Operaton Learn Arabic

Update: :

About one week at the Petra Hostel  perched on the edge of the walled ancient city.

Living in this hostel is a near camping expirence. The place is full of ancient filth and grime that blows  with the wind int the open doorways and windows from the Arab markets below.

Its loud. There are soldiers and merchants and mendicants jews christians arabs Armenians

The Jaffa Gate, just outside the room’s balcony is the main entrance to the Old City and thus a lively place to bunker against the summer heat and its also been effective for staging ‘operation learn Arabic.’

Petra Life

My current home in The Petra Hostel is reportedly the oldest continually-operating hotel in Jerusalem. The hostel itself was built in the 1800s by the Russian Orthodox Church and first served to house military guards or officers. The building itself is lodged behind the massive walls that enshroud Jerusalem’s Old City and it dominates one side of the plaza in front of the Citadel.

Past guests included heroes Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, Lawrence of Arabia, and Herman Melville.

Until I begin writing for the Jerusalem P*st on Sunday I am spending my days in the Petra’s shaded hallways and balconies studying Arabic & Hebrew, taking cold showers, and drinking hot tea with mint to stay cool.

Jilly’s is Quiet Tonight

By  Kate Harrison and Josiah Ryan

The memory of Frank Sinatra’s New York City headquarters, located in the back room of a circa 1960’s saloon called Jilly’s, has faded along with the memories of so many other relics from that roaring era. The room was immortalized in journalist Guy Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” featured in Esquire magazine in 1966. However, Jilly’s has since been replaced by Russian Samovar, a vodka bar. It is occupied by Russian natives, celebrity artists, and drunks who pass their days and nights drinking herb infused vodkas, wholly unaware of the glorious past of their surroundings. As recounted by Talese, Sinatra once considered the barroom his throne room. Soaking in bourbon and Lucky Strike smoke, the Chairman presided over the minions who worshiped him from that dark room on 52nd Street. “[Jilly's Saloon] is where Sinatra drinks whenever he is in New York,” said Talese. “There is a special chair reserved for him in the back room against the wall that nobody else may use.” “A rather strange ritualistic scene develops,” writes Talese describing a typical Sinatra night at Jilly’s. “Dozens of people, some of them casual friends of Sinatra’s, some mere acquaintances, some neither, appeared outside of Jilly’s saloon. They approached it like a shrine. They had come to pay respect.” Sitting in the booth in Samovar, looking around the empty, low-lit room, Talese’s vivid descriptions are easy to envision. Loping jazz melodies, amber liquid being poured into glasses. People edging around each other, craning their necks for a glimpse of him. And he, Sinatra, subdued and yet tense, scowling from the back. It is easy to leave out one character from this scene, however: Guy Talese, who was probably sitting a few booths away. Talese, watching as closely a spy, with eyes as attuned to details as a portraitist. Because Sinatra repeatedly refused Talese interviews while he was working on the profile for Esquire, he was forced to shadow him, to observe him on both sides of the coast and talk to the people in orbit around him. There is something preposterous about trying to capture someone’s life in words, especially when that person refuses to open up to you personally. But there is something very critical about Talese’s mission to show Frank Sinatra, the man. At one point in the profile, Frank Sinatra, Jr. vents: “Here is the great fallacy, the great bullshit for Frank Sinatra is normal, the guy whom you’d meet on a street corner. But this other thing, the supernormal guise, has affected Frank Sinatra as much as anybody who watches one of his television shows, or reads a magazine about him…” One of these television shows plays an important role in Talese’s account. From the beginning of the profile, Sinatra and his crew are worried about a CBS special about Sinatra’s life that is soon to air. He needn’t have worried: “It was a highly flattering hour that did not deeply probe, as rumors suggested it would, into Sinatra’s love life, or the Mafia, or other areas of his private province.” The show serves to contribute one more element to the glowing myth of Sinatra, and it is this very myth Talese strives to strip away. CBS may not have probed, but Talese does. He does not do so in a sensational, scandal-mongering way, but in a manner that re-humanizes him. With his vivid storytelling and magnification of detail, Talese pulls down the “supernormal guise” of magazine covers and golden cigarette lighters, to examine the man with the firefighter father, the man with intense mood swings, the man with a cold. Talese does not diminish Sinatra by showing his fears and flaws. Rather, he elevates him by showing that Sinatra is something bigger than a celebrity–he is a man. This must be the goal of any journalist covering a celebrity. It would be irresponsible to dismiss the fact that celebrities–singers, actors, artists–are an integral, iconic part of our culture. But coverage of celebrities has become a bloated, self-sustaining industry. It splays pictures of celebrities’ affairs, newborns, grocery lists, and cellulite across grocery store magazines and gossip shows. Because celebrities have become a commodity, celebrity coverage “serious journalists” tend to avoid, wishing to distance themselves from the trashy, exploitative paparazzi. Yet a deeper, more human perspective needs to be seen of these important men and women than E! and People give. To adopt Talese’s approach and seek to give an honest, fair, and deep look at celebrities does not only benefit the culture–it benefits these stars themselves by bringing them back down to earth. After CBS’s Sinatra special aired without incident, Sinatra received a telegram from Jilly’s reading, “WE RULE THE WORLD!” But tonight, just 43 years later, Jilly’s is quiet. Its 1:30 am now and the party then would have just been starting. But tonight it’s just the barman and three or four suspicious figures huddle in miasmas of cigarette smoke whispering through a haze of alcohol. Not a single photo of Sinatra adorns the walls and there is no neon sign blinking over the corner where the Chairman once presided over the Rat Pack. Though Jilly’s address, now occupied by Russian Samovar, sits just a couple blocks from major tourism thoroughfares, this bar is not even really for Americans anymore. How does Frank Sinatra, a name that has come to define an era, a look, even a mood, evaporate from the very temple in which he was once venerated? Why is Jilly’s quiet tonight? Could it be that Frank Sinatra was a man– just as the Russians slumped on the bar are men, and just as the tourists who stroll down 52nd street tonight are merely men?

