THAT'S WHAT I CALL this photo, "Lady in a Yellow Dress." I suppose I could have named it, "Bicyclist Who Almost Blocked My View of Lady in a Yellow Dress." but I caught the fluttery moment as a well timed summer breeze, or perhaps a passing bus on Spruce Street, kicked up the wind just enough to cause her dress to billow ever so slightly. She's a vision, isn't she? Her posture so dignified, almost regal. And yet fragile, waif-like.

I took this picture last summer and it's one of more than 30 photos I have on display at Rembrandt's Restaurant at 23rd and Aspen Sts. There's an opening Sunday afternoon from 2 o'clock on during the Fairmount Art Crawl. Come on out. I'd love to see you. Make sure to tell me that you read about it here. I'm trying to figure out who's reading Daily DeLeon.

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Posted by clarkdeleon at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

True story. I'm in this bar in Grays Ferry ten years ago when the phone rings. It's Stinky. He had recognized my car parked outside. He wants to know what I'm doing in the neighborhood. Mostly he wants to know why I'm in this bar at 28th and Reed Sts. asking questions about the neighborhood instead of a bar at 29th and Tasker where he, Stinky Markey, could answer them. What I didn't know then was the language of the neighborhood. In Grays Ferry 28th and Reed meant people who had hung out at the playground on 26th Street whereas 29th and Tasker meant the playground at 30th Street. Both 26th Streeters and 30th Streeters made fun of the people from Wharton Street, the playground at Hollywood and Wharton. In the pecking order of playgrounds, 30th Streeters considered themselves royalty and one of their nobles was a man named Stinky.

It was a tense time in Grays Ferry. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan announced he was going to lead a march of Black Muslims through the streets in protest of an incident where a black woman had been disrespected by group of white men. It was a complicated tale, filled with compelling back stories and I was trying to figure it all out. I had known Stinky -- Joseph Cyril Markey III -- for almost 20 years. I knew him well enough to ask him how he got his nickname. When Joe was a baby his uncle caught a whiff of his diapers and said, "C'mere Stinky." The name stuck. But I didn't realize how well it had stuck until I got off the house phone and the owner of the bar asked me who had called. "Joe Markey," I answered. The bar owner looked confused for a second and said, "Stinky Markey?" I nodded. And he said, "I didn't know his nickname was Joe."

That was one of the funniest unintentionally funny comments I ever heard. I wondered if I'd ever hear anything like it again. Not long ago I was in a store in the mega strip mall on Delaware Avenue in South Philadelphia when I heard a man call to a child wandering down the aisle, "C'mere Stinky." I looked over expecting to see a little boy in dirty diapers. Instead there was the most beautiful little girl I had ever seen. She had shining red hair, porcelain skin and the bluest blue eyes -- she looked like a postcard from Ireland -- and on her face was a look of absolute adoration directed toward the man who had just called her Stinky. For some reason I thought of her walking down another aisle 20-some years from now and a priest saying, "Do you take this man. . ."and someone in the church turning in surprise to the person next to him, saying, "I didn't know her nickname was Maureen."

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IT'S UNDER THE HIGHWAY where I-95 rolls past the Philadelphia Navy Yard and rises to meet the Girard Point Bridge over the Schuylkill. It's biker boys and skater men in FDR Park. It looks like a scene from a movie, doesn't it? What was it called? It's on the tip of my. . .

The Outsiders. That's it. The Outsiders.

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These kids with the skateboards. They rumble under the highway like Jets and Sharks, like Montagues and Capulets, like skateboard against bicycle, in as far south as you can go in Philadelphia without being in the the Navy Yard. The skateboard guys built these ramps, that I know. And who can blame them for being P.O.ed when surfers of another look try to ride the very waves they built.

But this is Philadelphia. You find its essence in the corners, if not in shadow, certainly in shade. This scene under the highway felt good to me. Fathers respectfulling trailing their awe-struck 12-year-old sons, wearing helmets and riding bikes. When a skateboarder does a good trick, or survives a stunt, their fellows applaud by tapping their skateboards onto the concrete like pool cues on a wooden floor after a winning shot. I like that.

What else? Oh yeah, everyone in Baghdad got killed yesterday.

Or was it only two or three hundred? A general got fired. Everyone's all upset.

Is it Tet yet?

