New York Connections
The street where I live?  It's a 5-block area in the West Village.  I have written a history of the street, including November 2003 photos of many of the historic buildings.

Following are some of the friends I now have or have had here in the city:


Peter 

Peter Ross is my neighbor, cybergeek, and confidante, to whom I owe the workings of my entire homepage. Since meeting, we've gone on trips, to movies, to plays, lots of places, lots of happenings.  On 9-11, I phoned him to come quick from 14th Street to see the World Trade Towers on fire.  We were incredulous but watched for hours. Peter's the most honest person I know, and if I had to be marooned on an island with just one person I'd pick Peter . . . except how could our Mac computers communciate with each other and how could Mike in Germany find him!  Ay, there's the rub!




Anita Weschler is the sculptor whose career I have followed over the several decades of our friendship. I purchased her statue, "The Humanist," and two of her hexes plus two electric paintings that can be lit up.  See her work, including the nude statue of Jose Limon, by going to "Warren Nude" on the present homepage. Anita died at the age of 95.

Alimul Kamal - Alimul (a/k/a Surid), who is Taslima Nasrin 's 14-year-old nephew, spent the summer of 1997 with me, during which time I was his guardian, tutored him in the humanities, and helped guide him through his training as a ball kid at a program sponsored by the NY Junior Tennis League. He played throughout the city, went to Newport, Rhode Island, for a meet (at which his NY team beat Boston's), was a ball kid at the Bronx Tennis Classic in Crotona Park, and applied to become a ball bay at the US Tennis Open. Meanwhile, we saw many Broadway plays, studied art (Haring, etc.) and artists (had an interview with Anita Weschler), went to night court, saw Al Pacino being filmed in "Chinese Coffee" near the apartment, climbed down into a visiting German submarine, evaluated the ethnic food of a dozen different nations, learned how to fly (and crash) a plane using virtual reality on the computer, studied math by investing in a hypothetical portfolio after which we toured the NY Stock Exchange, studied English (handwriting, spelling, syntax, speech, paragraphing, etc.), walked across the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk, practiced the magic tricks Joe Nickell had shown him, saw sunsets from the roof, and generally got acquainted with the Big Apple. Depending upon what's happening, I call him Suhrid, Allen, or Alimul.

 




Ed Cervone of New York is analgous to Tom of Finland, although he never liked to hear that.  Ed, an inveterate smoker, died in December of 2001. I purchased one of his rare oil paintings, a nude of Fernando and me, and I also own a signed "Batten Down The Hatches." A realistic artist who did not use live models, he was one the body of whose work is revealing. In fact, corporeal! So many times we ate at Fedora's! So many times we cruised around! So many times he heard me tell him to stop smoking! When I introduced him to artist Paul Cadmus, Paul made it clear that his nudes were not at all like Ed's nudes.  Ed died of brain and lung cancer 3 December 2001.

Luis Fantuzzi , my "son-of-a-gun sybarite," was around 8 or 9 when we lived in the same apartment building on 103rd Street. I became something like a surrogate uncle, even checking on his record in school (for one year I was a supervisor of practice teachers and visited his Joan of Arc elementary school). Fantuzzi has been around the world, literally, several times. He's known as a charismatic guru in Nepal and the South Pacific! On an LP jacket I helped him make when he was still a teenager, he credited me #1 and God only #2. When Newsweek needed a cover photo for an issue celebrating an anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, they featured Luis! Gabriel deSilva , whom I bribed to protect little Luis (who at that time was called Junior because of his size) from the bigger kids on 103rd Street, is now a teacher of art in Hawaii. One summer I transported both boys to Iowa, where I found them a farm to stay and which resulted in really good memories. That same summer, Luis's sister came along and I transported her to South Dakota, where one of my cousins kindly kept her and looked after her until school started. To see Luis on the cover of NEWSWEEK (he's the pot-smoking symbol of Woodstock) or to see him n - u - d - e, click the following: http://fantuzzimusic.com/



Joseph F. Cyr and I go back to Audiosonic Recording Studio days at 1619 Broadway's Brill Building in the late 1950s. He started as bookkeeper there, then became a recording engineer and partner with Fernando Vargas and me at Variety Recording Studio (225 West 46th St.). He continued on as an engineer until the studio closed in 1996. Joe, a Catholic who never appreciated Fernando's tales about the Pope's testicles, and who has put up with my joshing him over the decades, is consummately honest, loyal, and diligent. Although he got his B.A. at Boston University in business, he has trusted me over the years to be his own bookkeeper, and his record in investing has bested my own. No one knew my personal life history better than Joe. When he died in 1999, I felt a profound loss.



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