Following a rash of ‘upskirt’ arrests in Manhattan during one warm week in March, officials are warning New Yorkers to be wary of potential Gay Talese articles from an upskirter’s point of view.

“This is a serious crime with serious consequences,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. “These are not victimless crimes, but damaging invasions of privacy, and so-called ‘upskirters’ will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. They will also probably get prominent coverage in some of our most revered weekly magazines, leading to endless debates over journalistic ethics and lucrative film deals.”

Common locations where people should be on the lookout for articles by Gay Talese about upskirters and the ensuing bouts of hand-wringing and condemnation include Twitter, aggregation sites and the three remaining newsstands in New York.

Reached for comment, Talese said, “This is why I told those broads to stay away from anti-social types. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to take these pictures. Why just the other day I — Nan, what are you doing with the phone?”

Photo: David Shankbone

“He was always there, eyes alight, sweat on his brow, hands caressing the air. He has led more than two thousand and five hundred performances of more than eighty-five different operas; his brisk, effusive technique has been adequate to them all, and superior in many cases. He is an outwardly voluble man who has kept his personal life hidden, and few people, even those who have worked with him for decades, can say that they know him well. But as a musical personality he has exuded warmth and inspired trust.”
 — Alex Ross reflects on the legacy of James Levine, who will step down from his role as music director of the Metropolitan Opera when the season ends.

by Bryan Washington

Last summer, Houston’s METRORail opened a six-and-a-half-mile route through the city’s Third Ward. It came after years and years of delays, and a federal investigation into the alleged purchase of prototype train cars built in Spain. As with number of the city’s Good Ideas, if you held your breath waiting for it, you’d probably end up dead. When I lived on the block, the half-built station platforms implied as much as Michelangelo’s prisoners — almost artful in their not-doneness, looking only a little bit half-assed. But the city held its breath, and the neighborhood waited. Now the train cuts through Elgin and Alabama Streets, and Macgregor Way, a sort of punchline for an area already wincing from gentrification.

Depending on how far you take the Purple Line up Scott Street, you can watch a condensed history of the one-time epicenter of black life in Houston, go by. As you ride toward the East End, you can see the gradual decline, and where drugs hit the neighborhood the hardest. There are remnants of the Ward’s past as a hotbed for blues, mansions shadowing streets with tough reputations, and an abundance of churches. Before long, you’ll take a smooth left toward downtown and the Theater District, into the affluent Fifth Ward, its skyscrapers barely visible from the poorest parts of the Third.

Most Americans have heard of the Third Ward, if only tangentially. If you’ve been blessed by Beyoncé, you’ve heard both her and Jay-Z namecheck the Third Ward. If you’ve listened to Lightning Hopkins, you’ve been brushed by the Third. Ditto if you follow the Texans, or if you watch college football. But of the six wards that make up Houston proper, the Third may have the least known but most interesting history. Former slaves purchased the land from whites in the late nineteenth century, and now there’s a light rail running through it. That is a notion of progress as close to science fiction as anything we’ll get.

The Third Ward hasn’t always been predominately black; its original residents arrived as far back as the Civil War, when whites lived in the northern end, while the black population stayed south, below Truxillo Street. The emancipated showed up in droves, sometimes on foot, for the maintenance jobs that no one else wanted. Blacks bought homes from white people on credit, mostly at convoluted rates. By the late 1890s, over a quarter of the homes in the area were black-owned, and in 1926, the city established Yates High School, its second black high school in Houston’s city limits. Throw in a little white flight, and you had one of the few parts of Houston black people could honestly call their own.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Third became a home for a number of thriving, black-owned, businesses. Along Dowling Street alone, there was Tyler Barber College, the Watchtower Insurance Company, the Huckaby Funeral Home, and the Teal Portrait Studio. There were several movie theaters, a famous department store and pawn shop (Wolf’s, still open), and an amateur boxing club. One longtime resident called the strip in its heyday “Black Vegas.” Etta James, Ray Charles, Count Basie, and Nat King Cole all performed at the El Dorado Ballroom, before it closed in the nineteen-seventies, when the Third was on the decline.

In the past decade, the black population in the Third has gone down by more than ten percent, while the number of whites has doubled, and the Latino and Asian populations are slowly rising. A number of white-owned businesses have opened up, like public-event centers and new restaurants in what is still considered a prominent food desert. There’s been a resurgence in the real-estate market too, with houses bought up by a mix of preservationists and white folks who just to be a little closer to downtown. Today, if you drive down Almeda Road, it’s not uncommon to see a white man and a black woman arm-in-arm. Just hanging out, walking. It’s something you wouldn’t have caught not too long ago, unless you were in more progressive Montrose a few miles up the road, with its thrift stores and gay bars and coffee shops.

