Last night was a star-studded salute to one of the main reasons people pick up the Village Voice:  Michael Musto, who has written for the newspaper for 25 years.  Pick up his new book, Fork on the Left, Knife in the Back, and you’ll be as enchanted by his acerbic wit as is the rest of New York City.

Below are photos from the celebration, all taken by David Shankbone and licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution.

Joan Rivers hosted the party.

Countess LuAnn de Lesseps of the Real Housewives of New York

Irina Movmyga and artist Andres Serrano

Miss Dirty Martini, Michael Urie and Michael Musto

Ronnie Spector serenading Michael Musto

Ronnie Spector of The Ronettes

Joan Rivers enjoying Murray Hill’s performance.

Michelangelo Signorile and Linda Simpson.

Michael Urie of Ugly Betty.

Robert Verdi (center) and artist Robert Richards (right)

Burlesque sensation (and Karl Lagerfeld muse) Miss Dirty Martini.

Lisa Levy and David Shankbone (both of whom fought this People’s Court case for a dog rescue)

Epiphany, Brooke Crescenti and friend.

Party-goers

Robin Byrd

Musto and Judy Garland (Tommy Femia)

More party-goers

Unlike Snowmageddon 2010, Snowicane produced a good bit of snow.  The only thing keeping this from a complete blowout was that the snow was super wet.  It froze and accumulated during the night, but by late morning it mostly turned to slush.  The sky even cracked with sun for twenty minutes (last photo), and things started melting rapidly before the storm started up again, halfhearted.

I still tell you: we New Yorkers have become wimps with the snow.  So many people stayed home, yet the city was navigable.

Photos taken with my Samsung Memoir cameraphone.  All photos are licensed Creative Commons 3.0.

Snowicane-covered cars in Alphabet City, New York, 9 a.m.

Famous Katz’s Deli, 9 a.m. Snowicane.  You’re standing on the edge of the East Village,  staring across Houston Street at perhaps the most famous edge of the Lower East Side.

Snowblower outside of Red Square apartments on Houston; across the street begins the Lower East Side.

1st Avenue and Houston (the East Village) – man (I think) walking his dog in the Snowicane.

Wall Street, 9:30 a.m.  You can see it’s getting slushy.  It was quiet, many people stayed home and almost everyone else came to work in jeans and boots, which worked well in the conditions.

Looking north out a window in a stairwell toward the city from the financial district.  Click on the photo to see the slight outlines of the buildings in the distance obscured by the downfall.

A break in the storm over Wall Street.

Scott Lamb did a pretty cool post comparing the blizzards of New York’s past with the most recent.  Evidence that all three of these blizzards have been over-hyped for my city.  Take this shot from the 1899 storm:

Scott used this photo of Little Man from my blizzard post to represent 2010; click on it below to see more blizzard shots through time:

One of the more exciting restaurant prospects for me in Washington DC was a place called Founding Farmers. My sisters and I decided we would eat lunch there this last Saturday, and it was a mistake.

The idea behind the place is excellent: a group of family farmers banded together to open the restaurant. They believe in sustainable farming, only serve fish approved by Fishwatch, and area farms supply much of what is on the menu. On their website they trumpet numerous environmentally-conscious bonafides.

Enthused to try “true food” at reasonable prices, both my sisters and I found the experience was a real let down.  We all agreed, however, that the vibrant, artistic interior did not fail to impress.

Our server barely seemed to notice our table, and she took 15 minutes each time I order a Coke (I cancelled it the second time because I finished my meal, and that seemed to annoy her).

We could have overlooked the service except that the food was so incredibly greasy it upset all our stomachs. Granted, we didn’t order light fare. My one sister and I ordered the tomato soup that came with French fries and a grilled gruyère and white Vermont cheddar sandwich.

Everything glistened with oil. The French fries looked delicious, except that they were soggy. Handling the grilled cheese required the constant mopping of fingers. “Is your tomato soup greasy, too?” I asked my sister. “I don’t know, probably,” she said, putting down her spoon.  I thought the soup was the best part of my plate, but my sister did not finish hers.

