I came to Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood through sheer luck. I had liked reading Thomas Beller’s novel The Sleep-Over Artist and his hybrid essay-biography of J.D. Salinger called The Escape Artist and so I looked into Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and found a treasure trove of all sorts of personal essays painting a very different picture of the New York City than the one I had known. If we want to talk about me being not alive in 2000, then I really wasn’t alive for the events these writers describe from 1980 or 1970. Some of our writers dig through their memories and go back further than that.

Larry Racioppo, for example, goes all the way back to his childhood in the 1950s. His pieces effortlessly bounce around various times and combine writing with photographs (his career is as a photographer). You line them all up and you have something representing an autobiographical account of his life. I imagine the same could be said about many writers for Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

I interviewed Larry at his home in Rockaway. I had to take many subway transfers to get from my apartment in the West Village to his house. As the subway normally works, the kind of person to be going from the West Village to Brooklyn filled the subway and then left the subway and was replaced with the kind of person to be going from Brooklyn to Rockaway. The ride was only at its best for me when I was the last person on the subway as it was travelling over the water. When you are the only person on the subway, you can walk around and look at the different areas it passes. It is the only time outside your apartment that you can be unself-conscious in New York City, because pretty much every other time, there is a person somewhere watching and presumably judging you (and sometimes they are judging you in your apartment too as is the case with my sister).

Larry’s house was right on the beach. He had to call me to instruct me how to get in, because it turned out that google maps always took people to a parking lot that his house was next to as opposed to the house itself.

After interviewing Larry, I went back to my apartment and edited together a video that also used his photographs (at Tom Beller’s suggestion). In the end, I think it turned out well enough.

Here is a transcript of the video for anyone who wants to follow along:

My father didn’t finish grade school, and my mother didn’t finish high school. But they really encouraged me and my brother to read. They walked us to the library. They knew reading was important. When I grew up, the only book in my house was a Bible,

And that wasn’t a Bible for reading. It was a fancy showy big table, coffee table Bible. But they didn’t read. They occasionally read the Daily News, but that was it But they really encouraged us to read.

Well, I’ve basically been going through all my old photographs ,through my negatives. I’ve been I’ve been looking again at all the many many rolls of film I shot back in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and been going through them, seeing that I printed very few of the photographs I made. So, I’ve been going back through my old work and thinking about people, like my parents. That entire generation is gone. So, I did one about my uncle, and the story I told was about him and my relationship with him. And it’s kind of like a visual memoir.

I never really such a hot writer, but when I combine my writing with a few photographs, I come up with something I call a visual memoir, and it’s kind of interesting.

And Mr. Beller is one of the places that likes my work, and they’ve been they’ve been very open to publishing it. I first approached them with a one photo and a short, maybe, two paragraph pieces from one of my notebooks, and sent it to them intact, and they liked it. And I’ve been sending stuff to them now at least two years.

Look at the walls around my house and you’ll see some stuff that’s far out, and it inspires me, interests me, but I don’t actually work like that, but I take it in, and it moves me. Like there’s a picture there by a woman I know.. They’re photograms of rubber bands, and she just put rubber bands on photosensitive paper and exposed it, and then put together like 15 or so images, and I think it’s brilliant. But in a million years, I’d never think of doing that. I really like looking at it, and it makes me think about the possibilities of the medium. If I thought of something more complicated, I might do it, but usually I don’t. I’m very happy to work with Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. I think it’s a real privilege to be there. It’s been great for me. I think it’s great for the other contributors. I think it’s great for the reader, and I scan my own negatives. So, I’ll scan a negative, depending on the size of the negative., it could take five to 15 minutes, depending on which information, how big the negative is. And once I scan it, I have to work a little work to get it where I want. And then it takes another 10 minutes, and I’ll be at the computer. And during that time, I’ll just go into something like Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and read it.

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