I’ve moved around a lot in life – 33 times between 17 cities, 6 states and 3 countries.  All before I was 27.  A natural consequence is that what people consider home fascinates me.  Not just physical, but emotional attachment to a place.

It was eight years ago this month that I moved into my present home, one that in many ways has defined me.  It’s the longest I’ve ever lived at one address.  But also in those eight years a man has lived on the street outside my building in the van you see in these photos I took tonight.  Eight years in that van (that I know of).  He’s usually there year round, although last year he disappeared for about three months in the winter, the van too.

He has some kind of deal worked out with the guy who owns the brick ivy-covered building behind the van in the photo below.  An extension cord you see hanging from the bumper is the power supply that keeps the television and space heater running.  I’ve surmised that he is allowed to use the sculptor’’s bathroom.  Perhaps they are friends?  I don’t know.

For eight years I have been consumed by this man, but I’ve never spoken to him.  For eight years I’ve walked past his van-home in all sorts of weather, as I hurried to the subway station.  At night I often see the flicker of his television as I step over the cord running across the concrete.

Who is he?  Why has he lived in a van parked in the East Village for perhaps a decade?  How does he know the sculptor guy who lives in the brick building?  The questions gnaw at me.

This is this man’s home, and it’s right outside mine.

I have something special in New York City:  a community.  My building in the East Village is exactly that.  It’s a co-op, so most people own their apartments, but the few rented places–like mine–are owned by the building itself.

I have lived here since February 2002, and the people you see  below are like family.  Over 8 years (the longest I have ever lived at one address) they have been there for me.  The photos of them below are labeled by their relationships to each other.

New Year’s in my building is cool because many people open up their apartments, so we all shuttle between each others’ places and the main party rooms downstairs.  Few people in New York City have anything like this, and that I have such close relationships with the people I live next to is a source of tremendous pride and gratitude.

People often assume I spend my New Years in some exotic way.  For years, I have spent it with my New York City family, and they are below:

It’s almost midnight in this picture, and everyone is beginning to pile into the main room with the TV.  It’s only seconds away.

It’s the New Year – hugs all around.

More hugs for the New Year.

Looks like another hug is coming my way…

Mother and son.

Daughter and mother.

The young always make the holiday.

Mother of the building.

Grandmother and granddaughter

Dating.

Me and my Puerto Rican mom.

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.

After watching The Fearless play at the St. Mark’s Place Block Party and photographing the Mosaic Man, I watched a game of dodge ball and took in the crowd.

I caught the famous East Village artist Jim Power, also known as the “Mosaic Man”, working on a lamp post during the St. Mark’s Place Block Party.

Here are photos of a downtown New York City legend, whose is responsible for landmarking many spots around the East Village:

Julie Atlas Muz may not realize it, but more Wikipedia editors know her name than one would think.  There once was a minor battle on Wikipedia as to what photograph should illustrate the Neo-Burlesque article.  Muz, 2006 winner of the Neo-burlesque Miss Exotic World Pageant, was chosen as the lead photo.

As part of the Jackie Factory’s Viper Mad show at the 2009 HOWL! Festival in New York City, Muz and her Harlot Pixies performed.  Below is a photographic essay of her and a few of her pixies:

Joey Arias is a downtown New York City legend.  From Wikipedia:

Film credits include Big Top Pee-wee, Mondo New York, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Flawless, and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar and Wigstock: The Movie.

His most recent work was performing in Arias with a Twist, a collaboration with puppeteer Basil Twist, at HERE Arts Center in New York and before that as the Mistress of Seduction in the Las Vegas show Zumanity, an “adult-themed” Cirque du Soleil show running at the New York-New York Hotel & Casino.

Yesterday Arias took to the stage at Tompkins Square Park with Sherry Vine, who I last photographed at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival (seen here on Wikipedia with Lady Bunny).

Below is my photographic essay of Joey Arias (black hair) and Sherry Vine (blond) at the 2009 HOWL! Festival:

Cited by the New York Times as one of the people who brought burlesque back to the city, Miss Dirty Martini performed tonight at the HOWL! Festival.  Dirty was there as one of the main attractions for The Jackie Factory’s Low Life 3: Viper Mad in Tompkins Square Park tonight.  Below is a photographic essay of her show (taken with my Olympus, not the Memoir as in my previous Howl! post).

I last ran into Dirty in 2007, when she co-hosted a bingo night with Murray Hill and Linda Simpson at Mo Pitkins House of Satisfaction.

Every year in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of New York City the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival takes over.  Parker lived right on the park.

As readers know, I’ve been spending a lot of blog space testing the Samsung Memoir–what is supposed to be the best camera phone on the market–in various settings.  Previously I did a beach vacation on Fire Island (Grade: B) and poet Eileen Myles reading at Blue Stockings (Grade: F).  The Parker festival was an opportunity to test the Memoir at an outdoor concert.

