Pollock's Toy Museum

Pollock's Toy Museum in Fitzrovia takes its name from Benjamin Pollock, a designer of toy theater in the Victorian age. Inside is a warren of dusty rooms joined by impossibly narrow, winding staircases. Floorboards creak ominously underfoot. Imprisoned behind glass cabinet doors, forlorn wax dolls and broken robots watch visitors pass by as though powerless to warn them of a similar fate should they fail to escape the museum by nightfall.











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A Visit to Sherlock Holmes

Let's face it, the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b Baker Street in the Marylebone district of London is unarguably a tourist trap. Yet one no devotee of the stories could resist.


Inquisitive schoolgirl: "When was Sherlock Holmes born?"
Curator: "He's a fictional character, so he wasn't born."


Detecting equipment.


Holmes kept his tobacco in the Persian slipper over the fireplace.

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More paraphernalia.


A scene from "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual."


"The Man with the Twisted Lip."


Holmes always liked to keep a souvenir of his cases. In this instance, the dreaded Hound of the Baskervilles.

The Troubadour

The Troubadour is a historic coffeehouse in Earl's Court that first opened in the mid-fifties and figured prominently in the British folk revival of that period. The main floor is a respectable restaurant where patrons sip and chat in relative peace, but down the narrow steps in back to the low-ceilinged cellar is another story. Here, driven solo artists wielding guitars or mandolins confront the mic while a gathered audience of aficionados downs tall brews and spicy popcorn. Bands shove their tottering equipment onto the humble stage and hope for the best.

Some notable names that have descended these stairs over the years include Richard Farina, Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch, and Linda Thompson. An unknown Bob Dylan played here the first time he visited London. The place fairly reeks of musical posterity.


The Troubadour on Old Brompton Road.


This soulful young viking maiden performs under the name Mallie.

Broadstairs

Broadstairs is a coastal village in England about 16 miles northeast of Canterbury. In the nineteenth century smugglers dug elaborate tunnels in the chalk cliffs to hide their swag. Charles Dickens was a frequent visitor and finished writing The Pickwick Papers in a house overlooking the sea, now a museum. He also wrote David Copperfield here. John Buchan came to Broadstairs to recuperate from an illness and was inspired to write his novel The 39 Steps, based on a set of wooden stairs he found in the cliff face near his nursing home.

Highgate Cemetery

Highgate Cemetery, near Hampstead Heath in North London.

The Andy Monument

I could've sworn this chrome statue of Andy Warhol ornamented with Campbell's Soup cans and flower stems wasn't there last time I passed through the northern perimeter of Union Square.



The statue, designed by Rob Pruitt, is located near the Decker Building at 33 Union Square West, which was the location of Warhol's Factory from 1967-73. It was also where Valerie Solanas, brainchild of the Society to Cut Up Men, delivered to Andy a near-fatal critical review. The building now houses a Puma shoe store.

Marvelous Stories

This Wednesday Neil Gaiman curated an evening of magical realism called "The World of Marvelous Stories" at the Upper West Side's Symphony Space. "Magical realism," he began, was often defined as "stories written by people in Argentina," and conceded it is one of those things where you know it when you see it. He described its effect as looking across a room at a strange and unfamiliar figure, only to realize suddenly you are looking at yourself in a mirror.

The event kicked off with a story called "A Life in Fictions," written by one of Gaiman's former Clarion students named Kat Howard who happened to be lurking in the audience and was promptly outed. This was read by Marin Ireland. Gaiman tackled his own story "The Troll Bridge," a modern update of the Three Billy Goats Gruff folktale. Also on the program were Jorge Luis Borges' mesmerizing "The Circular Ruins," read by Boyd Gaines, and, to conclude the evening, Gaiman's "The Thing About Cassandra," performed by Josh Hamilton with Marin Ireland returning for a dramatic cameo.



Neil Gaiman was charming and affable, and from my balcony vantage looked like a somewhat ghoulish version of Harpo Marx. "He's so talented," I heard the woman behind me gush before the show. He indeed turned out to be the ideal narrator for his own tale, voicing his troll with more vulnerability than one might expect from a matted, salivating creature who lives under a bridge. The audience clung to his every word and I was amazed by how few cellphone glows were visible across the darkened theater seats as he spoke. After the program ended half the population of Manhattan lined up to have their books graciously autographed by the man himself. I stuck around long enough to watch him approached bashfully by the little girl in pink who headed the line.

The evening was recorded and will undoubtedly soon turn up on the Selected Shorts website. Worth a listen.

Underage Chicken Smokers

I think this photo speaks for itself:

[From 50 Unexplainable Black & White Photos]

Omar Comin', Yo

[From The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden's "The Wire"]

Oyster Bay

Across the way from Sea Cliff lies the sleepy hamlet of Oyster Bay. Though known as the summer residence of Theodore Roosevelt, it was also the childhood home of the writer Thomas Pynchon and likely inspired the setting of his short story "The Secret Integration." Other notable figures associated with the area include Captain Kidd, Typhoid Mary, and Robert Townsend of the Revolutionary War-era Culper Spy Ring.


Moore's Building on a downtown intersection. Originally a humble grocery store, later the location of Roosevelt's Summer Executive Offices.




Snouder's Drug Store, for decades the location of the town social center, aka soda fountain.


Oyster Bay Harbor.


The Raynham Museum, originally known as the Townsend Homestead where the Culper Spy Ring allegedly thwarted Benedict Arnold's plot to surrender West Point to the British.









The Derby-Hall Bandstand. The base of the civil war cannon was fashioned from scrap metal taken from the USS Maine, the sinking of which led to the Spanish-American War, a subject close to Roosevelt's heart.


A house across the harbor on Centre Island, as viewed from the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park.


Moments after I snapped this photo a seagull dropped an oyster from a great height which smashed against the pavement close enough to pelt my pantleg with shrapnel. The winged perpetrator acted like it was just a standard technique for getting the food out, but I saw the cold-blooded glint of murder in his eyes. He was hunting bigger game than oysters.


Cove Neck in the distance.


The Theodore Roosevelt Monument Assemblage. Each rock represents a chapter in his life. There were a lot of chapters.