You tell me. When was our Tet in the Iraqi War? At what moment did the war in Iraq seem as hopeless as the war in Vietnam, at what moment did we all get it, liberal or conservative or don't give a shit. In Vietnam it happened in January 1968 during the widespread and costly Tet Offensive by Iraqi citizens which in those days we called Viet Cong. Charlie is now Hajji. He looks like anyone else. He'd as soon kill your ass and a couple of hundred innocents as he would blow himself up. Which seems to be his problem. Hajji doesn't care. He's already dead.

It's hard to fight a dead man. He has an unfair advantage. He's smarter than our president.

Continue reading "Meanwhile back at the ranch. . . . . . . . . . . ." »

Posted by clarkdeleon at 01:08 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

THE BBC WORLD NEWS STARTED its broadcast tonight with remarks by President Bush at a memorial service on campus at Virginia Tech. "The victims the of this tragedy didn't deserve their fate," Bush said. "They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time."

I wonder if that statement sounded as dopey to the rest of the world as it did to me. Where else should college students and teachers be than in their assigned classrooms on a Monday morning? Wrong place at the wrong time? What kind of dumbass thing is that to say? And to think a speech writer was probably responsible for such words of no comfort, that strain logic, that have the power to reduce heart numbing loss to a phrase of an an ill-thought cliche.

A week ago a high ranking Philadelphia homicide cop used the same words to describe the 99th murder of 2007. "He was in the wrong place at the wrong time," the police inspector said of a man in his 50's shot dead outside the corner store a half block from where he lived in West Philadelphia. Wrong place at the wrong time is when you take an island vacation and the volcano erupts. Wrong place at the wrong time is when you take the wrong exit and end up in the middle of a shoot out between the Crips and Bloods. Wrong place at the wrong time is not a college student sitting in class at 9 o'clock in the morning, or a father shot in the head while getting ready for work by a stray bullet through the window.

They were in the right place at the right time and they paid the wrong price for living in a country and a city where dead innocents are collateral damage in the losing war against handguns.

Continue reading "More Mush from the Mumbler-in-Chief" »

Posted by clarkdeleon at 08:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'VE BEEN HAVING STRANGE CONVERSATIONS all week with people, young and old, black and white, male and female and in between, about Don Imus and "nappy headed hos." I say strange because, believe it or not, there are people willing to argue passionately that there is nothing wrong or objectionable about the words "nappy headed hos" anymore than there would be in using the words, "lily white preppies" to describe a group of Penn students. I found black people, black women, who shrugged with resignation. Don't mean nuthin'. Don't mean a thing. I found white people, males mostly, who seemed to identify with a rude-mouth radio cowboy who can say things they can't and get paid $10 million a year.

There was a lot of "we" and "us" versus "they" and "them" going on in these conversations. "We" have to put up with what "they" say, but if "we" say something back "they" go ape-poop. Am I allowed to say "ape"? What I found was a universal sense of powerlessness. Whites, blacks, young, old, male, female. It all hinged on race. No one wanted to talk about language, about the meaning of words, about the power of the spoken word, about the responsibility of the person speaking them. Some people said it was unfair to hold Imus so accountable for three or four words in the context of a 20-minute radio bit about women's basketball. As if "nappy headed hos" isn't enough context. Mayor Wilson Goode once famously said that he didn't want his term as mayor to be judged by the actions of a single day. How many political careers have crashed because of a single remark? How many tens of thousands of people are in prison today for the actions of a single second?

What about freedom of speech? Some argue that Don Imus's 1st Amendment right to call a spade a spade is being denied. Bull-oney! Congress didn't fire Don Imus, CBS did. "This is about a lot more than Imus," wrote CBS president Les Moonves in a memo to employees. "He has flourished in a culture that permits a certain level of objectionable experssion that hurts and demeans a wide range of people. In taking him off the air, I believe we take an important and necessary step not just in solving a unique problem, but in changing that culture, which extends far beyond the walls of our company." Don Imus is a victim of nothing more than his big fat mouth and the free pass that his success has given him for years. And now, as Malcolm X once famously noted in November 1963, "the chickens have come home to roost."

Continue reading "The Cock of the Walks Gets Neutered" »

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IN AN EXHAUSTIVE POLL taken during happy hour Friday afternoon at Dirty Frank's bar of registered voters questioned about their preference for mayor among the candidates running in the May 15th Democratic Primary, Center City attorney John Rolllins is the frontrunner by a huge margin. (The Dirty Frank's poll has a error factor of plus or minus 50 perecent ). Rollins' qualifications for mayor consist, essentially, of him being a regular at Dirty Frank's, and the fact that he's a dead ringer for Michael Nutter.

