A Lucky Strike

Welder Matt Hanley enjoys a cigarette and book before starting work in the Empire State Building.

NEW YORK, May 14, 2009- Almost none of the New Yorkers hustling by noticed the man smoking on a bench outside of the Empire State Building. With his construction helmet under his elbow and his scuffed boots resting on a rail, he finished reading his Clive Cussler novel as the traffic passed him by. But Matt Hanley, the man with a graying beard, bifocals, and crusty, callused hands doesn’t mind the noise of NY. In fact, this 49 year-old welder from Long Island enjoys his life as part of the racket.

“I’m just relaxing here between jobs right now,” said Hanley. “Tonight’s the first night on this new Empire State job, I don’t really know what we’re doing. I suppose I’ll just be welding angles or something.”

Hanley has been soldering the city since 1981, and has done iron-work all his life. While Hanley may seem like just another of the eight million that help keep the city sleepless, some of his work has been used everyday from 34^th street to Times Square to New York Harbor.

“I helped fix the Statue of Liberty back in 1986. I remember working on those narrow, spiral, stainless-steel stairs and that small elevator,” said Hanley. “Of course a lot’s changed since then.”

A lot has changed since the days when tourists could gaze on panoramic views of the city from Lady Liberty’s head. The lone elevator on Liberty Island has been rendered useless while the construction in NYC has continued to evolve immensely.

Although he’s kept the Grateful Dead sticker on his helmet, this welder who used to measure steel with a string-line tape measure has adapted to the times and still fits right in- despite the new wrinkles, fewer coworkers, and having kids in college and high school.

“After more than 25 years I still love what I do,” said Hanley. “They keep coming out with these new high tech tools, but with or without that stuff, if I’m given the time and material there’s pretty much nothing I can’t put together,” he said. “I can build anything.”

Hanley says he learned his craft from people who are now retired or deceased. Hanley himself only plans on working five more years but doesn’t know what he’ll do when he retires.

“I really don’t have any plans, I’ll probably take time to ride my bikes and go to see my kids in Vegas,” said Hanley.

Hanley is not a stranger to biker-culture either, actually he looks the part. According to Hanley, he’s been riding and collecting bikes since before sparking his fire atop skyscrapers.

“I’ve had Harleys and BMW’s and even a few Russian bikes,” he said. “But right now I just like riding my 1979 Harley-Davidson and doin’ my job”.

When Hanley retires in five years he’s not sure what he’ll do or where he’ll go. However, one things for sure, for the next few years he’ll still likely be lost somewhere high up in the concrete jungle, just another New Yorker in the crowd making a living at the craft he loves.

But until he finally reaches the open road on his ’79 Harley, you might be able to find him on a bench along the sidewalk somewhere in NYC.

He’ll be the one with the Grateful Dead sticker on his scarred bike helmet, puffing on a Lucky Strike.

Describing the Indescribable

NEW YORK- What is our world but a bowl into which we drain the broth of our most innate and wholesome emotions. We cry and sweat and bleed, among other things, often at the peak of our vehemence. But our physical lexis is frequently incapable of accurately expressing our innermost feelings. As for Cynthia Ozick’s character, Rosa Lublin, insanity required rationalization and despair needed depiction, and Ozick did not disappoint.

The detail in Cynthia Ozick’s, “The Shawl” enhanced the significance of every breath and every moment of surviving in a world without mercy or pity. In this case, Ozick is the visionary of a menagerie. With her imagery, Ozick describes the indescribable, and substantiates fear, desperation, love and pain with her prose. Torture is not always just physical but mental as well. The Holocaust was a horrific massacre, and concentration camps intensely tormented bodies and souls to say the least. But with her writing, Ozick made readers truly feel for her character who suffered through the greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world.

Aristotle once said, “To perceive is to suffer,” and with painstaking writing such as Ozick’s, writers should take notice and learn to be selfless enough to perceive life in another’s shoes and conscientiously tell stories so that readers can better perceive and understand them as best they can, or perhaps, how best they should. Every story has a nature or a message unique to it’s own, Rosa’s was “cold, cold, cold as hell,”…and I could almost feel it.

