For The Good of the Neighborhood

This is a photo from a story I recently reported on Coach Tyrone Green. Mr. Green founded a non-profit, For the Good of the Neighborhood, utilizing basketball to develop strong moral and academic values for kids of all backgrounds living in the NYC metro area. Here his daughter Ashley holds a locket with a photo of her mother, Cookie, as she tells me about life with her dad since her mom passed in April.

My debut in a NYC publication...Queens Tribune...came out on Friday, 18 July 2008:
link is here.

Standard Operating Procedure

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft will testify today before Congress about the Bush Administration's policies on interrogation of the prisoners of war it refers to as "enemy combatants," a title that has given carte blanche to White House representatives - from CIA operatives to foot soldiers - to abuse, torture and kill those accused of terrorism. In prior comments, Ashcroft defended the Bush administration counterterrorism policies and maintained that harsh forms of interrogation -- including waterboarding -- are not torture.

As the torture debate comes again to the forefront of the public mind (or at least of those paying any attention) I am reminded of a film that was aired in the spring, a documentary of the administration's interrogation protocols and imprisonment of Iraqis as seen through the lens of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

In Standard Operating Procedure Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris focuses his camera on the soldiers behind the notorious photographs of prisoner abuse at the American-run prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib. The documentary aired in Manhattan on the opening night of the TriBeCa Film Festival in April; after the showing, we got to hear from the filmmaker, who was present for a Q&A discussion.

Founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal as a response to the economic impact on the TriBeCa arts industry in the wake of September 11, the Festival's origins coincide nicely with the intent of Morris' film, namely to address the power of an image to affect the world.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are indelibly branded into the minds of all who have seen either the footage on television or the images that have been reprinted the world over. The same can be said of the photos documenting the abuse and torture of terror suspects by military men and women which first became public in 2004.

The film is not about Washington politics, Donald Rumsfeld or President Bush, except indirectly: no one above the rank of sergeant has been brought to trial, and the higher you go up the chain of command the fewer those punished. Instead, through extensive interviews that become monologues in the film, along with re-enactments of what took place in the photographs to fill-in the back-story, the film's concern is less about politicians than about the power of a photograph to conceal and reveal simultaneously.

Take for instance the photograph of the detainee the soldiers nicknamed Gilligan.

On 5 November 2003, an Iraqi citizen who had been accused of killing an agent from the US Army's Criminal Investigative Division (CID) arrived at Abu Ghraib. Refusing to give his name, the prisoner was handed over to Specialist Charles "Chuck" Graner, an army reservist and corrections officer in civilian life who had no training (or clearance) as a military interrogator.

Graner took a photograph of "Gilligan" standing on a small box, wearing a black poncho and pointed black hood, arms outstretched in a crucifixion-like pose, fingers attached to wires. After already having been stripped of his clothes, forced to crawl on the floor and deprived of sleep, the weary prisoner was told he would die of electric shock if he budged. As it turns out, the wires were not live, it was all a show, and later the prisoner not only survived, but became one of the soldiers' buddies the way a kid once bullied on the schoolyard becomes a buddy of his former abuser when another poor sap becomes the picked-upon. Only in this desert schoolyard, the bullying sometimes ended in death, and being a buddy translated only to a few more scraps of food and freedom from physical defilement.

The sinister-looking picture, along with a number of others, when published first in the New Yorker magazine became a symbol of all that was wrong with the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.

It was the embarrassment to the military of what the photo seemed to portray (officially deemed "abuse" as opposed to "torture" and classified as "standard operating procedure") that prompted President Bush to publicly apologize for "the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families."

In comparison to the what other Abu Ghraib prisoners experienced, including men who disappeared in back rooms and body bags, innocent children and petty thieves who were held together with the more threatening general population, all living in horrendous conditions (even the soldiers slept in the same prison cells that were once used by Saddam Hussein's henchman to torture and kill dissidents) and were exposed to daily mortar attacks—compared to that, the photograph of Gilligan was a joke in the eyes of the soldiers playing the game.

