The Evergreen Cemetery: Where Asimov whistled while the Chinese boiled

All in a day's work: Former gravedigger and now cemetery historian Donato Daddario demonstrates the key that releases the two rosette-shaped screws and releases the marble faceplate from a compartment.

"THE boiler would come by with his two big cauldrons, disinter (dig up) the bodies and boil 'em up to remove any remaining meat. He'd then chop up the body at the joints, box up the bones and they'd be loaded on a ship bound for China ..."

In case we needed a better visual, the ebullient Donato Daddario whacks a cleaver-shaped hand against his elbow and knee.

"We used to say, they used the broth to make chop suey!"

We happened to stumble across Donato during a personal tour of the Evergreens Cemetery led by distinguished historian and über sailer John Rousemaniere, author of  Green Oasis in Brooklyn: The Evergreens Cemetery 1849-2008 

Heading over the Brooklyn Bridge with my friends sporting my signature "stayin'alive" Traffic Cone Bag

Our friend Pamela Talese organized the sortie, with our phalanx of folding bikes heading over the Brooklyn Bridge to meet a cluster of writers and cultural creatives from her circle. First stop: the sublime Vinegar Hill House for brunch, who always welcome folding bikes into their little secure courtyard at the back.

I've been thinking about why this "farmhouse aesthetic between a cobbled street and a smokestack" is so insanely popular. I think it's this: if whatever you make - be it a killer sourdough pancake or slice of quiche - is just that little bit more scrumptious than anyone else's, foodies even on a budget will come for miles. It wasn't cheap and I was still hungry after. But I digress ... 

"A memorial for children, see the dragons?" Artist Pamela Talese, got her friend John Rousemaniere to generously give us a tour.  

So why visit a cemetery on an impossibly sunny day? No one around, no volleyballs to bounce on your burrito and loads of shade. And, in the case of many New York cemeteries, loads of colorful characters.

I flicked through John's notes and saw that Isaac Asimov spent his afternoons "sitting on one of the cemetery’s benches, reading and engaging in his half-conscious habit of whistling." The spacey young author-to-be described Evergreen as "a lonely Eden ... a park without the disadvantages of being full of people."

A log shaped headstone meant the deceased had no kids so it was the "end of the line, the tree had been cut."

As you can see on the website, more than half a million peeps are buried on the site. There's an above ground burial building where ashes are installed. I wondered if one day, there'd be entire condos for the dead - with per-square-inch prices starting low in the super's basement and escalating as you ascended to the heavenly penthouse floor ...

The Chinese section - the headstones were very uniform and unadorned. 

The Chinese section was much less ornate in terms of headstone design. According to Donato, the Chinese would spend just a short time buried - 3 years - then with the help of the boiler man, be returned to the mother country. One day, a shipload of bodies was blown up en route to China, meaning none of the passed passengers every made it home. Someone decided it wasn't worth continuing, and boiler man had to find another career.

Speaking of boilers, the photo below shows one that's actually a tomb.

Be buried in your life's work: William H Guild's boiler-tomb.

Says John, "William H. Guild's metal tomb is an example of taking such pride in your work that you decide to live with (or in) it for all eternity.  Guild was in the boiler business at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the late 1800s. He had this graceful pile of iron - likely a ship's boiler - brought by horse and wagon to the cemetery. There it, he, and his family lie in the Evergreens' Hickory Knoll section, surrounded by some more traditional monuments. "

A family rails against the railroad which claimed the life of their young son. 

One woman stopped by with a brace of tiny tots in beaded dreadlocks, carrying rather large bottles of what looked like coffee powder.

"Their dad was murdered, and they saw I had ashes of my mother and said, how come we can't have our dad with us like that? So I told them, we're going to go to the cemetery and bring your daddy home."

I asked the kids what they planned to do with the dirt.

