Roberts and Anjelica Huston have tried turning her books into films, and she's gotten a shout-out on the TV show Gilmore Girls.

"There will come a time when people will realize that she's one of America's greatest writers," Page said.

This story was produced by Mycah Hazel of Radio Diaries. It was edited by Deborah George, Ben Shapiro and Joe Richman. Thanks also to Nellie Gilles, Alissa Escarce, and Lena Engelstein of Radio Diaries.

This story is the third in a series called The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island. You can find other stories from Hart Island on the Radio Diaries Podcast.

[dietcunt222]

it gives me a splash of comfort to know other creatures have souls too.

but when it comes to my own species, i’d rather be alone.

i could never figure out why.

maybe its the familiarity that ruins the mystery.

maybe because when i look at them, i see me.

[mushi-shield]

[rabbitcruiser]

National Violin Day 

Tune up your fiddle and get bowing, sign up to instrument lessons or attend a concert to hear the gorgeous sounds of a string orchestra.

The violin is easily the most well-known bowed string instrument across the world, and it is really not all that surprising to see that the violin does in fact have a day dedicated to its existence! After all, everything from Western and Indian classical music to bluegrass and jazz would be unimaginable today without the violin.

It is quite possibly the most versatile instrument in the world in terms of repertoire–and that must be why there is a special day all its own to celebrate the violin.

History of National Violin Day

The violin itself seems to have evolved from medieval instruments that were like fiddles. It came into its own distinct form by the 15th century, becoming the most popular virtuoso instrument in Europe by the 1660s. Most violins made today are copies after either Stradivarius or Amati, the latter being active as a violin maker in the 16th century.

Today, the violin not only remains an indispensable feature of western classical music, but has found its way into various forms of classical and folk music around the world as well as various other genres. There are a lot of violinists and fiddle players throughout the world today, so it is easy to see why National Violin Day has caught on!

In fact, the violin is present in the most prestigious musical groups in the world, including the Venetian Philharmonic Orchestra. Imagine an instrument with such humble beginnings becoming such an important mainstay of modern classical music.

Now it’s time to celebrate the day revolving around this humble instrument!

How to Celebrate National Violin Day

For those who want to get involved with National Violin Day but are not quite sure where to start, these ideas might help to set the stage for the day:

Play the Violin

Well, for those who happen to play the instrument, then it is a no-brainer to go ahead and play the violin in honor of National Violin Day. Get that violin out of its case, tune it, place some rosin on the bow, and get ready to make some beautiful music in honor of the day! And those who are a little bit out of practice might want to invest in some ear plugs for family members.

Go to a Violin Concert

For those who simply want to appreciate the sound of the violin without actually playing it, then it might be a great idea to go to a concert where the instrument would be played on National Violin Day.

Not sure where to go? Try out one of these important groups that is sure to feature a superb violinist or two:

Boston Symphony Orchestra Playing at Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts, this orchestra also features a Young People’s Concert Series to allow the public to hear up-and-coming new talent.

Itzhak Perlman Undoubtedly one of the most talented violinists alive today, Perlman has achieved almost super star status with his instrument.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra Mixing classical music talent with rock band style, this group plays all round the world and, yes, they feature many songs with a violin. It’s not necessarily “classical”, but a modern ear for music just might love it.

Give a Gift to a Favorite Violinist

For those who happen to know someone interested in learning the violin but who doesn’t have an instrument – today would be the perfect occasion to gift that person a violin. Or gift something to a violinist in your circle, even if it’s just some sheet music, some rosin or just a little card to show appreciation for them and their attempt at mastery of the instrument.

The modern violin family includes not only the violin, but also the viola, the violoncello, and the double bass as well. So for those who know any cellists or violists, today would also be a great day to listen to them play or to get them a gift as well!

Watch a Film About the Violin

Interested in learning more but not ready for a live performance yet? That’s okay! National Violin Day is a great way to feed a mild interest by watching a film about the instrument. Whether fiction or documentary, these movies would be a great way to get started:

Music of the Heart (1999), starring Meryl Streep This biographical drama features the true store of Roberta Guaspari, who was a violin teacher in Harlem in the late 1980s.

Orchestra of Exiles (2012), written by Josh Aronson This documentary tells the true story of a Polish violinist who founded the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Small Wonders (1995), directed by Allan Miller This is the Academy Award nominated documentary upon which Music of the Heart was based. It tells the story of the kids in East Harlem and their violinist teacher who went against the odds to play at Carnegie Hall.

A Late Quartet (2012), starring Christopher Walken This movie tells the story of a group of four struggling musicians who face serious challenges when their cellist is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Start Taking Violin Lessons

For those who have ever had the inclination to learn the violin, or perhaps have one laying around unused, this day is just the perfect time to start taking violin lessons. Start with the basics like brushing up on how to read music and then get to practicing. Don’t forget other important equipment such as a practice mute, extra set of strings, metronome and a comfortable shoulder rest.

Source

[tuttle-did-it]

‘Murder in Milan’ Murder, She Wrote

Cesar Romero returns (The Golden Girls, The Love Boat, Magnum PI, Fantasy Island, Charlie’s Angels, Hart to Hart, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Ironside, Night Gallery, Bewitched, Here’s Lucy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E, etc)

George Coe returns George Coe (Kramer vs Kramer, Bones, Archer, Star Wars animated shows, Supernatural Curb Your Enthusiasm, Grey’s Anatomy, The West Wing, Smallville, Becker, The Nanny, L.A. Law, St:TNG, Night Court, Murphy Brown, so much more!)

Paul Gleason returns (The Wonder Years, Adam012, Columbo, Cagney & Lacey, Magnum PI, Dallas, Kate & Allie, Diehard, Father Dowling Investigates, Seinfeld, Lost on Earth, The Drew Carey Show, Diagnosis Murder, etc)

S9E1 20 Sept 1992

[allthingsfandomx]

[singeratlarge]

SATURDAY MUSIC VIDEO MATINEE: “My Funny Valentine”—This ironic love song is from the comedy-musical BABES IN ARMS, a Rodgers & Hart musical that premiered this weekend in 1937. It’s the story of a group of small-town Long Island teenagers who put on a show to avoid being sent to a work farm by the town sheriff—the original 1937 version of the musical had political overtones with subplots about Communism and racism. A character named Billie Smith sings “My Funny Valentine” to a man named Valentine "Val" LaMar. Billie describes Valentine's characteristics in unflattering terms (at one point Billie describes Valentine's looks as "laughable," in keeping with the title), but ultimately affirms that he makes her smile and that she doesn't want him to change. The description of Valentine was consistent with lyricist Lorenz Hart's own insecurities and belief that he was too short and ugly to be loved. Hart, with Richard Rodgers,composed the musical, which included “Johnny One Note,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Where or When” and other songs that are now in The Great American Songbook. 

Ella Fitzgerald’s remake of “My Funny Valentine” inspired me to do it, and I’m familiar with signature versions by Chet Baker, Elvis Costello (whose version I heard first), and Miles Davis. I do it in D minor and it’s one of my favorites to sing out.

#Valentine #ValentinesDay #babesinarms #longisland #teenagers #myfunnyvalentine #billiesmith #valentinelamar #rodgersandhart #richardrodgers #lorenzhart #whereorwhen #greatamericansongbook #musical #ellafitzgerald #chetbaker #elviscostello #milesdavis #johnnyjblair #singeratlarge #williamsportpa #bullfrogbrewery #jeremiahs

[harveyspictures]

Shy Blackbird, Hart Miller Island May 15, 2021