Stories of the Slain

Paradise is lost to those who somehow lived through the genocide in Rwanda. The country with spectacular, seemingly painted scenery of rain forests, tea plantations, banana trees, eucalyptus trees, brilliant green grass, volcanic peaks, and fertile soil is “empty” in the eyes of survivors like Joseph, one of the many who shared their tragic, horrifying stories with Philip Gourevitch. Like many other Tutsi, Joseph’s brother and sister were among the 800,000 to one million slain during the three-month carnage campaign of the Rwandan government and Hutu people in 1994.

In his book, “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families,” Gourevitch explains the Rwandan sentiment toward life after surviving mass-murder this way: “To those who were targeted, it was not death but life that seemed an accident of fate.” So today, the estimated 300,000 survivors of the Tutsi are shackled to their scars from the slaughter and left to wonder how it is that humans can be so inhumane. And while on April 27, 1997, Hutu girls chose to stand up for their beliefs in peace and unity and die with their Tutsi schoolmates, many of Gourevitch’s readers have since been left to wonder how it is that the genocide in Rwanda was allowed to develop into a “case study in international negligence.”

Genocide survivor, Laurent Nkongoli, now a lawyer, said of enduring the nightmare, “When you’re resigned and oppressed you’re already dead.” While Rwanda was long out-of-sight, and out-of-mind for most Americans, unwavering reporting akin to Gourevitch’s is thought-provoking and brings unwavering attention to the universal relevance of the struggle for life. Maybe American citizens and the media alike should take a lesson from Gourevitch’s compassion, and remember the words of an American hero, Martin Luther King Jr., when he said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” Perhaps reporting like Gourevitch’s can revive the soul of an often apathetic America.

Bearing William Faulkner

NEW YORK- What does it mean to truly be a man? William Faulkner knows. Take it from the example given by the whiskey-swirling, game-hunting, story-telling author from Oxford, Mississippi in his short story, “The Bear.”

An often overlooked work of this Nobel Prize-winning American author, “The Bear” is just one on a long list of his published short stories. Faulkner has also written critically acclaimed novels such as, “The Sound and the Fury,” “As I Lay Dying” and “A Rose for Emily.”

“The Bear” bears the portrayal of Faulkner’s main character, Ike, born and raised as a hunter in the South, who grows up learning about the land and man’s place in it. During his hunting adventures, Ike lives among and learns from a group of men that have a particularly callous approach to living in the wild. Throughout his experience chasing a legendary bear, “Old Ben,” Ike is molded into his own person and faces the challenge of being called to stand up for what he believes in.

Though Faulkner uses his wisdom to write about the emerging insatiable attitude of the 20^th century man and his effects on the dwindling wilderness, his take on manhood and his commentary on the exploitation of nature is hidden beneath his choppy narration and cloudy chronology.

William Faulkner was ahead of his time for his take on the effects of slavery and the alleged purge of the North American wilderness. “The Bear” is a difficult read for most, but is a suave demonstration of his unique story telling ability and great insight into the Southern man’s view of manhood. Faulkner’s tale is an entertaining story worth reading, if you can bear it.

Sinatra’s Contagious Cold

NEW YORK- Coming to you in living color: Frank Sinatra, the man who “withstood the test of time, the man who had everything, lost it all then got it back, the man who could do whatever he wanted, the man who let nothing stand in his way,” captured like never before.

It wasn’t until later in 1966 when the first color television, the GE Porta-Color, began to take it’s place in American homes, but those who read the April issue of Esquire magazine in 1966 were given a glimpse into how the times were changing.

Gay Talese didn’t need to have a drink or a smoke with Frank Sinatra to better acquaint himself with one of the most celebrated personalities in Hollywood. Talese used his journalistic instincts to investigate Sinatra through methods of emersion and integration into “Il Padrone’s” business and social environments. While his exclusive report of Sinatra’s life is intriguing, what makes the article so memorable and unique is how Talese told the story like a story. He depicted scenes, emotions and people so clearly that the detail in his writing could rival that of even the brightest color television. The tactics of this Esquire reporter were innovative for the time, and broke ground on what would later be considered “modern journalism.”

Today, as the means of research continue to improve and multiply and while people’s trust in the media has been on the decline, it is the duty of journalists everywhere to take the examples from Talese’s article and report their stories as accurately, passionately, and as interestingly as he was able to.

With his article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” this Esquire reporter, Gay Talese, set a vivid scene for readers as well as for the future of feature writing.