"Make sandcastles," they said. A tiny little thing sat beside me. From his tiny perfect little face came the words, "You speak Chinese?" I started to explain how my mother didn't speak so I never learned yadda yadda, but he looked at me as if to say, "you know you should."

You see life anew as well as adjourned in a cemetery. 

My zealous alter ego Chelsea Gallerista couldn't help but dream of a hybrid cemetery/art gallery looking like Storm King RIP, where original, commissioned sculptures could replace the cookie cutter headstones, with modest entry fees paying for maintenance ... 

Storm King ... how about a cemetery of headstones that looked like this?

"These tombs aren't much smaller than a Manhattan apartment," observed Markley.

"Yes, perhaps the deceased should get a three year lease," quipped David. "After that, you should be able to move in. It's quiet, you've got an instant neighborhood, no barking dogs or basketball hoops."

As you can see from the picture below, it doesn't look all that different from an average suburban street - Corinthian, Doric and Ionic columns abounded in the 'burbs where I grew up - and where it was about as dead. 

Does this look like a neighborhood near you?

I'll let Pamela have the last word: 

Here is the quote I was rambling on about in the graveyard. Thomas Lynch is an American poet, essayist and undertaker. The Gladstone to which he refers is the great Victorian Liberal who sounded like a New Age Republican when he wrote that "he could measure with mathematical precision a people's respect for the laws of the land by the way they cared for their dead."

And as I watch my generation labor to give their teenagers and young adults some “family values” between courses of pizza and Big Macs, I think maybe Gladstone had it right. I think my father did. They understood the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions—only those who do it well and those who don’t. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment, or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we seek a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like 

From The Undertaking / Life Studies in the Dismal Trade
By Thomas Lynch

Get John's book and listen to more stories on the Evergreen Cemetery's website

Thank you John and Pamela, for the wonderful tour, and Susan for stowing our folding bikes in your Suburu.

A sunscreen story from Downunder

Remember, a few years ago, when they told women to start wearing sunscreen daily, or end up a wrinkled old prune ? 

It was the era of PABA, or para-amio benzoic acid. This was the most common sunscreen ingredient at the time, at least Downunder. Sometime later, it fell out of favor due to allergic reactions. 

I was one of those unfortunate "reactionaries." 

I remember putting Hamilton Sunscreen on my face - a popular pharmacy brand - and within a few days my cheeks started itching. Then it got worse - little fluid filled bumps and a redness that spread across my face. 

The usual thing we do, of course, is try all manner of salves and lotions in our medicine cabinet "just to see what will happen." It usually it makes it worse. It's almost like the ashen-gray hue and "something not quite anything" flavor resulting from a smoothie with too many fruits or a soup with too many ingredients.

A dermatologist prescribed the usual first rash-abater - hydrocortisone cream. Corticosteroids are something you want to avoid using for any length of time, especially on the face, where they can break down the skin structure and lead to "depressed, stripey areas" as the textbooks so appealingly put it. 

But my face got worse. It started weeping and I looked like someone in need of a skin graft. 

The dermo then got me to bring in a box of all the things I had put on my face - and indeed, it was quite a box! Even so, she was scratching her head in bewilderment (don't you hate it when someone earning 10 times your wage does that?)

Being a medical science geek - I wanted to be a pharmacologist once - I started reading the labels. Bingo! The cortisone cream was preserved with 1% hydroxybenzoate - a PABA derivative (para amino benzoate - get it?). And PABA was of course, in Hamilton sunscreen. So the cream that was supposed to reduce inflammation was being scuttled by its own preservative. If anything, the ointment version of the cream, which is anhydrous (i.e. no water, and thus no preservative) would have been more appropriate.

I had to deal with my allergic reaction like this.
Well, not really, except on this occasion.

The dermatologist's experience now came to the fore. She diagnosed that PABA was creating a light sensitive reaction, so continuous exposure to daylight - and even the weak UV rays of flurouscent light - were triggering the condition. I had to stay in a DARK ROOM for 3 weeks, to get it out of my system. This meant I moved back with my mother while she brought me food in a kind of twilight zone and I read by flashlight. 

