101211_African_Tape

Bringing Red Duct Tape to Africa, Physically and Metaphorically

photographed in Providence, Rhode Island on February 20, 2010

Tom sat cross-legged in the corner, next to his pack, winding a piece of duct tape around the frame of his glasses. A candle burned beside him, and Kate sat nearby, with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up, holding a beer bottle on her lap.

“Tom,” I said. “What did you mean, you never paid for your plane ticket?”

He didn’t look up. He tore off another strip of duct tape and carefully wrapped it around his glasses. “Next time I come to Africa I’m going to bring some superglue,” he said. “Life in Africa would be so much easier, if only we had some superglue.”

Excerpted from The Road Builder by Nicholas Hereshenow. Published by The Berkeley Publishing Group, New York, 2001.

100511_Art_Installation

On the Installation of Large-Scale Public Art Works

photographed in Central Park, Manhattan on September 19, 2011

On the federal level, public art programs are part of the General Services Administration (GSA). The GSA’s Art-in-Architecture Program mandates that all new-construction, newly purchased, or renovated federal buildings set aside 0.5 percent of the cost toward acquiring and installing art in or around the building. Artwork made for federal projects is generally durable and permanent, designed to last for decades. The work generally must represent values held by the majority of U.S. citizens. Artists participating in the GSA’s projects usually have national reputations, excellent ties with fabricators, and an ability to work on a grand scale.

Excerpted from The Practical Handbook for the Emerging Artist by Margaret R. Lazzari. Published by Wadsworth, Cenage Learning, Boston, 2010.

100311_Park_Fishing

City Fishing on a Fall Afternoon

photographed in Central Park, Manhattan on September 19, 2011

But if you really want to shock a few Manhattanites, just tell them you’re going fishing in the park. At first, they invariably think you’re full of it and, after you finally convince them, they’re horrified. When the discuss it, the look they give you conveys several layers of reservation: It’s illegal. Well, if it’s not illegal, it should be.  There’s no fish there, anyway. Even if it’s not illegal, why would you want to? …

Yes, you can fish in Central Park. You just need a New York State fishing license and a taste for weirdness. There are largemouth bass, some specimens of which are rumored to approach double-digit poundages. There park is certainly a fertile place in many observable – if not always appetizing – ways, and I don’t doubt that there are some real hogs cruising its eight tiny bodies of water.

Excerpted from ‘Manhattan Odyssey’ by Paul Guernsey. Appearing in City Fishing, edited by Judith Schnell. Published by Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 2002.

092311_Paris_Bench

Love’s Luster’s Lost

photographed in Paris, France on September 23, 2009

From time to time we could see two forms glide by alongside the trees. We were passing in front of a bench, where a couple were seated side by side, making a single dark patch.

My friend murmured:

“Poor things! It is not disgust but an immense pity which I feel for them. Of all the mysteries of human life, there is one which I have thoroughly solved: the great torture of our existence lies in the fact that we are eternally alone, and all our efforts and all our acts are only an attempt to escape this solitude. Those two lovers on the bench, in the open air, are trying, like all living creatures, to put at least a temporary stop to their loneliness; but they are, and always will be, alone, just as you and I are alone.”

Excerpted from ‘Solitude’ by Guy de Maupassant. Appearing in The Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant, published by Walter J. Black Inc., New York, 1903.

092011_Ticket_Scalping

Scalping Army Football Tickets: Continuing the Grand Tradition

photographed in West Point, New York on October 18, 2011

Ticket scalping in connection to the Army-Navy football contest has been one of the features of the annual game which officers of both institutions have been trying to prevent for years. In spite of all precautions, however, the ticket scalper has always been on the ground at the annual contest with seats which he held until the great demand made it possible for him to sell at exorbitant prices.

This year special precautions were taken to trace the tickets. A record of every ticket presented to officers was kept, and efforts have been made to buy tickets from scalpers by officers from the Annapolis and West Point institutions. The tickets which Lieut. Commander Lenning now has in his possession, it is said, are the first that have been obtained from scalpers which were originally given to a cadet. A probe will be begun as soon as the cadets return to their academies, to ascertain what disposition of the youthful soldiers and sailors made of these tickets.

Excerpted from ‘PROBE TICKET SCALPING.; Naval Officers Will investigate Sale of Football Tickets.’ Published in The New York Times, Wireless Cable and Sporting Section, November 27, 1910.

091511_Informal_Vendor

Forming the Nexus of an ‘Informal Economy’ in Broadway’s Daylight

photographed in Manhattan, New York on July 30, 2011

The phenomenon of the informal economy is both deceivingly simple and extraordinarily complex, trivial in its everyday manifestations and capable of subverting the economic and political order of nations. We encounter it in our daily life in such simple activities as buying a cheap watch or a book from a street vendor, arranging for a handyman to do repair work at our home for cash, or hiring an immigrant woman to care for the children and clean the house while we are away. Such apparently trivial encounters may be dismissed as unworthy of attention until we realize that, in the aggregate, they cumulate into billions of dollars of unreported income and that the humble vendor or cleaning woman represents the end point of complex subcontracting, labor recruitment, and labor transportation chains. … We do not commonly realized that the clothing we wear, the restaurant meals we eat, and even the laptop computer we regularly use may have something to do with the informal economy.

