Quote Of The Week

"Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death — ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return."

Quote Of The Week

"The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening — nobody is in control. The world is rudderless."

A Penny For The Old Guy

"The eyes are not here. There are no eyes here. In this valley of dying stars. In this hollow valley. This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms. In this last of meeting places. We grope together. And avoid speech..."

Quote Of The Week

"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."

The Land Of Permanent Bliss

"Just how much abuse will you be able to take? Well, there's no way to tell by that first kiss... Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king. There's only one step down from here baby, it's called the land of permanent bliss. What’s a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this?"

Quote Of The Week

"I am a person who is unhappy with things as they stand. We cannot accept the world as it is. Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things."

All Of Our Yesterdays

Ian Patrick "Mac" McLagan

Rest In Peace

"We used to smoke, listen to music, laugh and giggle, and had the best time! We'd get to the gig and we'd play music, then we'd leave the gig and we'd listen to music. Then we'd go back to the hotel and we'd play music, then we'd listen to music. It's all we did, and it was fabulous! You can't have a better life."

Quote Of The Week

"The depressed peoples of the world are very shortly going to grow tired of being wooed and lulled into passivity and quiet endurance by chromium and neon lights. The soft music from the many well-placed public-address loudspeakers and car radios will no longer serve as balm to the thwarted hopes, defeated aims, and brutal suppression of needed change. They'll come out of their coma with a bloodlust and justified indignation for social injustice that will sweep the asphalt right from under the empire builders."

A Tree Dies In Brooklyn

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will."

Big Fight

Mural (detail) by Eduardo Kobra

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"We are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?"

Urban Light

"The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting."

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

A Day In The Life

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity

to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

Quote Of The Week

“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”

The Great Lady

"I love the city in an emotional, irrational way, like loving your mother or your father even though they’re a drunk or a thief. I’ve loved the city my whole life — to me, it’s like a great woman."

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.”

The Wages Of Dying Is Love

"What, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank
flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?"

Galway Kinnell

Rest In Peace

"I don’t recognize the distinction between nature poetry and, what would be the other thing? Human civilization poetry? We are creatures of the earth who build our elaborate cities and beavers are creatures of the earth who build their elaborate lodges and canal operations and dams, just as we do..."

Beyond The Horizon

Photograph by Lynn Goldsmith, 1983.

Quote Of The Week

"People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called 'character,' a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues... Nonetheless, character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs."

Vigor For Life

"Everything we do has significance. Every action, every thought leaves an imprint — not only on the self, but on the world, on the others, and even on time, on all who come after us! This implies a responsibility for one's thoughts and actions that should be taken most seriously! And yet one feels helpless, a hapless victim of circumstances beyond one's control, as if one's behavior and thoughts did not originate in the self, but were a product, an accumulation of imprints from the world, from our ancestors, from the people around us. It behooves one to take responsibility, to take the power to decide how one will act, and even how one will think! Not only for the betterment of one's self, but for the betterment of the world, all the others, and all who will come after us!"

Photograph by Harry Benson, 1968

Dancing In The Moonlight

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”

Ode To Eternity

"O man, take care!

What does the deep midnight declare?

"I was asleep—

From a deep dream I woke and swear:—

The world is deep,

Deeper than day had been aware.

Deep is its woe—

Joy—deeper yet than agony:

Woe implores: Go!

But all joy wants eternity—

Wants deep, wants deep eternity."

From Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)

Quote Of The Week

"What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?"

Midnight Was My Cry

Carolyn Kizer

Rest In Peace

Quote Of The Week

"He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being."

Until Further Notice...

Due to massive computer issues, A.I.T.A. will be taking a short break from publishing. We hope to be back with a bang soon.

Quote Of The Week

"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph."

Security

The twins strut proudly down the avenue, in plain view of all. It's obvious that they have not a care in the world, with their hoods pulled tight on their aging skulls, scratched-up goggles strapped even tighter around the back of their necks. They carry tattered shopping bags, rumored to be filled with decades of newspaper clippings. No one seems to know how long they've worn those goggles, why, or where the two of them live. Rumor had it that one of them died. But no, there they are, walking lock-step, with a determination that's inspiring. Never a smile, but you can sense their contentment.