According to Specialist Sabrina Hartman who was later sentenced to six months in prison, a demotion, loss of pay and benefits and a bad-conduct discharge for her role in what many of the photographs documented, Gilligan wasn't really hurt--it not only wasn't torture, it wasn't even abuse; it was a harmless game.

Hartman speaks extensively in Morris' film, both in person and through what she left behind - through her photographs and via the letters she sent home to her girlfriend. While at times clearly disgusted with the acts she was witnessing and photographing, she also participated willingly in many of them. Fellow soldiers interviewed in the film describe her as abhorrent to violence, including Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, who said Hartman "would not hurt a fly. If there's a fly on the floor and you go to step on it, she will stop you." What to make, then, of the photos capturing her grinning and giving a thumbs-up sign over dead and mutilated bodies, holding leashes around prisoner's necks, laughing as prisoners were forced to masturbate? Was it just fun? Did laughing at and photographing (making war trophies of) the activities normalize indecent behavior?

Some of the photographs back-up her claim that she was more interested in the forensic investigation of how a prisoner died, or as evidence she could use later to let someone know what was wrong with the situation. But with regard to the notorious photo of her grinning, thumbs-up over the face of a man, bandaged, bloated and bleeding in a body bag of ice her morality and innocence are more suspect. Of this series of photos, including the grinning-thumbs-up one, she says, "I just wanted to document everything I saw. That was the reason I took photos. It was to prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy, Hey, I was just lied to." She went back later, alone, removed the bandages from the corpse and made a series of photographs that could be considered forensic in nature, but the one of her grinning for the camera taken by her buddy? There's more to the story than she is letting on.

One of the ironies of the photographs and of the punishment that came as a result of their being published is that in many cases the atrocities they depicted were deemed less criminal than the act of photographing them.

For removing the bandages and taking pictures of the dead guy in the body bag, Hartman was originally charged with the crime of tampering with evidence. Of course, the "evidence" was of a murder by a CIA operative of a prisoner who should have been protected by the Geneva Conventions. The charge against Hartman was dropped only because the government couldn't afford to pursue the death that was evidenced by the photograph. The CIA agents and civilian contractors who dragged prisoners into back rooms without logging them in, who beat this guy to death and then covered up their abuse by bandaging the prisoner and leading him out on a gurney with an I.V. as though he were still alive - for that offense, no one was ever prosecuted.

The pornographic photo-ops of naked men wearing women's panties, forced to masturbate for the camera while hooded and chained, stacked in pyramids or posed in pseudo acts of fornication, became the focus of the administration's outcry (outrage would be too strong a word choice for how the military brass and politicians responded), and served as an easy scapegoat to distract from the more appalling and morbid reality of what went down in Abu Ghraib.

Morris' extensive interviews with his characters manage to provoke revelation and confession. In the discussion after the showing of the film, Morris responded to criticism of his paying people to sit for interviews. His claim: they wouldn't have done it otherwise especially given how successful his documentaries have become - if he's making money, so should they the thinking goes.

"It is difficult to ask people for such an investment of time without taking care of them in some way — and that may involve paying them, " Morris said in defense. "I paid the 'bad apples' because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise. Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know their stories. I can live with it."

Would Hartman or any of the other soldiers and civilian consultants said or done anything different had they gone unpaid by Morris? I doubt it. And, more importantly, the story needed to be told. If earning a day's pay for talking in front of a camera means we are all exposed to the complexities of what went on at Abu Ghraib, then so be it.

The bigger question is what have we learned from the photographs and the photographers who took them? What did the photographs reveal about what really happened there, or of what went on in the minds of the soldiers who participated?

