Newsday July 14, 1995 "So Much Beach, So Little Parking" by Marilyn Goldstein

"Steve Welch, one of the well-tanned supporters of more parking at Fowler's, promised, 'We're going to have a gay park-in on Fowler Street, in the middle. We're going to put a spinet piano on the back of a pickup truck parked in the middle of Fowler Street and belt out show tunes,' Welch promised. "We're going to have all-girl bikini mud wrestling. We're going to get ticketed by the village but the tickets won't be legal because we'll be on town property.'"



I really am a mo. No one will bring me oranges in the camps now.

I must say, that Marilyn Goldstein got that extended quote exactly right, and I recall she did it without taking notes. Her eyes just got big and round. That's called listening! We all could take lessons.

I remember being locked in mortal combat with Margaret Fowler, the farm family in-law who figures in the drama, and our local high-school Latin teacher to boot. After things had cooled down a little, I asked her what she thought of the quote above, and she said, "It made me laugh out loud!" It was an amazing feeling to have made her laugh in spite of herself at that difficult time. We're pretty friendly to this day.

My friend Pamela, the Nubian Princess, made it onto the front page of the Southampton Press this week,

in a photograph of the Democratic party victory celebrations at 75 Main Street, in Southampton. Obama's coattail effect was pronounced locally, as a sitting Republican town board member and sitting Republican town judge were defeated by Democratic challengers. This is simply unheard of in the political history of our little Republican-dominated town.

This ecstatic image was published in color above the fold in the Western edition of the Southampton Press. Edited by Frank Costanza, it is the less-read, and less influential of two editions of the paper. The Eastern edition of the Press, which is edited by Joe Shaw, published these photographs on the front page instead:

leaving the image of the winning democratic group for a smaller, black-and-white shot published on page 15.

It isn't hard to determine which image is the more flattering---or newsworthy for that matter---and what the subtext is between the two. The editor Joe Shaw must have led with the images from the Community Baptist Church because his wife was the photographer who took the shots.

Yes, that's it. Nepotism. Makes perfect sense. Certainly not racism.

3 Second Blackout at 10:28am as the North Tower Begins to Collapse

At the 40 second mark (00:40) into this clip of live CNN coverage, at 10:28am ET, after the beginning of the North Tower's collapse, a three-second blackout occurs.

Office Fires

Wilson's online repository of high quality digital images- powered by SmugMug,

Let There Be Light

It is a wondrous time we are living in truly. A leftover project from my house renovations a few years ago---installing a landscape illumination kit I had bought and stored away---was completed last week, when a new acquaintance of mine suggested he undertake the work. I must say, the result looks spectacular.

Being neglectful of everything but the state of our national soul for several seasons now, I had come to accept the gentle decay of my garden as something to be desired even. It helped in coming to terms with the starving deer (they could have everything below four feet, I could have everything above that plane.)

Certainly, "improvements" were something left far behind me, especially for something as symbol-laden as an entranceway. Truthfully, I wasn't holding out much hope for the low-cost Malibu-brand systems I'd purchased at Home Depot, and nothing looks worse than cheap outdoor lighting in my book.
But those unopened boxes of transformers and low-wattage lighting were still handy, so I said yes to the initiative. The only attention I could spare was to offer the barest approximates of what I'd intended, and then to say, now leave me alone until lunch. So when the job was finished, after two short days, when I went out into the night, I was deeply startled by the results.

My friend Red had created a thing of beauty, which I told him, was larger than then the sum of its parts. Red has the same last name as a well-known local family of electricians (Motto: Let Us Fix Your Shorts) but not the license--the result of his checkered resume and quite a few years spent in the state pen.
Apparently, I hadn't made any purchasing mistakes. I told him he didn't have to use everything present, as I didn't want an airport-runway look, but I also didn't want to buy anything more except wire. Since I'm someone whose brain shuts off when I pick up a tool, I can appreciate the intricacies of hard work, having failed so often at projects.

All I really remembered anyway were the little seven-and-a-half-watt, half-moon down washers, which I'd gotten to screw through retaining walls I built out of railroad ties covered in mud cement and topped with brick. I must say, Red balanced the distribution between the two longer, and one shorter lengths of straight wall beautifully. But it was in his execution of the leveling and spacing, which a trained eye could find fault with in an instant, that he really pleased me. Lastly, everything is tightly mounted, so I'm trusting his trenching is to the same high standards.

I live on an old 18th-century farm road, which retains some quirky flavor, so I decided I could safely relocate the front door of my old farm house to face south without appearing eccentric. This orientation away from the road almost feels like a snub to the world, but it allowed me to utilize a narrow wedge of property that formerly was useless and had been given over to woods and vines. There was room for a wide drive, which incorporates a gentle curve behind which hides the first view of the house and barn. This builds suspense and heightens the climax, as I'm sure you know. Shouldered in high earthen berms, thickly planted, it provides for a perfect privacy, and I felt I'd aligned myself with powerful feng shui forces. Of course it didn't work well after dark, but that's what Tiki torches were for.

I'd acquired heavy urns at auction to decorate the drive and I was the first person to have asymmetrically positioned a pair of them---as far as I know---anywhere in the Hamptons, with the pedestal on the outside curve being two feet higher, as though you were psychologically rounding a banked turn at Le Mans.
I knew to place them well in from the road, away from vandals, but alas. Their first Christmas I put evergreen trees in them with old fashioned colored bulbs, and I must say, they stood out! Coming home in the December darkness one night, I could tell from far off that one was out. But driving in I saw that someone had pushed it over. Miraculously, since it comes apart in three sections, it had toppled, but hadn't broken. I didn't think to turn out the lights on the other one as a protective gesture, and I should have. Knowing this time how heavy they were, the vandals came back later and they must have really run down the drive, and gave it a bigger push---and this time the large bowl fell and broke into many pieces. I still have the base and footing, which a climbing rose grows up on---that is, when the deer let it. But the asymmetry factor was lost.

I can't remember what negative energies I was serving as a lightening rod for at that moment in time (there have been so many.) But I recognized afterward that there was a certain amount of hubris involved in my design decisions, and that what resulted was purified of any pride.

Would it engender feelings of enmity in readers if I were to say the entire lighting project came in at approximately $1,000? That would explain why we aren't supposed to talk about money. But for me, that is so cheap as to be unbelievable, so you do see how blessed, and protected, and cared for I feel in consequence?

I hope you feel that way too and that you've earned it.
This blog is less about the world of form, and more about the realm of light.
Ugh! I'll leave that last line as written, although, its pretentiousness shut me right up.