Edges of my Life.

It was back before the turn of the century when I lived in that storefront on Vanderbilt Avenue. He just sits back in his beaten up old chair through all kinds of weather as the Park Slope crowd stream past.  The rasta man has his LP's and books displayed out on the sidewalk near Grand Army Plaza subway in Brooklyn. He's often there at the entrance.   I paid twenty-five dollars for a comfortable old wicker love seat once.  Streetwise. Street smart. Making a living. Waiting to make a sale. So he can eat. So he can survive. So he can live.  So when the rasta man saw me riding past on my bicycle, riding slow up the hill with my garden tools, he just walked out into the street and stopping me cold said: “You know me man. I'm no beggar man but I need some food, some rice and beans. Can you help Andrew? Police have shut me down.” There's a thin line between civil society and revolution and sometimes it's more civil to revolt. What is it that keeps us down, compressed lik...

3rd June, 1985 One of the perks of journalism, particularly in overseas Bureaus, was the opportunity to pick your stories and rub shoulders with history and the past. I was on assignment with Ray Martin and David Brill for Australian Broadcasting and we were on the road with Eugene McCarthy on the way to the Hollywood  Bowl in LA. As well as a skilled and idealistic politician, McCarthy was a published poet and we’d already filmed him in his Washington DC office as part of a profile. Eugene McCarthy ran for president as  peace candidate in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War. Many years later I wrote in my diary: “CBS reports on the CIA and army disinformation campaign during Vietnam War. Seems General Westmoreland continuously underestimated allied troop casualties by as much as one-half to give President Johnson the feeling that America was winning the war. How many thousands were killed because of this?”. I remember that hot afternoon at the Hollywood Bowl in southe...