Excerpted from The Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg. Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2005.

091211_7WTC_Sunset

Remembering 9/11: The Rebuilding

photographed at the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan, New York on August 10, 2011

On the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, as the nation reflected on its losses, thousands of families gathered at the new World Trade Center rising in Lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon and on a field of wildflowers in Pennsylvania to commemorate nearly 3,000 killed on that infamous morning when jetliners were turned into missiles and a new age of terrorism was born.

The day’s centerpiece unfolded at ground zero, where more than 10,000 members of the victims’ families, and some dignitaries and their wives, gathered in a parklike setting of swamp white oaks and emerald lawns — a strangely futuristic plaza with precisely spaced trees rising from a five-acre granite floor, surrounded by a gouged wasteland of unfinished skyscrapers and silent construction cranes.

Excerpted from ‘On 9/11, Vows of Remembrance’ by Robert D. McFadden. Published September 11, 2011 in the New York Times.

091111_Shanksville_Pennsylvania

Remembering 9/11: Shanksville, Pennsylvania

photographed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on October 13, 2006

Behind the lunch counter at Ida’s Country Store at the corner of Main Street and Stutzmantown Road, Tammy was wrapping ham and cheese sandwiches in advance of what passes for the noontime rush in Shanksville, population 250. The lifelong resident of this sleepy mountain town tucked in the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania is happy to give directions, share a joke or dispense unsolicited advice to strangers, but she won’t give up her last name.

And her age?

“Old enough to know better,” she chirped, drawing a cackle from Missy Brant, 38, who was shaving carrots in the kitchen. Tammy talked to the media a lot in the months after the “incident” that made Shanksville an international destination for pilgrims seeking to understand America by standing at the edge of one of its worst wounds. She has “googled” herself a few times since, however, and unhappily found that her name has been broadcast around the world.

Folks around here value their privacy, Tammy explained, and they are determined to preserve it even as bulldozers and mounds of federal and donated dollars raise the monument that will make Shanksville a tourist attraction rivaling Gettysburg. Swarms of tourists will soon descend on her hometown, most who will neither know nor care what was there before tragedy put it on the international roadmap.

Excerpted from ‘Sept. 11: Ten years later, a nation of resolve‘ by Christopher J. Kelly. Published in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on September 11, 2011.

090611_Smithsonian_Sputnik

Sputnik 1 in the Smithsonian Is Only a Model, But I Was Hoping We Won the Real Thing in a Poker Game or Something

photographed in Washington, D.C. on September 3, 2011

If details given by Russians about man’s first artificial moon are correct, the Soviet has taken a giant step into space, a step beyond what is contemplated by scientists in this country.

Soviet reports placed the weight of the successfully launched satellite at about 184 pounds. The diameter of the sphere was said to be about twenty-two inches. The Soviet “moon” was said to be up in an orbit 560 miles above the surface of the earth, where it is speeding around the world at about 18,000 miles an hour.

In contrast to this large satellite American scientists told Congress last spring that they hoped for a twenty-inch sphere weight 21.5 pounds up 300 miles. These plans have since been dropped – an American September launching was at one time envisioned – in favor of plans to launch the twenty-pound satellite some time in 1958. Perhaps a tiny test satellite scarcely six inches in diameter could be achieved this fall, American scientists said recently.

Excerpted from ‘Satellite Flight is Step into Space’ by Robert K. Plumb. Published by the New York Times on October 5, 1957.

090111_Katrina_Construction

Rebuilding N.O. on Interstate 10 Despite the Lack of Construction Workers

photographed outside New Orleans, Louisiana on October 2, 2008

Quite possibly, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast will never completely recover from the catastrophic impacts of Hurricane Katrina (see the postscript in this volume). A major indicator of Katrina’s destruction to the built environment is that in Louisiana alone, insurance companies paid $14.5 billion in claims during the first year after the storm, and many claims have yet to be processed. … Specifically for the New Orleans metropolitan area, all sectors of non-form employment have experienced significant decline, and the return of manufacturing, especially smaller manufacturers (food processors), had not occurred in the year since Katrina. … Even more serious, construction employment in the New Orleans metropolitan area has not rebounded, as in other metropolitan areas along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, reflecting an anomalous pattern following a natural disaster.

Excerpted from ‘Katrina as Paradigm Shift: Reflections on Disaster Research in the Twenty-First Century’ by J. Steven Picou and Brent K. Marshall, appearing in The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe, edited by David L. Brunsma, David Overfelt and J. Steven Picou. Published by Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Massachusetts, 2007.