So why “Passages on the Verge”? Because there just seems to be something to say about what’s not being said, a different way of seeing if we just tweak a few things, look differently, shift the focus. It’s the lover’s quarrel on the bleachers at a baseball game, the ice cream cone that falls out of the child's hand in the park, the man frowning on the subway car. Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and the rest of the New Journalism gang in their wonderful works shifted the focus from the “event” to the individuals on the fringe, the sentiments of the never-seen, that verge of the messy and complicated where stories were never black and white but balls of conflictual confusion.
In my blog entries, that’s what I’m going for: passages on the verge that are not neat, nor clearly defined, that try to bring to the fore a different perspective. It’s a tall order I know. But it’s also a lot of fun.
The map below creates a visual, international web of where the individual's interviewed are from as well as where they now live and work. No locations are exact of course to protect those involved, but it will be an increasingly interesting visual to watch as it evolves.
View Passages on the Verge in a larger map
Conflict and Resolution: A Moment with Aldo Civico
Professor Aldo Civico is the director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR) at Columbia University's Schools of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). An anthropologist, he has been doing fieldwork in Colombia since 2001 focusing on internally displaced people and the paramilitary. Since 2003, he has been facilitating the peace efforts with the ELN guerrilla. Previously, he worked as a senior political adviser to Mr.
Drive
Barry Alpha is a livery-cab driver for Arecibo Car Service based out of Park Slope, Brooklyn on 5th Avenue. He arrives a couple of minutes early and the two of us try to throw everything in. He looks at me and I look back. We shake our heads. It's cold as hell and the luggage won't fit in the back. He's in his late 30s, originally from Guinea and spends 8-12 hours of his days, six days a week, glued to the leather seats of his Dodge Ram, tied to the radio where a guy in his early 20s decides whether or not he will have a customer.
Cold Days
The streets are cold after last night’s rain, Halloween approaches and the consumers shuffle around Union Square perusing the artist’s ware, buying their weekly groceries, listening to the scraping of the skateboards on the corner, the wailing of a lonely sax or the cries from the Christian choir. The presence of police, undercover and in their blues, is overwhelming and one of their copters looms overhead, perfectly still, watching. I approach a vendor on the corner of 14th and Broadway, ask the man if he’s interested in telling me his story and he shakes his head. “My boss said no press,” he says.
Wash Cycle Change
For Elsworth Worrell, a long-time businessman in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, aged 69, the area has seen tremendous change and he has the stories to mark them out.
Coming first to New York from Bermuda with a church choir for six weeks in 1955, Elsworth arrived in Brooklyn five years later in 1960, partly at the behest of his mother who wanted to move there. Soon after moving to Brooklyn, his mother would move down to Florida and later, Tuscon, Arizona to live with his brother, both now deceased.
Eiffel Tower: For Sale
From Dakar, Senegal to Paris via Cameroon, Michael Ngj, aged 25, now sells miniature and medium-sized pewter Eiffel Towers, watches and lighters amongst perhaps 30 others from all over the world (India, Senegal, Gabon, and Bangladesh to name just a few), all selling the exact same items. For 7 years, Michael has come to the Trocadero fountains in front of the Eiffel tower to sell these small pieces of tourist souvenirs which are all, according to Michael, made in China.
Kabir the Fruit Vendor
Some are sullen, withdrawn, gruff. They look at me, my outstretched hand with a business card and simply say, “No.” One does not and his name is Kabir Howlander, a 44 year old man standing around 5’6” from Bangladesh who dons a blue apron, a stark black hat, and a license around his neck from the NYC Department of Health that all food vendors are required to carry.
Uncharted Carts
The shiny aluminum siding of the cart rattles his brain as he traverses the corners of NYC. Who are the people that serve him the falafals, who dish up his lamb and rice, what are their stories, where do they come from and how have they found themselves on Park Ave, Lexington, Broadway and the rest? He walks past them everyday, conducts business with them at least a few times a week but knows nothing of them. To him, they are the unknown, the storied question marks, those everyday parts of his life that he never takes the time to look at and consider.
