Protect Your Magic New York, Walking through Winter from Prospect Park to Roosevelt Island

Laura's birthday party rocked.  Channeling Jim, she sang when the music's over, a big electronic sound explosion filling the room. 

Infinite Finale at Rockwood Music Hall + LAURA'S BIRTHDAY PARTY! And other adventures among Eastern European  spies. Photos by Erik McGregor.  Top photo NYC Graffiti, Jim, when the music is over, Iggy and David.

Photos by Erik McGregor. It was Erik's birthday, so the spies took our beloved fried for an adventure. 

Some weeks the world stands up and howls.  I walked through the streets in a daze trying to finish my new book, Sustainable Urbanism, a story about my friends in New York and our efforts to fashion a livable city and world in the face of a world in constant flux.  There was more Gransci and Lukacs and Marxism and Bakunin than my other stories.  But the theory and the stories about Emma Goldman’s capacity to look at loss and movement breaks as possibilities for openings inspired me.  The activists around New York always inspire me.  So I turned in the book and took in the beauty of the city, in the warmest January in memory.  There were still some flurries. So we wandered through the snow. But the world is changing.  Places we want to visit are in chaos, a travel advisory in Mexico, a virus here, and refugees there.  But the city is still here.  So we went sledding, explored Roosevelt Island, dressed as spies, greeted the January light.  It felt wonderful just to be with everyone, with all the adventures we’ve had and will continue to have. 

When the music’s over, Jim sang at the end of his shows.  Laura sang it at the beginning of her show the other night, with a big round sound filling the room, an electronic soul explosion.

Music is about community she explained celebrating her birthday late into the night Friday night.  It was hard to get there. But Iggy Pop and Bowie helped guide me out of the apartment into the night.  “I am the passenger,” Iggy sang, with Bowie accompanying him on keyboards.

Later the girls and I laughed at Now for Something Completely Different and Life of Brian. “That was a great scene,” number one laughed at the ridiculousness.

And Laurence Olivier lead the kids on an adventure in The Little Romance through a mystery that would last forever. It was one of his last movies, one if Diane Lane’s first, the world ever shifting. But the feeling would always be there, of connecting with others, and running for what one belies in, the sound and feeling passing through time.

Laurence through time. 

Sunday, we strolled to Judson.  The we wandered through the West Village, looking at records on Bleecker Street, strolled from 14^th street, union square, back to the Lower East Side, taking in graffiti on Houston Street, Stanton and Suffolk Street.

Sabbatical is over.  Its time to get back into the classroom and finish that old San Francisco novel, to read more critical theory, the invisible committee, more novels, draft more stories, see more of the city, as much as I can.

Tomorrow, I’ll start teaching again. I’ll ask the students  why is sex always a moral tug of war?

Libertines and Casa Novas giving way to puritans.

Sex radical clashing with Victorians.

Swingers vs Prohibitionists

Margaret Sanger vs Comstock.

Sexual Revolutionaries vs. the Christian Right.

Expression vs Repression through time.

January was filled with stories and questions.  Number one talked with me for hours about the stories pulsing through her imagination.  She talked and we strolled through a majestic January. Here are a few of those moments as we strolled through NYC with our friends. 

January was grand.