The streets have changed over the years. Stores open and close. The old charmed faces fade into younger colder ones, and the sense of community folds into a heartless nod of the head. The twins never left, despite their scarcity at times. I'm going to miss them terribly one day — and I don't even know their names.

© 2009 Lee Greenfeld

Dream This Night Away

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

I Must With Thee Dwell

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"Without ambition, one starts nothing. Without work, one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it."

The Last Picture Show

Brooklyn Heights Cinema

1970-2014

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no--true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man."

Quote Of The Week

"Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations."

Where Peace And Rest Can Never Dwell

"In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. And this results in a striking experience — one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devastation would by lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorably attained. However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, god help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words."

Quote Of The Week

"Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months."

We Must Fall Down

"Stars, hide your fires;

Let not light see my black and deep desires."

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

Quote Of The Week

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."

No More Walls

"Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another."

Quote from The Diary of Anaïs Nin

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

The Embargo

Whiskey-smacked birdmen take to the sky once again, avenging all so-called transgressions via radio-wave breakdown, and always with a nod and bow to the ancients. The pain comes in fast and hard, with little relevance to the affair at hand, let alone rational intent.

A self-inflicted blow to the face, with the force of months of disoriented walks through heaps of Dionysian rubble. The loss of taste is the worst of it, but at least sight remains, allowing for glorious sunspots, and the awareness of those precious, awkward smiles.

© 2009 Lee Greenfeld

Quote Of The Week

"Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them."

A Coney Island Of My Mind #17

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow."

He's Left Home

Tommy Ramone

Rest In Peace

I only got to see the Ramones live once: I had just published an interview with the band in my 'zine (and had them on the cover), and as such brought two stacks to the show. I was already giddy being on the band's guest-list and finally getting to see them live, but looking out to see a sea of faces reading my rag before one of the greatest and most important American bands hit the stage was a feeling that's hard to describe, though also one I'll never forget... Those first three LPs are game-changers, and it's hard to believe that all of those responsible for creating them are gone.

Bright Lights, Big City

"The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding." -John Updike

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them."

Quote Of The Week

"Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn’t surprise us, as astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely."

Cold War City

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good!" The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare."

Quote Of The Week

"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed."

Quote Of The Week

"Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself. And avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be very frightened by your own bad acts."

Tick Tock

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

Quote by Bertrand Russell

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"We must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war. There is no task that is more important or closer to my heart."

In The Free World You Must Stay

William Worthy

Rest In Peace

"William Worthy, a foreign correspondent who in the thick of the Cold War ventured where the United States did not want him to go and became the subject of both a landmark federal case concerning travel rights and a ballad by the protest singer Phil Ochs, died on May 4th." ... Story continues here: William Worthy, A Reporter Drawn To Forbidden Datelines, Dies At 92 (NY Times)

Quote Of The Week

"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth."

A Coney Island Of My Mind #16

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once...  and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you."

No Matter What Your Language

Jack Agüeros

Rest In Peace

Destiny asked if I would play cards, so I sat.

I liked the one-hand cuts and snappy shuffles

but I kept going down. Deal after deal,

pictures, numbers, I never controlled a hand.

"Destiny," I cried, "you only wear one suit -

it's red!, or is it black?"

Destiny blew on the deck and laughed.

"Look around, call yourself lucky - I let you play."

"Destiny," I said, "look at me, I'm a brown Jack

and I sit high in the hierarchy. Where's my privilege?"

Untitled poem by Jack Agüeros © 2006

Quote Of The Week

"A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere. In the present age a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable. Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence of our times. On the other hand a political virtuoso might bring off a feat almost as remarkable. He might write a manifesto suggesting a general assembly at which people should decide upon a rebellion, and it would be so carefully worded that even the censor would let it pass. At the meeting itself he would be able to create the impression that his audience had rebelled, after which they would all go quietly home — having spent a very pleasant evening.”