My second sister only wanted something to pick at since we had big dinner plans, so she ordered the homemade potato chips with dips. She suffered the most (and me the least since I didn’t eat the dips). That night before we were to leave to the Westend Bistro for dinner, both of my sisters suffered from cramps.   I have a garbage can for a stomach so a quick trip to the bathroom worked for me.  The only thing we did besides Founding Farmers was a drink at P.O.V., so we all blamed the restaurant’s food that was greasier than T.G.I. Friday’s.

I took this early in my photography, on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2007, two months before I bought my Olympus.  It’s the stage that is shared by both the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera.  I had a cheap Panasonic, but a guy who I had fallen in love with once offered to show me around because he had access to what was then the New York State Theater.  I didn’t want to waste the opportunity, so I used what I had, but it still came out decent enough.  I believe this is my one and only panoramic shot.

Man, I had to go to the ballet a lot when we dated, because he had been a ballet dancer and I thought I should give it a try but after two I was burned out.  Nobody can tell me I don’t have a right not to like Balanchine, as it was his anniversary season so every show was Balanchine.  I’m sure he’s great, but I learned ballet is not my thing.  Particularly as I associated it with this guy.

Two years before on Valentine’s Day, 2005, was one of the most miserable moments of my life, and he had a good bit to do with it; that and MacroCat prematurely dying on that day as law school exams loomed.

I hadn’t spoken to him for over a year after he left to work in Europe, and in that time I had finally forgiven him for the lies and betrayals, forgiven him enough that I pined for that in-love feeling I had felt.  We tried to make a go of it again for about a month, but whatever we had was lost.  Worse, discovering new indiscretions and trying to remember what I had even seen in him cheapened what had been a proud bittersweet memory.

The photo I took that day of a ballerina working with her coach in the empty theater is used on 143 pages on 31 Wikimedia projects around the world.

I captured this trio in Tompkins Square Park in my neighborhood, New York’s East Village.  An unseasonably warm day in the city, a lot of people were out to enjoy one of the few outdoor days before winter.

The guy was singing his heart out, and these two girls were lapping it up.  The girls were far more attractive than the guitarist.  Just goes to show how far music can carry the heart.  They were both quite taken with him.  He sang so loudly that passers-by had to look.  I am not saying the singing was bad, but its volume created a spectacle.

The one in the middle provided shy, barely-audible background vocals overpowered by his Steve Perry meets John Mayer power chords.

The listening fare included Shwayze – lol.

They are sitting at the base of the famous Hare Krishna tree (from Wikipedia):

One of Tompkins Square Park’s most prominent features is its collection of venerable American Elm (Ulmus americana) trees. One elm in particular, located next to the semi-circular arrangement of benches in the park’s center, is important to adherents of the Hare Krishna religion. It was beneath this tree, on October 9, 1966, that A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, held the first recorded outdoor chanting session of the Hare Krishna mantra outside of the Indian subcontinent; participants in the ceremony included Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The event is seen as the founding of the Hare Krishna religion in the United States, and the tree is treated by Krishna adherents as a significant religious site.

Photos taken with the Samsung Memoir camera phone.

Kamila Shamsie and Hari Kunzru were at Union Square B&N to read and discuss their work with Robert Polito.

Unfortunately, my contact popped off my super dry right eye, so I had trouble with the focus and it shows in most of the shots.  Grrr.  Win some, lose some.

Kamila Shamsie was interesting to see.  In a short time she has accomplished a good deal of award-nominated work and comes from a family of notable Pakistani writers (she is the daughter of Muneeza Shamsie and a niece of Attia Hosain).  She read from her work Burnt Shadows.

Equally interesting was Hari Kunzru, whose varied tastes have taken him from travel journalist at The Guardian to music editor at Wallpaper* to winner of the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel The Impressionist. You can never celebrate a renaissance man enough.  Kunzru read from his book My Revolutions.

Perhaps most exciting for me was the unexpected opportunity to see Robert Polito again, as I have some memories tied to him.

In 2006 there was a symposium at the Bowery Poetry Club for Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl. I found a table in the front, where I sat drinking vodka all night as Polito, David Gates, Bob Holman and Alicia Ostriker talked about the famous poet’s work and the effect that he had on their lives.  My camera was very cheap, but I liked the photographs I took of each of them (they could all stand to be cleaned up).