And how, in the end of the film, could the abuse captured in the photographs be defined as Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)? Where official military doctrine exists, SOPs will usually adhere to the official doctrine - and in a war managed from a distance by the likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Ashcroft who explicitly accept interrogation "by any means," official doctrine translates to approval of abuse and torture. Among a group of reservists with little military experience and no military police or interrogation training, SOPs and official doctrine were defined by a combination of what they saw anonymous interrogators from the CIA and private contractors perform mixed with their own base instincts in a screwed-up, nasty hovel of a prison-home-base camp in the middle of the desert.

The film also touches, then, on the question of the complicity of officers and administrators high-up in the Bush Administration in the acts of prisoner abuse and torture when the foot soldiers were told to make a prisoner's life miserable, and when prisoners held by highly-trained operatives left the prison in body bags. Will a war crimes tribunal one day bring the men in suits to justice?

At it's most profound and haunting level, the film asks the question of what in the American psyche allowed the women and men at Abu Ghraib to pull the stunts they did, and what's more, to make photo trophies of it all?

The late Susan Sontag, writing in The New York Times Magazine, saw the Abu Ghraib events as evidence of the pervasive sickness of American culture where pornography, violence and an obsession to document and publicize our most personal - even deviant - lives. "Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit," Sontag wrote, "and send the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal."

When violence, pornography, humiliation and killing are acceptable in mainstream culture, whether perpetrated against "enemy combatants" in the Middle East or as urban gang members, addicts or immigrant workers trying to "sneak" into America, we will continue to sell television series like 24 and video games like Grand Theft Auto; we will see more Abu Ghraibs and Gitmos - if soldiers are foolish enough to keep taking the pictures.

And if Ashcroft in his testimony before Congress continues to defend the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo and countless other secret interrogation and prison cells around the world, then we know that the sickness in the popular culture of America extends to the highest reaches or lowest depths of our political culture, as well.

Tour de France: A Band New Start?

Tour de France - Brand New Start


As we wake to the first day of this year's Tour de France, the epic three weeks commence amid a mix of excitement, mystery and for the corporate sponsors who make professional cycling possible, at least a bit of anxiety.

The banks, watchmakers, national lotteries, car manufacturers, GPS-makers and restaurants that provide cycling's financial backing in the absence of the ticket sales of other sports have been abandoning their riders in ever-greater numbers in the wake of drug scandals played out on the very public stage of the most prominent cycling event on the calendar. As if to pre-empt or mute the constant buzz, Versus, the sole U.S. television station airing daily coverage of this year's Tour, has created its own buzz, tapping British rock artist Paul Weller to provide a new background tune.

The station's campaign dubbed "Take Back the Tour" includes a commercial spot pairing Weller's tune, "Brand New Start," with footage of past Tour riders played in reverse. All of those included in the advertisement have been associated with the scandal if not implicated, and some who have since returned to the roads after multi-year bans.

David Millar, Alexandre Vinokourov, Ivan Basso, Bjarne Riis, Jan Ullrich, Marco Pantani, Micahel Rasmussen, all of whom have either retired or been stripped of their greatest palmarès, ride back up time trial ramps, step down off winner's podiums and, in the case of the American Floyd Landis, is stripped of his maillot jaune in the commercial's wiping clean the slate.

Cycling is associated with doping scandals more than any other international sport, not necessarily because more cyclists use performance-enhancing drugs than other athletes, but perhaps due to their being one of the first group of athletes to be identified with the habit.

Beginning with the death of Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen at the Olympics in Rome in 1960 (an autopsy later identified amphetamine use as the cause) and burned into the memory of Tour de France spectators when British ace Tom Simpson died on the slopes of Mt. Ventoux in 1967, cycling has endured an unfortunately tragic history with drugs.