It’s difficult to describe the metamorphosis of Houston’s Third Ward in relation to the other five, because it’s impossible to apprehend the city as a singular entity; most of Houston is a mixed bag. Between the lofts lining Midtown and the Mexican revitalization of East End, and all of potholed Alief, and the hipsterized Heights, and Bellaire and Clear Lake and River Oaks and Chinatown and Aldine and Northshore and Spring and Rice — it’s just a bunch of hubs, at least inside the Loop. People are picking up on the marketability of this new culture of fusion in the Third Ward, and the question is no longer whether the changes to the neighborhood are good or bad (they’re both), but who gets to claim the narrative.

Despite its conservative tendencies, Houston has been majority-minority for some time. It’s one of the most diverse cities in the country in one of the fastest-growing metro areas. But as mixed as Houston proper is, it is also one of the most country’s most economically segregated cities. While this might be the standard in a number of sprawling metropolises, it is even more pronounced within the bayou city’s limits, because it is the only major American city without zoning ordinances, magnifying class dichotomies to the fullest extent. A Mexican dishwasher living on Fannin, an Indian housewife from Uptown, and the middle-class engineer dropping in from Westpark may never cross paths, even if they all set foot in the exact same restaurant.

While the Third Ward’s expansion could be the natural development of a city, it is also in some ways the erasure of a culture, or at least a period in time. A neighborhood built in the throes of the Civil War, and the first one owned by free people of color in Houston, will no longer belong to the residents who built it, but to those who came after, with all the money. Those who historically didn’t have a place to call their own could find themselves displaced once again.

As the rest of Houston comes to terms with the rapidly gentrifying Third Ward, many have taken a pass at attempting to rebrand it for a less convinced audience. They’ll note the surge in new (i.e., Not Black) businesses setting up in the area, the pop-ups and food trucks. They’ll talk about the shotgun houses and the Geto Boys and Paul Wall as if they’re just references or waymarkers. The history, if it’s mentioned at all, is usually only a pretext.

Last year, I worked at a magazine that fashioned itself as a microcosm of Houston — its expansion and warmth — and just how much “fun” the city could be. There was a vested interest in highlighting the Ward’s arts, particularly in a part of town the casual Houstonian may have thought of as artless (though Toni Morrison taught at Texas Southern University for a stint). One day, I sat in one corner, dutifully engaged in something mindless, while one of the editors interviewed a woman from the Third over the phone. He wanted to know about the restoration of the neighborhood’s shotgun housing, an independent effort from Project Row Houses that had been in the works since the nineties. He asked about its inspiration, and the newfound attention from moneyed connoisseurs, and whether or not she saw the project as sustainable.

It would be an understatement to call it a rough conversation. What began as a routine pattern of questions and answers escalated into a shouting match, until a room that was normally abuzz had dimmed to a murmur (I could hear someone pouring water downstairs, and a woman laughing too loudly below us). There were whispers from those sitting nearby, to apologize, to reschedule the call. Or at least hang up. But he kept right on shouting, and just when things seemed to calm down, not a minute passed before they were arguing again.

When the call finally ended, the editor said the woman had been patronizing. She hadn’t taken him seriously. She’d asked if he’d even heard of the Third Ward, if he knew where it was. She had asked if he knew this, that, and the other thing about the neighborhood. He said that she spoke like she was better than him, like he was someone who didn’t know these things, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why.

There are a number of things the further gentrification of the Third Ward could bring, not all of them bad. Longtime residents could be priced out, their trials erased. But they could also be supported by affordable housing and grocery stores. Schools could be refurbished, and roads could be buffed. With the light rail now running through it, the Third could be on its way back up. The most recent influx of commerce is just another chapter in the neighborhood’s story — one that will remain convoluted, tumultuous, and misunderstood, but one that’s still ongoing. Just two days ago, a deputy constable was shot in the back four times after a traffic stop near T.S.U., his life spared by his bulletproof vest.

The best gauge for the Third Ward’s future could be a ride on the Purple Line: it takes you out of the desert, into the oasis of the city. Stick around long enough, and you’ll see enough of downtown to seduce you, with all its coffee shops and lofts and sushi eaten by open windows. You’ll catch enough to take stock of what’s possible in a place, what can be done if we take a little time. And then, once you’ve had your fill, you just hop back on the train, take it all the way back, and then you are home.

Photo: Photo: Joe Wolf

Here is a collection of stories from the NRA about armed citizens exercising their Second Amendment rights on some bears.

“Who? Weekly works in part because Weber and Finger never seem to be working that hard.”
 — If you’re not listening to Who? Weekly because you think podcasts are a waste of time and God knows you’ve got plenty of more important things to do and you’d feel gross about devoting an hour of your day to chatter when you haven’t read a book all the way through since high school, fine, I accept that. But that is the only legitimate excuse.

