Snow Day at St. Mary's Cemetery

After getting out early on Friday because of the snow, I spent a perilous hour driving around both the Bronx and Yonkers for a cemetery. Woodlawn in the Bronx had closed their gates, as had Oakland in Yonkers. Having taken photos of St. Mary's in last year's blizzard, I was pessimistic I would capture anything good. I got one, and all I had to do to get it was stand in freezing water. If you look closely, you might even see a grave...

Snow Day at Woodlawn Cemetery

THE TERATOLOGY DEAD POOL: 2011

Instead of a New Year's resolution, I decided to come up with a list of graves I want to visit in 2011.While the list is invariably dominated by writers, I wanted to cover a wide spectrum of artists, including musicians, television personalities, and theatrical performers (lacking a better term for Spalding Gray). There are no American Presidents on the list (that's a whole other project), but rest assured, there will be much dead president hunting in 2011.

DEATH HUNT: A CHARLES BRONSON EPIC

Do you know anything about a guy going around playing the harmonica? He's someone you'd remember. Instead of talking, he plays. And when he better play, he talks...

 --Cheyenne, Once Upon a Time in the West

One of the single most moving experiences I've ever had in a cemetery, slowly ambling up to the grave of Charles Bronson, all alone in the middle of nowhere, while listening to the hauntingly sparse Harmonica Theme from Once Upon a Time in the West while a light snowfall accentuated the silence of world all around. It left me with goosebumps.

The Great White Whale: The Grave of Herman Melville

If I wasn't Herman Melville, I was at least, by God, his ouija board, and he was moving my planchette. Or his literary force, compressed all these months, was spouting out of my fingertips as if I had turned on all faucets. I mumbled and muttered and mourned and yelled through the morning, all through noontime, and leaning into my usual nap time. But there was no tiredness, only the fierce and steady and joyful and triumphant banging away at my machine with the pages littering the floor and Ahab crying destruction over the right shoulder and old Herman bawling destruction over the left.     
                                                                       -- Ray Bradbury

Woodlawn Part II: Joseph Pulitzer

Woodlawn Cemetery Nov 7, 2010