Nutter, who has bee running against John Street in his TV ads (not that that's a bad thing -- if only Street were on the ballot), looks so much like Rollins that once one of Nutter's campaign staffers approached Rollins at the Art Museum mistaking him for the candidate. And, frankly, enough is enough. That's why Rollins' friend and Photoshop enthusiast Al Stegman prepared some campaign literature for candidate Rollins featuring Nutter's photo and Rollins name.

It's time voters have a chance to decide which Michael Nutter they like best.

Continue reading "Will the Real Michael Nutter Please Stand Up" »

Posted by clarkdeleon at 04:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps you've noticed that I love to talk with my eyes. I tell you what I see. And the whole time I'm looking over my shoulder at you, saying, "You see what I'm seeing?" And I love that. And I always expect people to see what I see. "Can we agree it was a rainy day?"

It was inevitable that I would become a photographer. It's my nature. It's my calling. The number of times I've cursed myself for not having a camera, rather than a pen or a pencil, is about a thousand to one. Advantage, camera. I always know I can explain a situation and describe a moment. But to show it, to freeze it in time. That's magic. That's photography. Think of the eyes that never saw a photo of themseleves. Ever. Think of the ancients who only spoke with words what the eyes saw. Imagine their joy, their despair, if they knew that you, me, everybody could actually see what they saw frame by frame.

I'd be one of the joy guys. "See. See! That's what I'm talking about." And so I offer the picture above. I could have described the fence, but everything I would have said would pale to the facts of the photo. Look at that fence! Fresh blonde wood cutting a swath through a heavily forested hillside, seperating the rich from the richer, or the dutiful from the negligent in Chestnut Hill.

I first saw this picture on Thursday night on my way to teach a seven o'clock journalism class at Montgomery County Community College. Through winding Cresheim Valley I caught the idea of the fence to my left, like a bat sees bugs. I fluttered around to see if there was a picture there. This requires steering an automobile in traffic, and a thousand times before I would have shrugged, after not noticing, after not caring about a stupid picture. But I turned around and I'll tell you why.

That's a great reason to start a new paragraph. I could tell you everything all at once, but let's focus on this picture, this photograph. What do you see? What do you find "pleasing" or "thematic" or "metaphoric" in its structure? What am I trying to say? What do I want you to notice?

Out of the corner of my eye I saw this, turned my car around and took a picture. I still "take" pictures rather than "make" pictures, which is how the newspaper photographers talked about their art. I like the idea of "making" pictures. Come to think of it, with digital photography and high resolution printers I've been going broke making pictures. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures.

I think I'm getting better at it. I see more pictures I want to make every day. But some willstill be there tomorrow, or next week. I'm talking about a fence here. But this fence will be invisible in a couple of weeks, if current global cooling doesn't continue. Any other spring, summer and autumn, I would never notice this fence. But not only did I stop and take pictures of the fence last Thursday evening, I stopped Monday morning when the rising sun would do what the rising son with the camera was looking for.

That's the fence at dawn. It's beautiful. It's ridiculous. Why does it make me think of Verdun? Why does it haunt me so? Why did I trust you so much?

Another good reason to start a new paragraph.

Continue reading "Good fences make good Chestnut Hill" »

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Stop me if you've heard this before: radio shock jock Don Imus is in hot water for saying something coarse and reprehensible. On any given weekday morning the syndicated bloviator and his on-air attack minions say horrible, hateful, and irredeemably offensive things about blacks, women, liberals, Jews, Muslims, fatties, handgun opponants, homosexuals, politicians, substance abusers, third world nations, Christians, Hollywood, HIV-positive, illiterate, at-risk and desperately poor people. Beanie-wearing jewboys and towel-headed sand worshipers walk hand-in-hand into the furnace of invective that Imus stokes every day like a blacksmith with a bellows. Imus has been consistent, incorrigible, insightful, irrelevent, egomanical, mind-numbingly boring and bafflingly mean spirited or soft hearted during his four decades of growling into a microphone. Personally, he is not my cup of tea.

Last Wednesday morning Imus described the Rutgers University women's basketball team, which had lost in the national championship game the night before, as being "nappy headed hos." His on-air apology Friday has not blunted the calls for Imus's firing by newspaper columnists, and the Rev. Al Sharpton who said, "I accept his apology, just as I want his bosses to accept his resignation." Unless Imus is gone in a week, Sharpton vows to picket New York's WFAN-AM, where Imus's show is broadcast and heard by millions on 70 radio stations around the country and simulcast on cable TV on MSNBC.

