Watch Out Ghosts: It's Hunting Season- I wrote this story back in November

Ghost hunting is on the rise. In the past six months, ghost hunting agencies have been receiving more calls than ever. The amount of ghost hunters has risen due the attention that people are now giving to the supernatural. Don’t worry. Ghosts are not taking over New York City. It’s the reporting of ghost problems and the hunting of ghosts that’s becoming more and more popular.

There was blood dripping down the windows.

I was eight years old when my uncle took me to the World Trade Center for the 1st time. He told I’d better not be afraid of heights, and I skipped ahead saying that it couldn’t scare me because I’d been on “super-fast” roller-coasters that went up “just as high.”

When we got to the top, we sat in a row of chairs designed to give people a chance to see how high up they were. The windows were floor to ceiling and extended out toward the chairs so that people could look straight down. My uncle pushed me forward, not realizing that I would fall off that chair. I looked straight down through the glass on my hands and knees and screamed at the top of my lungs.

My journalism class visited the World Trade Center Tribute center where we took an audio tour and a private tour through the exhibits. Honestly, I just kept thinking that it seemed so bizarre to be taking an audio tour of NOTHING. There was no visual to match the audio. I was staring out the windows, trying to reconstruct the buildings in my mind, the way they were. I can only think of them falling.
John Henderson led our class through the exhibits, which included a collage of victims that is slowly rotated- a constantly changing tribute.

“See in these pictures, everyone is smiling?” Henderson said. “These pictures are from vacations, weddings, proms, baptisms…most people are wearing a tux or a swimsuit.”

They were just people. They smiled. They died.

People JUMPED off the buildings, holding hands. That was on television. I screamed when I knew I wasn’t falling. They chose not to fall. The Titanic was going down and there weren’t enough lifeboats.

Rhode Island

Worms in your apartment! And they're not the gummy kind!

Aurelia Kaelin takes good care of her pets. She has a special box for them to snuggle in. Even though she keeps thousands of pets in her apartment, they don’t make a sound. No one complains. Like a growing number of New Yorkers, Kaelin keeps worms.

The red wrigglers eat food trash and poop it out as compost that Kaelin uses to fertilize her plants. “Those little worms especially love cantaloupe,” said Kaelin, who volunteers at the Lower East Side Ecology Center, where she teaches others about the joy of worms.

The center’s work with worms has been catching on. Its outreach to environmentally-concious city folks includes hosting how-to workshops and running a worm hotline. The center also staffs a stand at the Union Square Greenmarket where people dump their edible trash in bins that are later trucked to the organization’s headquarters at The East River Park near FDR Drive.

“It’s much better when people take responsibility for the waste they create,” said project manager Carey Pulverman. “It’s like the lowest-hanging fruit. It’s one of the easiest things to start doing if you want to make any ecological difference.”
The worms only eat certain types of food garbage – vegetable and fruit scraps. But even feeding them scraps has a significant impact because “organic waste makes up a very larger portion of our trash,” said Colin Jerolmack, who teaches at NYU’s Environmental Studies Program.
That’s only the beginning of the impact that these slippery “pets” can have. If they eat garbage, there’s less trash that smells, which means changing means changing plastic trash bags less often. That in turn, means fewer plastic bags in our landfills. Plus, “newly acquired habits can be contagious in a social network,” Jerolmack added. “So it’s probable that at least some New Yorkers who begin in-house composting will become more likely to adopt other environmentally beneficial practices like recycling batteries.”
Keeping worms isn’t difficult. But do they need specific tender loving care, explains Andrew Hoyles, the center’s compost educator. The worm of choice is the red wriggler, which can be bought by phone or online. Two pounds of them – that’s about 2,000 worms – can eat one pound of scraps per day. They will live happily in a specially-designed plastic “worm condo” bin that the center sells for $55 (worms included). Worms like people-friendly temperatures (50 to 80 degrees).

Their bin will never smell as long as their diet is limited to fruit and vegetable scraps, egg shells, coffee, and carbohydrates like bread and cereals. To prevent fruit flies from breeding in the box, fruit should not be fed to the worms until it has first been washed, frozen or microwaved. Worm keepers can get help for specific problems by calling into the Ecology Center’s “Compost Hotline” at the Ecology Center. The main purpose of the hotline is to keep people composting, though they’re facing a few issues.
The most common questions worm owners have are how to deal with bins gone wrong due to improper ventilation. As for the people that shudder at the concept of thousands of worms in a box next door, Caroline Kruse, the development director, has an answer for them.
“If you compost correctly, there is no issue. It’s your own apartment, and people have no cause to complain about you. For example, if you live in an apartment complex that doesn’t allow cats or dogs, is it necessary to notify your landlord and neighbors that you’ve bought a fish? So what problem could there be with a box of contained worms?”

For more information:
http://www.lesecologycenter.org/

Lost and Found: The Grey Gallery's Collection of the art of Downtown New York

Marvin Taylor, the director of NYU’s Downtown Collection, has collected works from the 70s and 80s. It was a time period when artists were experimenting, creating and dying in the lofts of the Lower East Side.

This is the nation’s leading Downtown New York Collection and it is “not for the weak of stomach,” said Taylor. “There is not a flinching eye in any of this work.”

More than 300 pieces from the 50,000 in the collection are on display at NYU’s Grey Gallery. Heroin, AIDS and homosexuality are themes in photos and documents in this exhibition, “Downtown Pix: Mining the Fales Archives 1961-1991.”

In a time period when artists were living without money and often with disease, they received no respect from the general population. But, according to Taylor, even without recognition, “they are responsible for changing culture completely.”

These artists had to fight against their upbringings and the ideas instilled in them by their parents. They were able to see beyond what they had been taught and to grasp the reality and gravity of the situations that surrounded them daily.

This departure from past teachings parallels Taylor’s own journey to New York City. He grew up in Cottage Grove, Ind., a town of 109 people, and was raised in a Quaker family. His own love of punk rock and the culture in New York City while he lived in Indiana set him apart from the other kids-- as if being a gay kid in a small Midwestern town wasn’t enough to deal with.

Taylor maintains the belief that the Quaker religion, in which learning and working are valuable traits, has given him a basis off which to launch himself into his passion. In the Quaker religion, every person has a direct link to the divine, so it’s necessary to be articulate and knowledgeable. Taylor himself entered the world of academia in the 5th grade when he helped out in the school library and has continued to work in libraries throughout his life.

“If work can jar you out of your preconceived notions, that’s also what art does,” said Taylor.

When he looks at the photos that David Wojnarowicz took of his dead lover, he says “some days it’s difficult for me to look at these pictures, since it reminds me of a time when everyone was dying.”

Taylor hopes to expand his gallery to accommodate the vast collection that is not as of yet displayed to the public. His gallery incorporates photos and videos that depict the multi- media experimentation that was new to the art world back then.

“The ethos of that time was that anything was possible,” Taylor said. When asked how he determines what he includes in the gallery he responded, “when you look at something and have a moment of sweetness, that’s when you know that it’s important.”