No American TV commercial can erase the drug scandals from the memories of fans; only a clean Tour can accomplish that goal. And for the cyclists to ride clean, the race needs to not only get better at detecting doping than the cyclists are at masking it, but also create a more manageable Tour - shorter stages, fewere hors catégorie climbs, and more humane conditions that don't beg riders to dope to survive. The founder, Henri Desgrange, said after the first race in 1903 that his ideal competition would be one in which only one competitor “survived” to finish. The physical demands are excessive in the extreme and the race has always been intended to test man to the limit – this year the course is 3,500km (2,175 miles) with the usual two days only of rest thrown into a three-week onslaught.

When Tour organizers provide less extreme conditions, perhaps then we will witness a clean Tour. And while I'm sickened by the reality that athletes around the globe and across disciplines feel compelled to harm their bodies in order to win, I can't help but be thrilled by this summer's lineup from the Tour to the Olympics even as I hold my breadth in awe and dread. British commentator Phil Liggett speaks for me when he says "There is no place I'd rather be in July than on the roads of the Tour de France."

Real Pictures for Real People: No Bullshit

New York, NY. 18 June 2008
Long moments of respectful silence were punctuated with soulful reflection, confessions, dreams laughter and even some arguing: Philip Jones Griffith’s memorial at Aperture on a recent night was as anarchic and enjoyable as the man himself.

The 72 year old photojournalist and warrior of peace died in March after an eight year battle with cancer. He was no stranger to death, having photographed its ravages in Vietnam, Cambodia and in other conflict zones around the world since he began working as a full-time freelance photographer in 1961.

In the course of his career he accumulated many thousands of negatives, some of which were reproduced into books as epic as the tragedies they depicted. Perhaps his most famous is Vietnam, Inc., published in 1971, exposed a reality that has existed in times of war for centuries, yet in his singular way, Jones Griffiths framed the ravages of war in such a way that helped turn the tide of American public opinion regarding the war.

Through Jones Griffiths’ subtle but poignant black and white images, he draws the viewer in rather than repulses with the vulgarity typical to images of war. A pacifist and fierce opponent of the war, Jones Griffiths never considered himself a traditional reporter or war photographer.

The photograph of the Vietnamese woman cradling a babe in her arms while a US soldier stands behind watching her, cradling his machine gun; or of the young boy who lay on a bare mattress, contorted, chained to the metal post of his bed with his pants pulled down below his knees (he lost his mind when he lost his mother to the war), are just two such images on view the other night.

The memorial at Aperture opened with documentary photographer Donna Ferrato asking the one hundred or so gathered to embrace silence, even during moments of tempted hilarity, as we embarked on a journey of remembrance on screen. In typical fashion, Ferrato had gathered up whomever happened to be around when it came time to interview Jones Griffiths’ pals for the film she was making as memorial to her past lover, and managed to pull together a splendidly intimate and fittingly offbeat portrait of Jones Griffiths from his images, his words, and the responses to both by friends and colleagues.

Although I never met him, I learned from the film that Jones Griffiths was the kind of man you want on your side in the worst situations because it would ensure: (1) his methodical nature would get you out alive; (2) his argumentative nature would distract you and keep you thinking; and (3) his comedic delivery of even the worst news would leave you uplifted no matter the circumstance.

While he lost pints of blood from a constant nose bleed in the final days, suffering paralysis in the hand that he forced to sign hundreds of his photographs as he lay dying, Jones Griffiths asks his and Donna’s daughter, Fanny, to hand him a collection of Welsh poems. Jones Griffiths, who was born in Wales in 1936, in the film lies in what appears to be a hospital bed with a Wales-London rugby match (his beloved Welshman win) playing on the television. From the book Fanny retrieves him, Jones Griffiths reads an ode to rugby that includes the line, “Sing no song of rugby when the match is over they’re at the bar in throngs.”

In the movie he says he will start from the beginning, as if to say, “Here: listen. This is what I want you to remember.”

With grave tone he begins, “Good orgasms are hard to find. This is something we should care about.” As the audience erupts in laughter, Jones Griffiths waxes on about how fidelity is for the weak-willed who have fallen victim to the mores of a society that, “is all fucked up – it’s all done to make us feel insecure…love is always something you give, never something you take…love yourself first and have faith in yourself.” Throughout, Jones Griffiths comes off as deeply funny and deeply serious. Simultaneously.