It was Ostriker on stage who indirectly brought up Ginsberg’s NAMBLA controversy that I recalled well, as I had asked Ginsberg himself about it.

In 1995 when I lived in Boulder and my brother-in-law Rob attended the Naropa Institute–Ginsberg helped found its poetics department–I wandered over to the campus with Rob and his classmates for a festival the school held each summer.  Ginsberg always came out to Colorado for it.

I saw him milling about on the grounds, so I approached him.  What I most knew about him then was his position regarding the North American Man-Boy Love Association.  More accurately, I didn’t know his position, just that he had caused a national firestorm over it.

I walked up and introduced myself.  “Mr. Ginsberg,” I said,” I don’t want to take too much of your time, but I was wondering if you would explain to me your position about your support for the North American Man-Boy Love Association.”  I was incredibly embarrassed to ask him, but I already had prejudged him negatively about it.  Part of me felt now was the only moment I could confront him politely to find out his thoughts myself.

“Follow me,” he replied.  We began to walk down a path through the campus, and he asked me some questions about myself, who I am, what I wanted out of life.  The sorts of things one expects an older poet to ask a college student.

We approached the bathroom, and he motioned for me to come in.   “So you want to know what I think about NAMBLA?  Well, tell me David,” and he unzipped his pants and stood at the urinal as I heard water begin to trickle, “did you know what you wanted to do sexually when you were 16?”

Ginsberg went on to say his support for NAMBLA was nothing about having sex with 10-year-olds or any other such nonsense.  “More,” he said to me as he held his penis in his hand and finished relieving himself, “it is about our culture’s complete immaturity regarding human sexuality that people under 18 are classified as sexual incompetents.”

His support–he said as he washed up his hands–was not for NAMBLA per se, but only that we should reexamine the issue of age-of-consent laws to see if they actually make sense.  “We simply don’t discuss it.  After all,” said Ginsberg as he turned toward me from the sink, hands dripping as he smiled, “I certainly knew what I wanted to do when I was 15.  Didn’t you, David?”  He paused for the answer, and I replied shyly that yes, yes I thought I did.

“Well then,” he said as he smiled again and dried his hands, “should we return to the festival?  Or is there something more you’d like to discuss?”

When I listened to Polito, Ostriker, Holman and Gates talk about him that night in 2006, it was a pleasure to photograph them with my cheap camera and to reflect upon my own Ginsberg tale.  That moment in 1995 was one of the first times in adulthood that I decided that I would take the time to discover the reality of a controversy myself, and not just listen to what other people said about it.  What a reward that was.

That night in 2006 at the Bowery Poetry Club Polito gave an impassioned, tear-inducing reading from his then-new book The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later.

The images on this post are licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution; re-use is permitted but please link back to this post with credit.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya traveled far to New York City to discuss her work There Once Lived a Woman Who Killer Her Neighbor’s Baby. Only a few nights ago Snob Magazine hosted her at Russian Samovar on West 54th, where she sang cabaret songs as people downed vodka.  Tonight the setting was McNally Jackon, which played host to the Russian literary star reading, with Keith Gessen providing translation. From Wikipedia:

Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya (Russian: Людмила Стефановна Петрушевская) (born May 26, 1938) is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright. Petrushevskaya is regarded as one of Russia’s most talented contemporary writers, whose writing combines postmodernist trends with the psychological insights and parodist touches reminiscent of writers such as Anton Chekhov. Over the last few decades, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been one of the most admired and acclaimed contemporary writers at work in Eastern Europe: The Times called her “one of the finest living Russian writers”.

Below is my photographic essay of Petrushevskaya.

The images on this post are licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution; any re-use is permitted but please link back to this post with credit.

Tonight Paul Auster, as a I type this post, only an hour after that photograph was taken, is speaking before a large group of people on the fourth floor of Barnes & Noble Union Square, the must-stop for anyone who has written something worth knowing about.

The choice this evening was Invisible, and for me the event ended a horror before it began.  I left shortly after taking these shots.

