Craptacular writing day ... but you get a picture of an historic landmark

St. Patrick's Old Cathedral in the Lower East Side

The old church caught the dying light of day, but the ringing of its bells had caught Aedan’s attention. The cross was small, as if the building itself defined its purpose—this is a house of the Lord, you knew it and felt it without being told. The granite walls towered over the streets, but the tenements--rising with the stability and audacity of card houses--hemmed the cathedral in on all sides. The cleaner residents among them could be accepted as parishioners, but the majority could only accept the trickle of charity that leaked into the neighborhood. Aedan hadn’t entered the churchyard in years. When they moved downtown after Seamus returned from the War, his mother attempted to restructure their lives around the church. Aedan only remembered a few stories of the Bible ...

His father said she was buried there. Kyla believed this, and insisted on stopping outside the gates to greet their mother, ask her about heaven, cry a bit. But Aedan knew better. The man his father had paid to handle his mother’s body had no connection with St. Patrick’s, nor any parish. For all he knew, his mother had been dumped in the East River, and drifted out to sea just as easily as she’d come.

The Brooklyn Bridge novel

In the winter of 2010, I first heard about Isambard Kingdom Brunel--a kick-ass Victorian civil engineer with an equally kick-ass name. In the 1830s, 40s and 50s he constructed bridges and railways across England, designed the largest ship in the world, and assisted his father with the first tunnel under the Thames (or any river, for that matter.) This rather expensive tunnel was initially for pedestrians and tourists, and, of course, soon became home to a Dickensian cast of peddlers, pickpockets, and prostitutes. I thought, "Hey, that seems like an interesting setting for a play." But my uncle, Tim, reminded me about another fascinating sub-fluvial environment: the caissons beneath the bed of the East River during the construction of Brooklyn Bridge. Ah, now this had real potential.

Upon seeing The Twenty-Seventh Man at The Public

“Hm, that sounds like my kind of play,” I thought* immediately after reading a flattering review of Nathan Englander’s The Twenty-Seventh Man at The Public Theater. I think I may have even said this out loud to my roommates … or, at least, to the room. And I knew then that I would go see it, considering that I’m in a show-seeing mode (and that I could possibly get a ticket for relatively cheap.)

A Two-hour Tour: the Steinway Factory

Ah, Queens ...

Coming across a blurb in magazine, I remembered that ever since I moved to the New York area I have wanted to visit the Steinway & Sons piano factory. An odd aspiration, I know, yet ever since seeing a television program on the inner-workings of the factory, I thought it would be a cool place to see in person. Actually, this interest in Steinway’s originates from the summer I worked the William Kappell International Piano Competition back in 2007 at the University of Maryland. For two-weeks, as a member of the student stage crew of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, I worked rehearsals, recitals (by the likes of Philip Glass and Ahmad Jamal), and concerts--even the final night of completion. Throughout, we were immersed in piano music and inundated with pianos—including those from Kawai, Yamaha, and of course, Steinway. We weren’t piano-movers (c’mon those guys are huge) but on a daily basis we would run the pianos in and out of concert halls and recital spaces throughout the facility. And, since each participant selected a different piano to use for the competition, we would even do grand piano swaps in front of the audience—when smooth transitions are a must. So, while not being a musician I don’t look at a Steinway piano as a top-of-the-line instrument from which to produce remarkable sounds, I instead view it as an immense yet delicate machine—the production of which must be a great story.

"this mighty scourge" ... 150 years later

Today is not only Rosh Hashanah (and beginning of the year 5773), but also the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War's Battle of Antietam. While growing up in central Pennsylvania, I became a child Civil War-buff though visits to Gettysburg battlefield, reading Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, and repeatedly watching the Ken Burns' The Civil War documentary as well as the films Glory and Gettysburg. My friends and I would plan and enact ongoing battles at recess; for Halloween I dressed up as a soldier three times; and I even had birthday "parties" at both Gettysburg and Antietam battlefields. Needless to say, I was a strange kid. So strange that this fascination even continued into college. Combining creative and research elements, I developed a project on Civil War battlefields using my own photography and historical accounts of those battles from the soldiers themselves. It turned out well, and you can check it out here:
https://acrobat.com/#d=Va6UaB8AhJ3GhL6o*gYnPw

Later I wrote a thesis on the experience of the war in southern Pennsylvania, featuring the first U.S. draft, local politics, and two invasions by Confederate forces. It turned out less-well, and I will spare you from this academic travesty. After that experience, I essentially purged the Civil War from my interests. It may yet again play a small role in future projects, but in the last four years I have only read one book on this subject. (However, it was a very good one that combined social and military history while attempting convey to a modern reader the unprecedented scale of death and destruction the American people had enacted upon themselves, and how society dealt with it. If you're going to read a book on the Civil War not called The Battle Cry of Freedom, I would recommend This Republic of Suffering.) And since it is the sesquicentennial of this war, the New York Times has been doing a weekly series on its events, characters, and lingering impact. Today's entry is on Antietam, of course.

I'm not entirely sure why I felt compelled to write this post. Probably because I haven't posted anything in over a month; not that nothing was going on then ... but blog-writing just didn't fit. Maybe it will from now on.