In the film he is described by photographer Elliott Erwitt (think black and white photos of little dogs on the streets of New York) as a “moral compass” of how photography should be done (straight, unadulterated), and by Eugene Richards (a photojournalist known for his portraits of drugs, gangs and other gritty experiences) as a “forensic scientist” of history.

A contemporary of Jones Griffiths, the respected war photographer Don McCullin, perhaps considering his own legacy, sums up that of his deceased friend in terms of how people will continue to respond to his work. To the sound of the shutter release click-clicking as Donna takes Philip and Don’s last photos together, McCullin intones, “He tried to make a difference. Generations to come will be holding Philip’s hands and saying, ‘thank you’.”

After the credits roll and the lights get turned on (and then quickly turned off after Ferrato grabs the mike and shouts, “Lights off! Lights off! You jumped the gun, lights off!”) Alex Webb, an American photojournalist, offers the wisdom given to him by Jones Griffiths when Webb was first applying for membership in Magnum. At meetings of Magnum when you’re a nominee, he’s told, you say nothing. When you’ve become an associate member, you say nothing. Once you are a full member, then you say (and Webb pantomimes the appropriate arm motions to go with the phrase), “‘Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!’.”

Jones Griffiths pissed off a lot of people in his years. He could also take apart a Leica and put it back together. He also built his own industrial-size enlarger and, according to David Burnett, installed the landing light from nothing less than a 707 airplane as his light source. Everything with Jones Griffiths was larger than life, and not surprisingly, left unforgettable impressions on the people he knew.

Bring a group of passionate photographers and powerful women together and you’re bound to create a little friction. The night did not disappoint in this regard, with one particularly tense exchange between Ferrato and a woman named Alberta who stood up in protest after one of Jones Griffiths’ past assistants, Lila Lee, told of a dream she had in which a bed full of women (a theme running throughout the night was that Jones Griffiths loved to surround himself with women who are easy on the eye) were fighting in the deceased’s apartment on West 36th Street.

Alberta pleaded with the sound of disbelief mixed with disgust, “Can’t we have some boundaries? This is out of hand,” to which some snickered, others nodded their heads in agreement and Ferrato, who held the mic at the time, responded that Lee’s comments were beautiful and desirable, and others were welcome to follow suit.

Perhaps the most memorable commentary, for me, came from Tom Keller, a former director of Magnum, the picture agency where Jones Griffiths also served as director from 1980 through 1985.

Referring to the Biblical creation story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, wherein Adam eats the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge and is thus banished from Paradise, Keller suggests what remains for me, days later, the defining reflection on Jones Griffiths.

Through the lens of Milton’s version of the Fall in Paradise Lost, Keller describes how Jones Griffiths lived and moved and made choices. Without Eve Adam does not want to stay in paradise and so consciously chooses to eat, chooses to see, chooses to leave Paradise. Keller chokes back tears as he speaks:

“Philip spent his life eating from the tree of knowledge and knew an awful lot. I’m pissed off he left us here.” Keller pauses, and then adds, “And this isn’t Paradise.”

I still feel the lump in my throat that I felt when I heard his words, maybe because I hope to leave a legacy that stimulates and challenges, that brings Truth, or at least begs others to question what is Truth, where is Meaning, to the table.

As if in response, a young man and aspiring photojournalist who did not know Jones Griffiths personally, stood up to speak and offered, simply, “How can we live up to it? How can we not try? [Looking at Jones Griffiths’ work] inspires me to try a little harder because he did it so well.”

When Jones Griffiths stopped breathing the clock read 10 to 2. No more debates, no more soliloquies. No more poetry. No more photography. His daughters, Fanny and Katherine, lay in bed beside him not wanting to let go. In Donna’s words, “Philip believed being a photographer was an honor and that there’s no room for bullshit. Real pictures for real people. With Philip you got as good as you gave, and he always gave more.”