Is this the end of Rico? And if it is, isn't it delicious that the racially insensitive remark that may prove to be Imus's undoing is about hair? And that the man leading the protest is sporting a doo like Al Sharpton's! Is that irony, or simply reality? Imus said nothing that isn't celebrated on BET hip hop videos where black womanhood is manifested by booty-bouncing, bling-seeking, boob-revealing women hanging off obscenely wealthy, Moet-popping, high school dropouts with diamond studded teeth who keep it real by singing of mean streets where every man is armed and every king is a pimp. As hurtful as Imus's "nappy haired hos" comment may have been, he didn't invent or poplarize that word or that spelling to describe black women. Imagine if he had used the b-word or the n-word-that-ends-with-an-"a"-which-somehow-makes-it-OK-to-say-as-long-as-you're-a-nizzle. Sure it was a mean thing to say, but Imus simply held up a mirror to a society where white people don't say things like "nappy haired hos" and mean it. His joke was not about tattoo-sporting women on a Rutgers basketball team called the Lady Knights. It was about a language and a culture where the word lady is alien.

Photo Credit: Google image of a 1973 Imus LP album cover.

Continue reading "The hair. It's gotta be about the hair" »

Posted by clarkdeleon at 01:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Get a load of our new dog. His name is Louie. A name so nice it sounds like a song if you say it twice. Louie. If you say Louie twice into a mirror he sheds hair on you. Michael Nutter would ban Louie Louie from work places because of the second-hand shedding respiration hazards. And this is only April.

Wait till Louie gets hot. Wait till Louie lives his first Philadelphia summer, or any summer for that matter. Louie -- did I mention that he's a blonde lab -- will be a walking blizzard by July. He's a puppy the size of a small triceritops, but instead of a bony snout and piercing horns, he's got a tiny wet nose, tiny only in comparison to the enormous pink maw that is the mouth of Louie Louie. Even his nose is pink. But his mouth is everywhere. His mouth eats the cat's shit and then wants to mate with my face. And I let him. Because , well, look at that punim.

As you can see -- and perhaps this explains it all: I've always been drawn to loser dogs. Mischievous mutts with ADD. Dopey, sincere, loving mongrels -- this dog is a purebred. We've never had a purebred before. By purebred I mean any white dog without Italian ancestry. But this dog has been cleared by the Hitler Youth. He has his Aryan paypahs. Despite being a foundling (what's a pedigree white lab puppy cost? We figure it's an overwhelmed student who abandoned him in the park.) he was clearly an expensive animal, yet we acquired him the cheap old fashioned way. Dog needs food, a roof and peace.

Well take a look at peace incarnate. A dirty white dog on a dirty white sofa. Outside in the rain. Does it get any better than this for a dirty white puppy? What Louie doesn't know is that we're in the process of throwing out those waterlogged and magnificent dirty white sofas. So what if they've been in the back yard for a month.

Tell me you aren't thinking about that song?

Come on, you know the one. If you're not thinking about the bass power beat behind the rocking Foreigner song "Dirty White Boy" please access it, and the lyrics as well, which go like this:

"cause Im a dirty white boy
Dirty white boy, yeah, dirty white boy
Dirty white boy, Im a dirty white boy
Dirty white boy

Hey, Im a dirty white boy
Dirty white boy, yeah, Im a dirty white boy
Dirty white boy, dirty white boy, yeah

And you know what? I never get tired of that song.

And now I got a dog like that. He's a dirty white dog living in dirty white dog pigshit heaven in my backyard..

God's in his heaven. Louie's in his. All's right with the world.

Continue reading "He's a dirty white dog, a dirty white dog" »

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IF THIS IS HOLY WEEK then if must be all-Jesus all-the-time on one cable TV channel or another. I caught parts of the 1965 megaflop, The Greatest Story Ever Told, on Channel 48 the other afternoon. The movie cost $20 million to make and only earned $12 worldwide. The Greatest Story Ever Told is more famous these days as a trivia question, "Other than Ghengis Kahn, in what role was John Wayne most miscast?"

The answer is Duke as the nameless Roman centurion standing at the foot of the cross during the crucifixion scene in The Greatest Story Ever Told. Wayne's screen time totals seconds, not minutes, and he is as immobile as a statue throughout. In fact, you can't even see his lips move when he utters his only line, which steals the thunder, if you will, from the most dramatic moment in the movie.

