I resemble that.

Oh well, MTV Desi has me pegged.  They’re exactly right about me but at least they acknowledge that I also acknowledge that I am one more gawking American.

And I can’t complain about being named an honorary Desi, sort of.

New York Press Delves Into the Paan Game
by Abdullah

When I first saw the headline “Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater” on the cover of this week’s New York Press, naturally, I grabbed a copy and asked myself the question you’re asking yourself right now; What the hell is the New York Press?   Well, it’s a paper that’s running a cover story about something inherently Desi that’s breaking into mainstream culture. And why not? It didn’t take long for Americans to adopt the more… CONT’D AT https://www.mtvdesi.com/2010/12/07/new-york-press-delves-into-the-paan-game

The Asia Society also commented and was a tad less snarky than MTV (but who am I to complain about being snarky in a blog post?).

A Paean to Paan
by Aliya Sabharwal

…From describing his initiation into the practice of paan-chewing to drawing interesting comparisons to the tobacco-dipping culture of his Appalachian relatives, Stanley seems to have seriously and diligently researched this “local” practice. But the result is a riot for those familiar with paan chewing or chewers, if only for the novelty of reading an eloquent homage to the substance.  CONT’D AT ASIASOCIETY.ORG>>

Well, now it’s just too much. My paan habit has also made the celebrity gossip page of India Abroad, the major newspaper for Indian expats around the world, getting top billing over Tom Cruise’s tweets to Anil Kapoor.  I’m truly honored and humbled.

Theater of Cruelty

My friend John tossed me this book to review for monthly arts and politics journal The Brooklyn Rail about one of the 20th century’s first women playwrights, crime reporter turned dramatist Maurine Watkins, author of Chicago, which was a biting, satirical straight play long before it was a Kander, Ebb & Fosse musical.  Enjoy the review, or, more importantly, enjoy the book.

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Douglas Perry
The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired ‘Chicago’
(Viking, 2010)

Close on the heels of Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (Penguin, 2010), comes Douglas Perry’s true crime history The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago, which turned out to be a welcome companion piece.

The former is a dissection of New York City’s use and rapid improvement of nascent forensic medical techniques during the Prohibition era.  Murder after murder is lovingly recreated—especially those involving poisons—and then deconstructed by über CSI experts. The latter book takes us to Prohibition-era Chi-town, where the weapon of choice wasn’t poison but pistols, and the bad guys were bad gals.    Cont’d at the Brooklyn Rail>>

Talk Radio

CB seems like a relic from another time, another place. Perhaps that’s why it is alive and well on New York’s highways.

(Originally published as a New York Times “The City” section cover story, 7/1/2001, by Jeffrey Stanley).

CHICKENBOY: Hey, who’s that out there? You got the Chickenboy over here.

Frank Puma, an engineer at NBC in Manhattan, talks on his CB radio while driving to work. “Its a community,” he says of the CB world.

193: (laughs) Chickenboy? Yeah, come on.

CHICKENBOY: I’m in Williamsburg. Metro and Graham. Where are you?

193: Yeah, roger. You got 193 on the Lower East. Roger?

(loud static interference)

CHICKENBOY: 193, come back with that. What’s your 20?

193: Yeah, man. Come on.

L-TRAIN: Yeah, talk to me, man. I’m right here. I’m L-Train, man. I’m L-Train.

The voices on the CB radio waves in New York are not those of lost truckers from Montana on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. They are the multicultural shouts of a thriving subculture: two men threatening to kill each other on Channel 6; angry complaints about livery drivers on 22; a heated debate on 27 about the shooting of Amadou Diallo, months after the event has disappeared from the front pages; an endless cackle of off-color remarks on 12; and on every channel, lots of ephemera, like that involving Chickenboy, 193 and L-Train.

CB has an image as a rural phenomenon. But in the big city, it functions as a way to build community, an urban version of the gathering on the porch of FULL NEW YORK TIMES STORY CONT’D HERE>>

Smoky Mountains and Carolina Mud

Smoky Mountains and Carolina mud
were red like the Cherokee in Ocanaluftee.
Last summer Mama told me I show Indian blood.

Some grandmother with the last name Wood
married into my totemless Virginia clan.
To my English eyes they could do no good
but give secrets of tobacco and corn.

While summer rain turned soft soil to mud,
this news turned my whims to Indian.
I forced open a book, a child to a bud,
skimmed pages on Tsalagi history as told by whites.

My clan never asked her about the stream
of Cherokee tears I read about.
They never even asked her Cherokee name
or whether she believed in Christ Jehovah.

Last summer I drove to the reservation.
A red man in a chief costume took tips to pose for snapshots.
A fat guide spoke of the Cherokee nation
and took us on a walk through a recreated village.

Si-yu, he said, meant hello.
DeSoto showed us to make mud huts
he said, on his way past fourhundredfifty years ago.

The tour concluded at a square snack bar.
where he said, wa-do means thank you.
I wrote that down, and walked to the car
waved at the man, and drove away.

English as that grandmother, American as me,
no stories to hear, no spirits to see.
I mourned, driving home, through Carolina mud,
what good does it do, to show Indian blood.

©1995 BY JEFFREY STANLEY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.