Proud in Jackson Heights, Queens

In its 16th year, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride parade and festival brilliantly tramped down the streets of Jackson Heights in Queens earlier today. Demonstrating the great diversity of this neighborhood of more than 100 languages, parade participants, festival vendors, performers and spectators hailed from a multitude of countries and New York City neighborhoods.

Queens native and Italian-American Vinnie Barone said he, “must be famous somewhere,” given the number of times his photo has been taken over the many years he has been selling his shop’s wares at street fairs in the City. The yellow tent of his and wife Selma’s Ipanema Girl cast a soothing shadow in the early morning sun as they stocked their tables with green and yellow soccer jerseys, orange flip-flops and other brightly colored items one could imagine teenagers flocking to. Referring to his store in Astoria, Barone quipped, “everything’s imported, including my wife!”

Many of the crews setting-up on Sunday morning were family affairs – including a Colombian couple selling grilled corn on the cob and “fresh” lemonade (juicy lemons accompanied by ample amounts of boxed corn syrup). Father and son duo John and Michael Chan were expecting Mrs. Chan at any moment to help with the display of what Mr. Chan called “authentic gem stone” sculptures. The elder Chans were born in China and are raising Michael in Flushing.

Another father-son team have been hauling equipment from their large Islamic community in Ozone Park to this parade as well as many others for over a quarter century. NY Chair Rentals proprietor Waheed Khan, who was on hand to direct his son, Omar, and a crew that included an Osama, an Antonio and a Fernando. They had the main-stage tent up by 9am.

Russ and Paul Feddern, brothers in more ways than one, were on hand to assist with the first booth their group had staged at the event. Members of Chapter 32 of the Vietnam Veterans of America, the Feddern brothers did tours from 1966-1967 and 1967-1968, respectively. At the festival to educate and fundraise for their group, the veterans laid out $10 ball caps, an assortment of trinkets and kept busy sweeping their area. “We’re a place where vets can go for help – vets helping vets,” said first vice president Paul Narson.

Brothers and family of another sort were excitedly unpacking their car of give-aways. 2008 marks the 25th anniversary of the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan where, “300 groups meet monthly and 6,000 people are served weekly,” according to Rob Zukowski, pride coordinator for the Center. When asked if they look forward to the day or if it’s one long drain in the sun, intern Sterling Taylor responded that the pride season, which runs from June through August, is a great time. Arriving at a big day like the Queens event is like Christmas in June; “this is the easy part, like unwrapping the present,” said Taylor who also called Zukowski the “coordinator of all things prideful.”

Speaking of gifts, non-alcoholic drinks were being freely distributed and eagerly snatched up at the Englewood Cliffs-based Fuze Beverages booth. In a small attempt to “go green,” (or more likely meet the non-green demands of a grab and go culture) Fuze is transitioning from glass to PET plastic, the easiest plastic bottles to recycle. Marketing rep Joey Hodges was on hand to coordinate his team of Fuze-enthusiasts promoting "Plastic on the Outside, All Natural Inside" campaign, many of whom were eagerly looking for somewhere to relieve themselves of all the Fuze they’d drunk in the almost-80-degree weather.

In addition to the usual restaurants of Little India, a multitude of food vendors heated up 37th Road between 73rd and 77th streets. Cheesey corncakes were frying at Mozzarepas where Brian Leon and Ed Gonzalez were flipping the popular twist on a Colombian mainstay. The scent of Italian sausage, onions, peppers and fries cooking under the able supervision of John Thornton and Wess Charles at the Brooklyn-based Ned’s booth drew a large collection of NYPD officers, pregnant women pushing strollers and multi-tattooed and pierced women and men carrying rainbow flags.