First, a little about Parker–a name you should know–from Wikipedia:

Parker played a leading role in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and improvisation based on harmonic structure. Parker’s innovative approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries. Several of Parker’s songs have become standards, including “Billie’s Bounce“, “Anthropology”, “Ornithology“, and “Confirmation”. He introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including a tonal vocabulary employing 9ths, 11ths and 13ths of chords, rapidly implied passing chords, and new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions. His tone was clean and penetrating, but sweet and plaintive on ballads. Although many Parker recordings demonstrate dazzling virtuosic technique and complex melodic lines – such as “Ko-Ko“, “Kim”, and “Leap Frog” – he was also one of the great blues players. His themeless blues improvisation “Parker’s Mood” represents one of the most deeply affecting recordings in jazz. At various times, Parker fused jazz with other musical styles, from classical to Latin music, blazing paths followed later by others.

Parker, who hailed from Kansas City, had absolutley no desire to ever be buried there.  His death was dramatic:

Parker died in the suite of his friend and patron Nica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City while watching The Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show on television. Though the official causes of death were lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, Parker’s demise was undoubtedly hastened by his drug and alcohol abuse. The coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Parker’s 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years of age.

It was well known that Parker never wanted to return to Kansas City, even in death. Parker had told his common-law wife, Chan, that he didn’t want to be buried in the city of his birth; that New York was his home and he didn’t want any fuss or memorials when he died. At the time of his death, though, he hadn’t divorced his previous wife Doris, nor had he officially married Chan, which left Parker in the rather awkward post-mortem situation of having two widows, a scenario which muddied the issue of next of kin and would ultimately serve to frustrate his wish to be quietly interred in his adopted hometown. Dizzy Gillespie was able to co-opt the funeral arrangement^s that Chan had been putting together and coordinated a ‘lying-in-state’, a Harlem procession officiated by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and a memorial concert before flying Parker’s body back to Missouri to be buried there per his mother’s wishes. Parker was buried at Lincoln Cemeter^y in Kansas City, Missouri.

The photographs of the festival once again showed how limited the “best” camera phone is in producing quality.  It’s the lens, not the pixels (the Memoir packs a wallop with 8 mps).

See, everyone thinks “More Megapixels, More Quality” but it simply is not the case when your lens is worthless.  Essentially, you get really large crappy photos.

More dispiriting is that the conditions for shooting–outside, daylight, but with shade–that I previously found to be the camera’s optimal conditions for shots helped little.

SAMSUNG MEMOIR CAMERA CHARLIE PARKER FESTIVAL TEST GRADE:  C

The Stage – I was up pretty close.  For a camera phone, the Memoir produced a decent shot.

Arguably the best shot I took of the festival, the park was swarmed with people.

One of the tricks to the Samsung Memoir is to get absolutely no light in an otherwise dark frame.  The only difference between this shot and the one before it is the sunlight/sky above the stage, which completely throws off the Memoir, as it did here.  If I framed the shot lower to remove the sky above the stage, it would have come out clearer.  Unfortunately, if you have to change your shot’s frame dramatically over things like ‘there was sky in the photo’ then the camera is not worth much.

Charlie Parker’s home on Tompkins Square Park.  This came out better because I cut off the top half of the building, which was much lighter due to the position of the sun, to keep the bottom half’s color intact.

New York City's Tompkins Square Park dog run is considered one of the best dog parks in the country, and recently underwent a $450,000 renovation.

In a press release, Rent.com surveyed and ranked the best cities for renters with pets.  The result?  New York City is Number 1 (it also recently ranked the best city for working moms by Forbes).

Here are the best cities for renters with pets:

1. New York City. Central Park is simply pet heaven, with its winding trails and fenced-in dog parks. If asphalt is more appealing, walk your pet along the Brooklyn Bridge. New York is also one of the few cities where pet daycares can be found in nearly every neighborhood!

2. Chicago.  It provides canine cruises across the famed Navy Pier, as well as pet-welcoming patio restaurants throughout the city. Chicago is also home to an assortment of pet resorts and boarding kennels.

3. Boston invites pets to tour the harbor by boat, as long as their pet owners come along! Walk your dog along the Freedom Trail to explore the many historical sites that this city has to offer. Leashed dogs and felines are even welcome on the subway.

4. Houston is home to a variety of pet-friendly hotels and restaurants that span throughout the city. Barnaby’s Café is a local favorite, where wait staff provide a cardboard dog bowl to keep your pooch hydrated morning, noon and night.

5. San Francisco boasts plenty of pet-friendly dining in addition to off-leash beaches and outdoor areas. Pets are even welcome to ride in the cable cars or walk alongside their owners across the Golden Gate Bridge!

6. Austin offers the Zilker Botanical Gardens and Congress Street Bats as top-rated pooch attractions, in addition to outdoor cafes and off-leash parks.

7. Washington, D.C. and suburb Alexandria, Va., offer a selection of pet-friendly restaurants in addition to an array of outdoor parks.

8. Portland, Ore., is home to the famously pet-friendly Lucky Labrador restaurant chain, in addition to the well-known Rose Gardens and Saturday Outdoor Market. Several pet boutiques have recently emerged in the city, including Portland Pooch and Cat’s Meow.

9. Charleston offers tours throughout the historic city, including day tours to Boone Hall and Magnolia Plantations, as well as nightly ghost tours. All pets welcome.

10. Ann Arbor invites pets for outdoor fun from dog-friendly canoeing, farms and gardens such as the Nichols Arboretum, a 123-acre botanical garden at the University of Michigan.

For advice on how to convince your pet-unfriendly landlord to allow you to have your pet in your new apartment, read Linda Collins’ advice in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.