Shortly after Christ (Max Von Sydow) utters his last words "Into your hands I commend my spirit." and expires, the heavens open up with lightening, thunder and high winds. As the multitudes cower in fear, the granite-like centurion stares at the cross and says, "Truly, this man was the son of God." Until that moment the audience isn't sure who the centurion is, but in his signature John Wayne voice, the only way to parody the scene would be to add the word "pilgrim" at the end.

Wayne's centurion is as unintentionally comical as Tony Curtis playing the Greek slave Antoninus opposite Kirk Douglas's Spartacus when he says, "Yonda lies da house of my fadah."

Continue reading "Truly, this was a big mistake in casting" »

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ALL LAST WEEK I COULD FEEL IT. This spring thing is about to happen. It happens every year and I never fail to notice when it does. But I'm always a few days behind. I always anticipate spring and I always think I'll be there when it happens. It's kind of like waiting for a street light to turn on in the gathering dusk. I think I actually did it one night. I waited for the click that preceeds the illumination and then I blinked my eyes and it was light out.

Spring beat me again this year. I felt on top of it. I was certain I would know exactly when it happened, when all hell would break loose in the trees and bushes, when nature let slip the hounds of blossoms, those amazing colors of white and pink, the awakening of South Street. It happens ever year.

And it happened again Sunday when I had my back turned. I see this tree on Waverly Street whenever I stop for a beer at Dirty Frank's, which means I see this tree quite a bit. And I've been watching this tree lately the way Ralph Kramden watched Norton. "I got my eye on you, Norton!" But Swanee River happened when I wasn't looking.

Monday, sunny Monday, I saw this on the 1300 block of Waverly Street. What had once been a plumber's crack of brown branches against the sky had overnight become a song. The same old song every year, and I'm always amazed. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Incidently, that skyscraper under construction (31 storys used to be a skycraper) is Symphony House, the mucho swank condominium tower at Broad and Pine Sts..

Continue reading "The Grass Has Riz, Spring Has Sprung" »

Posted by clarkdeleon at 04:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

ON THE SAME WEEKEND that Philadelphia celebrated its 100th homicide of the year the presumed front runners in the May 15 Democratic mayoral primary election are still arguing over financial disclosure. "What's he got to hide," said Tom Knox, the millionaire Democratic candidate, referring to Congressman Chaka Fattah. In a story in Friday's Inquirer Fattah responded, "If the choice is between making my wife happy or Tom Knox happy, he's going to be disappointed, as he will be on May 15."

At issue is the disclosure of the salary of Fattah's wife, WCAU-TV news anchor, Renee Chenault-Fattah. On that same day New York reported a total of 80 homicides and Los Angeles 84 for the year 2007. Based on population, if New York had Philadelphia's murder rate there'd be closer to 600 homicides this year in the Big Apple. With New York's murder rate, there'd be only 14 dead this year in Philadelphia.

Clearly, something has got to give in this mayoral campaign. But it won't be Renee Chenault-Fattah's TV anchor salary. In one of the more remarkable statements I've ever read by a political operative, the candidate's campaign spokesman, Solomon Jones, e-mailed the Inquirer this statement, "Chaka Fattah stands by his wife's wishes today, tomorrow and forever,"

My guess is "forever" means less than a week. If Fattah allows his wife's salary to become a continuing campign issue in the midst of a city homicide crisis that has become a national disgrace, he can kiss the top job in City Hall goodbye.

Does Renee Chenault-Fattah's salary have anything to do with Chaka Fattah's fitness to be mayor? Of course not. Does his refusal to disclose her salary mean anything? Possibly. Do his stated reasons for refusing to reveal his wife's salary matter? You bet. On Wednesday, Fattah told reporters he could not release the information because of a confidentiality agreement his wife had signed with WCAU-TV, even though Chenault-Fattah had been released from that nondisclosure clause by her employers the day before.

Chenault-Fattah still refused, telling the Inquirer that revealing her salary would undercut her bargaining power with any future employers -- she just signed a five year renewal contract with Channel 10 in January -- and that she was "unwilling to put my family or the future of our family's income at risk."

In a city filled with thousands of families at risk every day, in a city on a pace to reach 400 murders this election year, that statement makes Renee Chenault at risk of sounding like Marie Antoinette. And becoming mayor of Philadelphia has never been a piece of cake.

Continue reading "Let Them Eat Reality "Today, Tomorow and Forever"" »

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