A mix of parade and community party, the day also made room for the usual politicking of the local elect and candidates. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-New York), State Assemblyman José Peralta (D-Corona) and City Councilwoman Rosie Mendez (D-District 2) were among the many politicians who shook hands, shouted into blow-horns and, in the case of Mendez who is an out lesbian and one of the grand marshals of the event, rode in an old convertible while waving to the crowd.

District 24 representative Rosemary Parker and other marchers from the United Federation of Teachers spoke out against what they are calling, “decades of chronic under-funding” of New York City schools. Claiming that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration has taken $450 million promised to the schools out of $600 million from the New York Senate, they chanted to spectators to call the Mayor and demand he, “keep his promise.”

Danny Dromm, the event’s founder, who is also a public school teacher and a candidate for City Council, detoured off the purple-marked parade route to embrace the parents of a young man who was beaten to death in August of 2001 after leaving a gay bar in the neighborhood. Leonor and Armando Garzon carried a large photograph of their son Edgar Garzon, joining the parade at the corner marked with his name and remembered as the place where he was slain. The grief over a similar hate crime that took place one block away but eleven years earlier, when Julio Rivera was beaten and killed in a schoolyard, is considered to be the original battle cry that rallied the local gay community to action.

Since 1993 when the parade was first staged, it has continued to grow, reaching an estimated crowd of 30,000 in 2007. This year, more than 75 vendors and some 100 parade participants, according to Harry Roach of Clearview Festival Productions, who puts on the event, offered something for everyone. Kids shrieked and parents cheered approval of the folk dancers from Raices de Mexico, male baton-twirlers and cartwheel-turners, and the award-winning music by the Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps marching band.

For a day that started before 7am with members of the traffic division relocating cars illegally parked on the parade route along 37th Avenue and ended with the Sanitation Department’s street sweeping machines making the rounds as police officers removed the street barricades after 7pm, it was a good, long, hot, proud, peaceful addition to the history of Jackson Heights.

Additional photographs with captions can be found on my Pride'08 Flickr page.

A Quiet Rest for Cornell Capa

Photojournalist Cornell Capa, founder of the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City, passed away in his sleep on Friday, 23 May 2008 after a battle with Parkinson's Disease. His death came just two days shy of his brother's death 54 years ago, when Robert Capa was killed instantaneously after stepping on a landmine while photographing in Vietnam. The older brother was the more famous photographer, perhaps in part due to his tragic, early death (much like how JFK carries a mystique his brother, Robert, almost approached). Yet Cornell, who lived into his 90th year, spent decades pursuing the "concerned photography" (a term he coined) to which both he and his brother were dedicated.

Cornell Capa, born Cornel Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary, in 1918, was a Life Photographer and then a photographer for Magnum Photo Agency, an association that his brother had founded in 1947 along with David "Chim" Seymour, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. According to the National Press Photographer Association's website, "Capa said he was motivated 20 years later to found ICP at a time when photojournalism seemed to be taking a back seat to television and film, and over his concern about how to 'keep alive' the work of photojournalists after their death (a personal experience for the photographer in light of his famous brother's work)."

Robert, a non-practicing Jew and a pacifist who covered wars and died while covering one, was buried at a Quaker cemetery north of Manhattan. Since then, Cornell's wife Edie, the Capa boys' mother Julia and the family biographer Richard Whelan have all been buried together. The Friend's Meeting House in Amawalk, less than two miles from my childhood home in Yorktown Heights, will welcome Cornell to his final resting place with a private ceremony on Wednesday.

I'd driven here yesterday, on a warm and sunny Memorial Day afternoon, with my sister and father. We did not, at that time, see where the family plot was located. The cemetery was empty of the living except for us, although a number of American flags placed at various tombstones throughout this small cemetery indicated others had been walking through recently. We made a somewhat perfunctory attempt at locating stones with "Capa" or "Friedmann," unsure of which name the family had been buried under.