For months after, had to wear a hat indoors to protect myself from the office fluorescent lights. 

For years after, I would get an itchy spot on my right cheek if I ever got a little too much sun, or stress. 

The lesson? If you're sensitive to things, read the labels and do your due due diligence with Google before you slather anything on your skin. If a small, round patch worn on your butt can stop you from getting pregnant, imagine what's going directly into your bloodstream with everything you rub on your skin. No leaning up against strange walls, now!

PABA has since been removed from most sunscreens, but it still lurks in some.

What do I use now?

I like Naked Bee ("all the good stuff, no bad stuff") sunscreen which I discovered in Bisbee, Arizona many years ago. There's something nice about this product that you can't quite put your finger on - perhaps it's because it simply feels and smells great.

I use Shiseido D Program purple range (sensitive skin) for the rest of my skincare at the moment.  I discovered it while hanging out at the Duty Free airport en route from Tokyo, and hallucinated that might be more attuned to my Asian skin. I can't for the life of me read Japanese,  but since it's not made in the USA, it probably doesn't have high fructose corn syrup or trans fat in it. So far, so good. It's quite expensive, but goes a long way, and besides, I don't drink, have kids or drive a car -  so it's my one indulgence. I have to get my Japanese contacts to keep me supplied as it's not available here in the USA. 

If you're a closet pharmacology/medical science freak like me, some books that you might like this book. 

Damien Hirst Spot Challenge: A scavenger hunt of the dotty kind

One of the funnest things you can do in Geneva: spot planking at the Gagosian Geneva gallery.
Thanks to Johan for being a great sport!

I popped up in Athens to face a phalanx of police riot shields. In LA, Stephen Spielberg's mother showed me her wall of fame to her son (it's on the way to the restroom). Then there was Occupy London ... and the $10/night Kung Fu hostel in Hong Kong with its Changi prison aesthetics and woman who refused to budge from my bunk bed …

My latest escapade was a complete departure from anything I've done before - the Damien Hirst Spot Challenge - a kind of global scavenger hunt where you had to dash around visiting all 11 galleries showing his Spot Paintings (NY-LA-London-Paris-Geneva-Rome-Athens-HK), and as a reward, receive a personally dedicated print. It was one of the maddest, funnest things I've ever done.

The full spot-by-spot journey is thrashed out on my art soapbox, http://chelseagallerista.com, and here are the relevant posts.

NEW VIDEO: Booking it along the Amazon with PACTOUR

90 SECOND TRAILER (Vimeo)
Watch in VIMEO

90 SECOND TRAILER (YouTube)
WATCH on YouTube

DVD Sleeve. Click on image to read it. 

UPDATE: A DVD of this tour is available Feb 2012 from Lon Haldeman, haldeman@pactour.com (Original 2004 DVD): 16,000 Feet on a FridayDonations for these Peru Projects (administered by FPC Global Outreach) are always welcome and appreciated. As you can see, they are put to good and immediate use!To donate, contact Lon Haldeman, haldeman@pactour.com
 ABOUT THIS TOUR | LON'S BLOG

Delivering books to remote schools along the Amazon.

I'M JUST BACK from my second expedition in Peru with cycling legend and tireless philanthropist Lon Haldeman of PACTOUR.

The 17-day, non-stop itinerary involved several charitable projects:  a shopping trip for a home for abused and homeless girls;  delivering books to remote schools along the Amazon;  visiting two schools that PACTOUR built near the jungle town of Iquitos; inviting street kids to an impromptu meal, and buying supplies for the Puerto Ocopa orphanage that we stumbled upon back in 2004. Lon has led this same trip almost every year for the past decade, so it's become an ongoing concern, attracting donations from many of his cycling clientele.