A Jerusalem Dawn

Weary from days of travel I soaked in this Jerusalem dawn

Arrived from Belgium too Jerusalem at 3am Wednesday morning. Though I managed to sleep several hours with my head lodged on the shoulder of an obliging young Isreali seated on the plane  to my right, I arrived exhausted.

Once in thethe Old City I garnered the strength to push through several more hours of wakefullness to witness the daily miracle of world rebirth over the city. Pitched in the mystery of night the sun fought its way over the Judean Hills and brought with it the smells & sights of commerce in the streets below as well as the guns the tension and the hot sun that makes Jerusalem Jerusalem.

It is 7.39pm and the Muslim call to prayers  resonate over the valley and through the labrynthine streets just below me.

True Blood

True Blood Spotting

Members of the Television cult rejoice. Mehcad Jason McKinley Brooks was spotted by DC friend strolling through the Lower East Side Sunday. Nicole says Mehcad is so hot right now so we asked him to cheerfully pose for this ophoto.

Lest one get the impression that I am endorsing either the series  True Blood or the appliance on which it plays (I am not) I quote my favorite poet T.S. Eliot:

“The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.”

The CCYC in Brussels

Applied Geometry

An old friend (Rowen) and I explored the great beer capital of the world Tuesday. Both sailors, rannking members of the prestigious Camp Copneconic Yacht Club, and addicted to maps, we spent more time navigating the city on paper than we did in practice.

New York Medium Tour

I am  running a circuit meeting editors and writers at the big magazines and media outlets here in thecity before I return to DC tomorrow.

So far:

Joseph Button– First Things

Kevin Williamson- National Review

Hendrik Hertzberg- The New Yorker

On the Docket:

Clayton Sizemore- CNN

MTV

The New York Times

Lights Lights Blinding

My friend Kate soaks in the view from the Vogue– just blocks from our(temporary) home in the shadow of the Empire State Building.

Searching for Bobby Fischer

I passed a leisurely Sunday afternoon roving the chess shops of Washington square and observing brilliant homeless me plying a wholly unprofitable trade.

Click here to view more chess photos…

Mendicant Cuisine

“There isn’t usually much funny about the homeless,” says Michael Race, a bicycle messenger smoking cigarettes in a park on Broadway. “But I’ll tell you a funny story about a homeless guy.”

“Wednesday there was this homeless guy in bad, bad shape down in one of those allies,” says Race indicating a labyrinth of narrow streets running off Times Square. “There was a guy down there just eating garbage out of a garbage can—he was just pulling filthy stuff out.”

“I could see him from the deli window where I am eating lunch, so I decide to do my good deed and bring the fellow a sandwich,” says Race.

“I get over there and interrupt the guy and he says, ‘well what kind of sandwich is it?’ in a haughty way as if I had interrupted tea with the Queen,” says Race who starts shaking with laughter in his recounting of the story.

“So I just started laughing then too and I said ‘why would it matter?’” says Race. “You are eating banana peels and eggshells right now, I mean, do you only eat certain kinds of sandwiches?”

Race is losing it now. Tears are dripping out of the corners of his eyes.

From that particular deli, the homeless guy, it turned out, only likes only the turkey and Swiss, says Race. He’s says he tried every kind of sandwich the deli makes and turkey and Swiss is just his flavor.

“Turns out he didn’t take it,” says Race. “It was a freshly made bologna and cheese sandwich and he didn’t want it.”

“So he kept eating garbage, “says Race. “ And even though he was right that the bologna in cheese is not the best sandwich the deli makes, I ended up having that sandwich for dinner.”