I had planned on quickly saying hello to Auster.  He, Salman Rushdie and I had a small conversation last year at a breakfast honoring Israel’s gift to literature, Amos Oz.  I wouldn’t expect Auster to remember some party chit-chat from 2008, yet it makes a good re-introduction as photographer’s routinely identify themselves to the subject.

But it was made impossible by a man who was almost a penciled caricature of a paparazzo. What made it comical to me (not to anyone else) was that there was absolutely no need to go paparazzo.  He and I were the only photographers there, and it was Paul Auster in a bookstore not Britney Spears on a red carpet.

I should have known the guy was trouble.  The entire twenty minutes before the start he wanted to go on-and-on with me about the guy with Alzheimer’s who won the Nobel Prize for something he did decades ago.  He talked about things I don’t care about, like Einstein and fiber optics, and the tragedy that only now this guy gets the big prize as he suffers from memory lapse.

Most photographers don’t want to talk.  Maybe over the years they see the same photographers covering the same events, and friendships develop; otherwise, they get in and out and don’t want to hear a random photog’s life musings.

Not this guy.  His eyes were so bloodshot that they barely looked like eyes since the inflamed skin surrounding them was the same puffy red-pink shade as his cornea.  It all blended together in a fleshy wrinkled mass.  Somewhere in there I saw blue irises, drowning. His hair was so badly dyed–the gray, coarse base with what looked like a black dye-job over a brown one–it resembled a toupee.

B&N Union Square, despite its size, is somewhat intimate.  Often, I am the only photographer there.  When professionals show up they know from experience to respect the venue.  A bookstore is not the place to start shouting, “Mista Austah!  Mista Austah!  Look left!  Now above!  Mista Austah, toyn some to tha right!”

He did this while Maria, the curator of these events, was in the midst of her introduction of Auster, causing everyone to stare in our direction to a point that Auster, holding up his index finger like a schoolteacher, had to “Shhhh” the guy.  He was making a spectacle of himself (and by association, me).

These photography sessions don’t last forever.  You’re expected to take a few shots and then let the person alone.  Not this guy.  He wouldn’t stop photographing Auster, gesturing, yelling loudly, “Mista Austah, one maw look down please…”

Every photo I took has Auster, lips pursed, staring at this fool.

Auster looked at me and I nodded in a sign that I got what I needed.  I turned off my camera and looked at this guy still going nuts with the flashes.  To stop the endless shots that had long worn out their welcome, I moved in front of the guy’s camera and made the quick introduction to Auster.  Flustered, he only brightened with recognition when I mentioned the Amos Oz breakfast.

Then he was called up to the podium.  I turned toward the exit embarrassed.

The images on this post are licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution; any re-use is permitted but please link back to this post with credit.

Between Saturday Night Live, Scare Tactics and 30 Rock, Tracy Morgan has become a one man gang of hysterical. Now he’s written a book about his experience, I Am the New Black. Amongst its revelations are how he felt about his former Saturday Night Live cast members:

“I had my finger on the pulse of urban comedy, but when I brought my act to ‘SNL,’ those motherf*****s just felt bad for me. None of the cast i came up with saw this future for me. No, sir. All i have to say about that is, where’s Chris Katan now? Where’s Cheri Oteri now? That b***h can’t even get arrested. … It’s all right; I don’t mind. It’s hard to get mainstream America to catch up. Mainstream America has just learned the words to Sugarhill’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’! And we don’t do that s*** no more! Jay-Z and Lil Wayne don’t sound like that! No one sounds like that no more!”

On friends who were only interested in his money:

“I’ve got friends who want money but don’t want to do anything to earn it. They won’t hold down a f*****g McDonald’s job to feed their own kids, but now that I’ve got money they want to come and work for me. I don’t know what the f*** makes them think i want them working for me if they won’t get off their a** to provide for their own family. I’ve lost a lot of friends that way, friends who feel like they deserve a place on my payroll. They don’t get it: I don’t need an entourage. I don’t need motherf*****s to play Xbox with me. I’d rather play Xbox with my kids.”

Below are Creative Commons photographs of Tracy Morgan that I released under the 3.0 attribution license that are now found on Wikipedia and my Flickr Creative Commons stream.