Nuns look after the 45 kids at the Puerto Ocopa Orphanage where we took food and clothing for 3 months.

My first visit, in 2004, resulted in a feature-length video, 16,000 Feet on a Friday: Biking the World's Highest Paved Road which portrayed, among other things, my gasping, slightly blue mug as I tried to bike over that 16,000 foot bump at a centipede's pace ... here's 1 minute of gasping for you.

16,000 feet ... ohhh, my head feels like lead ... 

This year, we drove it, while some of the crew biked sections. Without the gradual acclimatization afforded by biking at a steady 5-6 mph, we all got a little bit sick, despite ingesting No-Doz, Coke, Mate tea, loads of coffee and unbearable amounts of sleep-depriving Latino rap courtesy of every taxi driver's mp3 player.

1. Shopping for the Chosica Girl's Home. A generous Dutch non-profit runs "The House of Gina," a girls home in the attractive town of Chosica, 35 km outside Lima. It's a safe haven for abused and homeless niñas, and our contribution was to take them all shopping to buy some treats.

What are little girls all over the world made of? Pink diamonte shades! 

Gina was a little girl who sadly drowned. The home was named in honor of her.

Little Aracely (below), who Lon met 6 years ago in the remote, dusty town of Yurinaki, is now one of the local PACTOUR crew. Although she has a loving mother, her family are very poor and she is lucky to have secured a spot at the House of Gina.

Aracely, now one of PACTOUR's local crew members - is a terrific interpreter.

The cyclists in the crew included four Americans and two Peruvian competitive cyclists - sisters Alessandra and Samantha, currently national champions in their age groups. The cyclists leapfrogged the rest of the crew in taxis over the 3-day stretch from Chosica to Tarapoto, the jumping off point for boat trips along the Amazon and its tributaries.

Peruvian women's cycling champ Alessandra Davila

2. Delivering books to remote schools along the Amazon 

Buying books in Lima, for the jungle schools of the Amazon

An unforgettable segment of the trip was the 3-day, 2 night banana boat cruise from Tarapoto to Iquitos along the Amazon and confluences.

View from the Eduardo VIII "banana boat" at 6am, somewhere along the Rio Amazon.

12 bundles of goodies await six lucky schools. 

Being the "first class" passengers at $US60 per person, we slept in cabins and hammocks on the top deck and were served three really quite decent meals a day, prepped by the cook in the deck below.

The regular class passengers on the deck below vied for hammock space and brought Tupperware eat meals from the kitchen.

After bundling the books into 6 piles of 2 packages - books and writing/drawing materials - we were dispatched by motorized dugout canoe at various points along the Amazon, popping up in remote villages and surprising a number of tiny schools with our humble offering.

The teachers and kids were surprised - and delighted - at their windfall from the "extranjeros."
Escuela Esperanza: 71 kids. 

Interestingly, some officials from the local Dept Education happened to be on the boat doing their rounds of inspecting and testing teachers in remote schools. Apparently, students must attain a certain level of skill in certain subjects or the teacher gets shown the door (if there is a door) - according to Vioricka, our local Director of Operations.

3. Visiting the Jack Wolff and Joseph Pulley Schools


These two schools, built entirely from donations collected by PACTOUR, are located at kilometer 9 and 46 outside the northern jungle town of Iquitos. The Jack Wolff School, with almost 600 kids, prepared a grand welcome of placards, dances, poetry readings and food. Then the teachers got down to business to discuss their needs for the coming 2012 school year.

Touching messages everywhere you looked at the Jack Wolff School.

Lon listens to teachers articulating needs and desires - sporting uniforms, a powerpoint projector, laptops ... 

