drmstream[writing]

Every now and then a clear har­monic cry gave new sug­ges­tions of a tune that would some­day be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.“ – Jack Ker­ouac, On the Road The music flows in and out of your senses as eas­ily as the sweat raises your skin. What you […]

Father Today you would be ninety-seven if you had lived, and we would all be mis­er­able, you and your chil­dren, dri­ving from clinic to clinic, an ancient fear­ful hypochon­driac and his fret­ful son and daugh­ter, ask­ing direc­tions, try­ing to read the com­pli­cated, fad­ing map of cures. But with your dig­nity intact you have been gone […]

They stopped us at the bot­tom of the jet­way. We were the first ones to board, had scanned our tick­ets and paced down the car­peted walk­way with the pecu­liar metro­nomic inten­sity of reg­u­lar trav­el­ers. They weren’t ready for us. We were a mot­ley gath­er­ing: a tall, thin woman with a pinched face read­ing a faded […]

The con­cep­tion of the library in Stock­holm has wormed into my imag­i­na­tion. Then I stum­bled upon a curated sam­pling of book­shelves from Desire to Inspire. Here are two of my favorites. Just like the Stock­holm con­cep­tion, these images cre­ate kine­sis in my imag­i­na­tion. I grew up sur­rounded by books — lit­er­ally, sur­rounded by books, in […]

via boingboing.net Read this ad from a Children’s Home Soci­ety in Chicago from the early 1890’s closely. The chil­dren would be sent to you for free, on a 90-day trial, the ad pro­claims. The copy spurs an odd sense of dis­place­ment: What a dif­fer­ent time it was then. My grand­fa­ther was put in a Children’s Home […]

via bldgblog.blogspot.com Bios­phere 2 was a ill-conceived effort to recre­ate the earth’s ecosys­tem within an vast geo­desic dome, a kind of Earth-pod on the sur­face of Earth. Bldg­Blog is fea­tur­ing the pho­tos of Noah Shel­don, who recently vis­ited the defunct struc­ture and recorded nature’s steady creep. A dead build­ing, Bldg­Blog pro­claims. A dead build­ing is one […]

via ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com Here’s lower Broad­way in 1850, two years after the photo was taken of the farm­house on the Upper West Side. Click through to Epher­mal New York’s post — they have some inter­est­ing back­ground on the Mof­fat behind the ad on the build­ing you see down the street. from Dan McCarthy’s Stream

via ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity is up there on the hill where St. Luke’s was in 1900. (St. Luke’s is still on Ams­ter­dam, just not so promi­nent.) But, three-quarters of a cen­tury later, the bucolic vista had turned into a dark, tan­gled park of vio­lence and intrigue that was bor­dered on its west side by a […]

via thirteenthavenue.blogspot.com Fas­ci­nat­ing bit of NYC lore: the imper­ma­nence of 13th Avenue.