When I went for my morning run, I headed to the cemetery. This time, I couldn't enter even though I enjoy being in cemeteries - I feel protected in them, somehow. Today, though, I simply stood on the threshold of the driveway, unable to go further. I wanted to return showered and quiet. That time came this afternoon.

Pops and I stopped in on my way to the Metro North train station in Croton Harmon before I headed back to Queens. Just as we were about to leave, unable to find the grave, I spotted a large mound of dirt covered in a green mesh tarp on the downward slope of the cemetery, in a spot on the edge of the grounds. The undertakers had just prepared his grave when a light drizzle began to fall.

Surrounded by woods, the four markers stood two feet tall: Robert, Edie, Julia and Richard from right to left. In between Julia and Edie's tombstones lay the wood planks covering the whole in the ground that will receive Cornell's remains tomorrow. The sound of thunder ushered in a heavy downpour.

At first I felt a rush of energy and pleasure at the discovery of this treasure practically in my backyard. But as I stood there, then knelt, sheltered from the rain by the boughs of the trees above, I felt awe, respect, and the profound quiet of those woods around, and those lives before me. These men, and the women who loved them, are a significant part of the legacy I have inherited as a woman who wants in my deepest desire to live: as a concerned photographer and journalist. So I did what came naturally - I made photographs to capture the moment in time, to collect in some small way the experience of being in the presence of the greatness of their lives. Before walking back up the hill to where my father was waiting, I touched the ground and thanked the earth for giving them life and giving them rest.

The Little Flower of East Orange

Stephen Adly Guirgis writes with an emotional intensity that bursts forth in anger, sorrow and biting humor. Well-known for his work Jesus Hopped the A Train, Gurgis' characters alternately cover themselves with street-harsh words and reveal their desperate agony to create a roller-coaster ride that is often loud and cathartic.

In The Little Flower of East Orange, a co-production by the LAByrinth Theater Company and the Public Theater, where the show is staged, Guirgis presents the relationship between an addicted son and his passive-aggressive, partially paralyzed and suicidal mother. Under the direction of LAB co-artistic director Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michael Shannon plays Danny, who narrates Little Flower as a series of flashbacks as he sits in jail after another relapse. When his mother goes missing, Shannon's Danny, alternately loving and bitter, abandons rehab with his perpetually high companion (played by Gillian Jacobs), to reunite with his mother.

Danny and his sister Justina, ably portrayed by Elizabeth Canavan who calls herself "the cold bitchy hysterical one who is also known as the only one who gets things done," find Therese Marie in a Bronx hospital after she tries to roll herself off a cliff in the Cloisters one night. While begging for scotch to ease her pain, Therese fakes amnesia so as not to bring her children to her bedside, wishing she were dead, or hoping to drink herself to death. When they finally find her, Justina panics at the thought her mother has died, but then screams what a bitch Therese is for trying to kill herself the one night Justina couldn't look after her. All three play the martyr to each other, all three jostling for the title of Greatest Victim, all seeking redemption from their anguished and co-dependent existence.

While never fully explored or explained, demons haunt mother, son and daughter all of whom feel they haven't measured up somehow - and never will. Their psychic turmoil throws them into strained interactions indicating undying love and utter misunderstanding. Danny taunts his mother in their final scene together, ultimately forcing her to admit that her deaf father's abuse caused her paralysis, but never revealing the causes of his own self-abuse.

From the vantage point of his jail cell from which he tells the story, Danny finds, at the end, his beginning and states, "let the state of incarceration do for me what I could not do for myself." And in this dead-end, where he cannot choose to leave like he did time and again when in rehab, and now after his mother's death finally sees "there is no precipice, no stopping point, no deluxe accommodations for martyrs. The only thing that stops you is death. Grace does not reveal itself to anyone who isn't looking for it...Grace is like the next breadth, it's always there."

Grace offers them acceptance - of themselves, of the ones they love, of the ones who have beat them down. It's theirs to accept, or go to their graves denying.