The kids at the remote Joseph Pulley School. Many walk 1 hour from further inside the jungle to class each day,

The Joseph Pulley School is a hot, dusty, 4km hike into the jungle. It was named after the father of an avid PACTOUR cyclist., Brenda Pulley. The site consists of the school building, a hut for the teacher, a hut for the live chickens, a cooking stand and a river nearby. The teacher, Vioricka's mother, spends 5 days a week living in these spartan conditions, and returns the city of Iquitos on weekends.  Many of the children walk 1 hour or more to the school from deeper in the jungle each day to attend class.

A hot 4km hot and sweaty hike in and out of the school. Douse your socks with repellent!

As remote as it was, the Jack Pulley school cooked everyone wonderful meal of duck confit, rice, pickled onions,  plantain and slices of the sweetest pineapple.

4. Street kid parties

Like a "flash mob" event, we hosted two spontaneous meals at a local restaurant for kids who looked like they had nowhere to go home to. We handed out individually numbered invitations and asked them to show up at the restaurant at 6.30pm. A sign that Peru is become more affluent: some kids refused the invitation, and those who accepted looked fairly well looked after "which hasn't been the case in previous years," said Lon.

The little boy selling snacks took time off work to attend the party. 

Not all the kids were particularly poor ... this fairly affluent girl (left) sticks by her less affluent friend.

I wondered if this benevolent gesture might be misinterpreted by onlookers, given that my mother always told us "not to accept pollo from strangers." My concerns were laid to rest by a local guide:
"Peruvians are accustomed to foreigners stopping buy and doing kind things," he said.

5. The Orphanage at Puerto Ocopa


The Orphanage is at the end of a spectacular and often treacherous 300+ mile route from Lima to Satipo over the 16,000 foot Ticlo pass.

It's come a long way since we first visited in 2004, when a single nun looked after 85 kids whose parents had been killed (apparently) by guerillas. At the time, all cooking was done over wood, each child had one set of clothes, which were washed by standing and soaping themselves in the river and rain - and there was no electricity.

Thanks to non-profits from France and Spain the center now has running well water, electricity, three fridge/freezers and even a TV room.

Gabriele Garcia, who lives year round at the Orphanage, runs the Children of Rio Tambor Foundation.
He's made the well operational so that the Orphanage now has running water.

The orphans received clothes, shoes and personal hygiene items as well as 3 month's supply of food.

6. Cycling

Our crew included Peruvian champion cyclists Alessandra and her younger sister Samantha. Read about their rise to fame here.

Christian of the many beautiful and charismatic kids we met in Peru.

Crayolacam 2.0: I used a SONY DSC-HX9V and a Canon S100 point and shoot cameras for this project.

Thanks so much to gun cameraman Johnnie Behiri, who I've met through his spectacular review of the SONY DSC-HX9V on Vimeo. He provided life-saving online help in mastering the impressive little camera which shoots 1080p/60fps - yet it's still just a point & shoot. I really need hi-def video but with one-handed operation (the other on the handlebars of a bicycle) and this really did the trick!

More pictures on my Facebook page here
Read about this tour

My latest acquisition: George Takei in technicolor!

I'm suddenly the lucky owner of this homage to Mr Sulu/George Takei - since it's about art, go forth and read about it on my ChelseaGallerista blog.

CUBA: The Handsomest Man in Cyberspace

I've just been informed by my Publisher Globe-Pequot that the Handsomest Man in Cuba is now floating in cyberspace as a Google e-book. Who knew? One minute there was all an outcry about Google elves madly scanning books against people's wishes, the next, it's quietly made its way onto an e-shelf.

Currently priced at around $9 like a paperback, it's no wonder the print edition has sold around 12,000 copies (including my original self-published Bike Friday edition), but zero e-editions so far. Apparently Google is not the first place people think of when it comes to e-books.

Nonetheless, if you want it for your e-reader, it looks like you can read 50 pages for free, and then there's a link to it in my lemonade stand. I'm not sure if the color photos are included, this news is so new.  But now, you can save a tree (well at least, a fully realized one), and if you're an American, read it as you're coming in from overseas without the cover arousing suspicion!