Exile On 116th Street

Matt was a local legend. A real borough hero. Matt's best friend Eddie lived uptown. Eddie's influence on Matt was immeasurable

One winter night in the mid-'80s Matt ranted, for what seemed like an eternity, about "the commies" all while letting cigarettes burn out on his arms in an effort to show that he was prepared for "the coming fight." On that same cold blustery night using just one hand — and then just a few fingers — he hung his body off the local esplanade to show his resolve. He could care less about the bumper-to-bumper traffic below. Or perhaps he didn't notice it.

Eddie ruined Matt's life.

Words: Lee Greenfeld © 2012

Destruction

I come and go — the Demon tags along,

hanging around me like the air I breath;

each time I swallow he fills my burning lungs

with sinful cravings never satisfied.

Sometimes (for he knows my love of Art)

he visits in a seductive woman's form

and with the specious alibis of despair

inures my lips for squalid appetites.

Thereby he leads me out of God's regard,

spent and gasping — out to where the vast

barrens of Boredom stretch infinitely,

and here he hurls into my startled face

the open wounds, the rags they have soaked through,

and all Destruction's bloody bag of tricks!

Poem by Charles Baudelaire

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"Why on awakening from your dream and entering fully into reality, do you feel almost every time, and occasionally with an extraordinary force of impressions, that along with the dream you are leaving behind something you have failed to fathom? You smile at the absurdity of your dream and feel at the same time that the tissue of those absurdities contains some thought, but a thought that is real, something that belongs to your true life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart; it is as if your dream has told you something new, prophetic, awaited; your impression is strong, it is joyful or tormenting, but what it is and what has been told you — all that you can neither comprehend nor recall."

The Final Exit

Last Exit

Rest In Peace

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

The Apartment

The cigarette didn't taste right.
Truth was, they rarely did.

Books surround,
magazines too.

Still...
No comfort.

© 2009 Lee Greenfeld

I Live In The Springtime

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil."

Justice Is A Game

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter

Rest In Peace

"Here comes the story of the Hurricane,

The man the authorities came to blame

For somethin' that he never done.

Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been

The champion of the world."

•

Rubin Carter Dies at 76

In The Palm Of Some Fool’s Hand?

City Baby Attacked By Rats

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else."

Indignation

"You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you —

life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings.

You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again."

Text by Philip Roth • Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Why Not?

Quote Of The Week

"Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."

Rear Window

Brighton Beach view, circa 1991

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."

The Spirit Of '76

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Quote Of The Week

"What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would have once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup. It was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human beings lacked any real affinity. How odd."

A Gallery Of Cool, Take Sixteen

Dig: Gallery Of Cool, Take Fifteen

Quote Of The Week

"For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and embarrassing as freedom."

Quote Of The Week

"Philosophy becomes tortured thinking. Thinking that devours itself—and continues intact and even flourishes, in spite (or perhaps because) of the repeated acts of self-cannibalism. In the passion play of thought, the thinker plays the roles of both protagonist and antagonist. He is both suffering Prometheus and the remorseless eagle who consumes his perpetually regenerated entrails."

Romance Ain't Dead

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014

Back Then

Justin Kaplan

Rest In Peace

Quote Of The Week

"Nobody really knew anything. People lived; they went here and there about the earth and rode through forests; so much seemed to challenge or to promise, and so many sights to stir our longing: an evening star, a blue harebell, a lake half-covered in green reeds, the eyes of beasts and human eyes; and always it was as though something would happen, something never seen and yet sighed for, as though a veil would be pulled back off the world; till the feeling passed, and there had been nothing."

Christopher Columbus Syndrome

"You just can’t come in the neighborhood. I’m for democracy and letting everybody live but you gotta have some respect. You can’t just come in when people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here? Get the fuck outta here. Can’t do that!"

Rant excerpt by Spike Lee, February 2014
Brooklyn Love artwork by Adam Suerte © 2014

Tea And Misery

"...our own age is essentially one of understanding, and on the average, perhaps, more knowledgeable than any former generation, but it is without passion. Every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move."

Text from The Present Age, 1846

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2014