Note of Approval: Ice Cream

“Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost,” observed the writer A.S. Byatt, and this fierce irony is at the heart of a conundrum that has puzzled us for as long as we have been eating ice cream: How can something so cold be so pleasing?

Let’s begin with the sweetness. Oh, the sweetness: The touch of sugar on the tongue that promises delight to the whole body from the very first taste. It’s no accident that the sacred texts of religion and literature are full of paeans to honey and sugar; the frequent comparisons to both love and the Lord are an indication of the prize we place on things that are sweet.

Then there is the creaminess: That tactile, elastic mouthfeel that carries comfort through every delicious scoop. Cream signifies fat, and fat is stored in the human body to be converted into energy for future use. Energy makes us go!

Of course, there is also the nostalgia factor: Each ice cream we eat contains within it the memory of every other ice cream we’ve eaten, be it on a hot summer day at camp when we were children or on a dark, rainy night when our heartache was so great that the only balm that could assuage our pain was the pint in the freezer that we stood over the sink and spooned up until it was gone.

What else? Oh, right, the colors. Think about how many different colors there are of ice cream! White for vanilla, brown for chocolate, red for strawberry. Green. Purple, I guess. I’ve seen blue for sure. So many different colors! When you look at them them lined up next to each other, as you do in an ice cream shop, it is like seeing a rainbow you can eat. Who wouldn’t love to eat a rainbow?

Ice cream shops, right, those are another good thing about ice cream. How many happy moments have you spent in your life in an ice cream shop, anticipating the pleasure that is about to occur, reveling in the bounty that almost spoils you for choice? Ice cream shops are awesome. They are like bars that serve sugar and fat.

I almost forgot the toppings! You can put fucking anything on ice cream and it is amazing. When I was a child the choices were either chocolate sprinkles or rainbow sprinkles, but these days they will grab a bag of whatever crazy crap they got from the snack aisle of the grocery store and mash it into the ice cream and it tastes like God jizzed into a cone. Is there anything else you can dump a bunch of shit into and have it come out somehow better than it went in? Fuck no!

And don’t get me started on what they’re doing with cones now. Also booze in ice cream.

To be sure, ice cream is not all pure bliss. Let us not forget the bane of the ice cream eater’s existence. I speak of the dreaded “ice cream headache,” that sharp and stabbing spike that inexorably attacks at your moment of greatest joy. But even that is another miraculous example of ice cream’s power. The blending of pain and pleasure produces a sensation so highly refined that it is been a muse to philosophers and songwriters since time immemorial. Pretty impressive, ice cream!

“The only emperor,” wrote the great Wallace Stevens, “is the emperor of ice-cream.” And he was an insurance guy full time, not just some kind of artsy dreamer. If a businessman in Hartford knew that ice cream is the best thing ever then it is pretty much indisputable that ice cream is as good as it gets. Ice cream is terrific. I highly recommend it.

Photo: Shutterstock.com

This track is the kind of miracle trick where you can center yourself just by having it on in the background. No stretching, no spirituality, no extra effort required. I can’t tell you how good your weekend will be but it’s almost certainly going to be better than your week, and you’re almost there. Let’s do it. Enjoy.

★★★★ The four-year-old remarked on the total clearness and blueness of the sky, even as he was judging himself too ill to go outside and get to school. It was a near-immaculate blue, and at last unfaltering. The sun had leaves to shine through on the forecourt, and the new tips of shrubbery were alight with yellow-green. A luminous aura spread from a building that blocked the sun. The air came in the nose and mouth as cool and clean as meltwater coming off an ice cube. A man crouched by the curb to hold a large-lensed camera over the long sky-filled puddle in the gutter. People were wearing more bits of color, or the bits of color they wore seemed brighter. The moon in the daylit eastern sky looked pink for a moment. From Sherman Square, the familiar line of buildings down Broadway glittered and dazzled. Even now in the shade, the shrubbery held its insistent glow.

This is relaxing enough to get you through the rest of the afternoon and, really, once you’re done with this day it’s so close to being the weekend you can almost believe life is worthwhile. Enjoy.

Awl pal Mary Pilon believes that Instagram is ruining vacation, but isn’t it possible that what’s really ruining vacation is our embarrassing desperation to show others what full and exciting lifestyles we lead? Maybe the real problem is we’re so afraid of how meaningless our sorry lives are that we will grasp at any attempt to prove to the universe that we’re here, that we matter, that we’re not just shuffling toward the tomb. It could be that our pathetic need for validation has finally found a format that briefly allows us to feel as if we’re being noticed and approved of. But also, sure, fuck Instagram. Fuck you and your filters. WE’VE ALL SEEN SUNSETS, ASSHOLE. Jesus Christ, take a picture of yourself reading a book or something, maybe then I’d be impressed.