You can also read 3 chapters on my handsomest webpage on Cuba ...  www.handsomestmanincuba.com

My friend Lynn souvenired this poster from the time of Leian Gonzalez affair, around 2000. I was given a t-shirt and asked to "wear it in my home country."

I still have this t-shirt, given to me by the gentleman wearing it.

Link to the Handsomest Man in Cuba e-book

Link to The Handsomest Man in Cuba Official Webpage

Link to the Handsomest Man in Cuba Facebook page

Better harassing through science: the Cat Attack toy

The Cat Attack: A little remote controlled mouse with skittish attachment keeps cats on their toes (shot on my iPhone, a bit of drumming by the Greenpoint Marching Band in Hudson, 2010)

Let's face it: it's generally more fun to watch a white elephant gift exchange than a traditional Christmas gift opening. Same ole, same ole, given and received with gracious grimaces - sox, books, TJ Maxx gloves, scarves (OK I was guilty of gifting a few from my recent Peru video shoot), tins of mass produced shortbread butter cookies ... oh wouldn't I kill to see someone gift a black velvet flocked painting to a serious art lover!

But this year, after teaching a Christmas Day yoga class, I was generously invited by a student to a wonderful gathering and saw a particularly fresh stocking stuffer:

It's called a CAT ATTACK: a remote-controlled toy with convincingly twitchy, skittish mousey moves. Three laser-pointer-blasé cats - a tuxedo, a tortoiseshell and a calico - were mesmerized by this gadget. Staring in disbelief, they stalked it from a few whisker-lengths distance, backing off and darting behind boxes when it swung around for a swipe.

Yes, as if twitching and nose-butting the cat wasn't enough, the gadget features a Chaos Wand - a neurotic pom-pom on a spring that's whacked around asynchronously like a fly swatter.

As you can see, the tortoiseshell eventually bit the pom-pom and stalled the action until it let go.

Best of all, it kept the only child in the room utterly transfixed (for a while) as she controlled the remote like an expert crane driver. Uh, except when she drove it over the rug fringe, where the spinning wheels sucked up the cords. It was like trying to unravel a reel of dental floss sucked up in a bicycle chain (not that the two would ever get that close.)

The unpredictable moves make the toy very interesting to watch, and apparently it's a product of applied chaos theory. It utilizes "algorithmns based on six-dimensional coupled nzmap system modeled on the neural network of a real mouse." I include the full and fascinating thesis at the bottom of this post.

OK, the fluffy booties were the second best stocking stuffer

How fun would it be to work for a company that makes this kind of thing!  Applying your PhD in Robotics and bringing the prototype to the boardroom table for progress presentations ... I use to wonder what the boardroom meetings of adult toy industry would be like:  Powerpoint presentations of penile enhancers, battery life charts of buzzing day-glow suppositories ... you get my drift. As we know, everything gets old, hence the relentless onslaught of new tchotchkes. Like this Tengu toy my beau discovered in MOMA, which I filmed lip-synching a classic Rowan Atkinson skit:

 Read on for a holiday applied science fix - it's what happened when NASA met Kitty!

Cat Attack Remote Control Cat Exerciser

As much fun for people as for cats, the Cat Attack is the world's first remote control cat exercises featuring the Chaos Wand, based on chaos technology, to keep your cat wildly entertained for hours on end. You drive the Cat Attack and it drives your cat crazy! The Cat Attack uses the latest research in chaos theory and complex systems to emulate the movements and personality of a cat's favorite prey. This "virtual mouse" technology utilizes algorithmns based on six-dimensional coupled nzmap system modeled on the neural network of a real mouse. What that all means is that the Cat Attack's "virtual mouse" will become your cat's new best friend! This product is based on Capsuled Chaos TM technology by ChAotic Toy Factory, ltd. (from http://www.felinefanatics.com/cat_toys.htm)

Have a happy cat-harrassing 2012!