By Stuart Mitchner

Let’s say I’m sitting on a bench in Central Park thinking about long-ago weekend afternoons playing catch with Florence Victor, a tall, lean, motor-mouth poet with long black hair tied back in a pony tail, who stopped talking only when she was throwing the ball and did she throw it, crack! every time it hit my mitt. Being truly, proudly, deeply neurotic, she was usually talking about her various ailments and anxieties, which tended to be interchangeable with her poetry.

So as I’m sitting there smiling, remembering how Florence and I sometimes kept the ball flying between us until twilight and beyond, along comes this tall guy in a hoodie with a camera in his hand, asking if he can take my picture. Ordinarily I’d say “no thanks” and find another bench, but since this is an imaginary encounter I know right away that this guy is Brandon Stanton whose book Humans of New York: Stories has been my constant companion, along with the fiction of Chekhov, ever since the new year began. In fact, the more I read the two together, the more I realize how many subtle unexpected things the humans of New York have in common with the humans of late 19th-century Russia. Before he can get started, I explain that his book was a party gift from a friend at work. “It’s addictive,” I tell him. “It lights me up every time I look inside.” 

“Thanks,” he says, rushing it a bit, he’s used to hearing how great his stuff is. “So where do you work? At a newspaper?” He’s noticed my reporter’s notebook and he’s trying to get a better look at the paperback under it.

The Human Face

Afraid that he might be put off by the idea, I briefly say what I do and get right back to Humans of New York. “Every time I look at the faces in your book,” I tell him, “it makes me think of a line from a song I love. It’s by Procol Harum, a rock group you probably haven’t heard of.”

“Before my time I guess.” I find out later he was born in Georgia in 1984, 17 years after “A Whiter Shade of Pale” topped the charts. He asks me what the line is; he has his note pad ready.

“The song’s called ‘Your Own Choice’ and the line is ‘the human face is a terrible place,’ only the way Gary Brooker belts it out, it means ‘terrible’ as in ‘amazing, phenomenal, unknowable.’ It’s a very upbeat song, sort of a pub anthem, even though it ends with the singer drowning, ‘rest in peace.’”

“Awesome! What’s the music like? Can you sing it for me?” He crouches down on the sidewalk, ready to take my picture singing. Oh boy.

“Whoa, hey, no, I’m not, I mean ….” But the funny thing is, I feel totally at ease. I even find myself wanting to sing. It’s a very infectious song. So I sing, not too badly, the whole middle verse (people are staring), with “Choose your own example” coming after the “human face terrible place” line.

When he shows me how I look in the picture, all I can say is it’s a good thing this is a fantasy.

The Ultimate Human of New York

Having given me a big smile and some polite applause (he has huge hands), he pushes on: “You were smiling when I first noticed you. Do you mind me asking how come?”

So I tell him about Florence, how we both worked for the same publisher until she got fired for coming into my office (and everybody else’s) all the time to talk. I tell him how we played pitch and catch in the park, how good a pitcher she was, and how in her little rent-controlled apartment a block from the park on Madison Avenue every space was covered with poetry she’d either pencilled in or typed and taped on the wall.

“Do you remember any of her poems?”

“Not really, but she was good, really good. She wrote a poem about being in a dentist’s office when Kennedy was assassinated. I think it’s in some anthology. But what a talker she was. You’d have lost an hour hearing her out. She’d have taken over the book. She was great, really. The ultimate Human of New York. She died years ago. I didn’t even know. We’d lost touch.”

“Sorry I’ll never get a chance to meet her. Was this a romance? What did she look like?”

“No romance, just a nice friendship. There are friends like her and me in your book. You can tell. People who complement each other. The pitch and catch idea. But I never ever thought of her romantically. She was an emotional no-fly zone, if you know what I mean. She bared her soul. That was more than enough. As for looks, she was, well, imposing. Very New York. Intense. Bright. Feverish. People were always mistaking her for Susan Sontag. There are several versions of Florence in your book. The one who calls herself a spiritual healer, the one who says her therapy seems to be going well. The closest may be the girl in glasses who asks you ‘Should I do my dinosaur face?’ and you say yes and she does it.”

“Yeah, she was great.”

“I didn’t know it at first but she reminded me of Florence the way she looked when I first knew her, same color hair but not worn short, never, same build and taste in clothes (that jacket is a poem in itself), tall, long legs, and a willingness to perform on the spot, to be a story or a poem. She was both.”

By now Brandon is ready to move on, but not quite. “What’s with the book?” he finally asks. He’s been eyeing it the whole time.

He means my paperback of Baudelaire’s essays on art, The Painter of Modern Life. I have to smile. “That’s what you are, isn’t it?” I say. “Sort of.”

“Me? But the guy on the cover! What a face! Now that’s my idea of a terrible place!”

“Nobody smiles in those early photographs. This is from around 1862. He died five years later.”

“That look! What a glare! I don’t know what words I could put to that one. ‘Hey, you just stole my soul, now you’re gonna pay!’ “

After a brief summing up of Baudelaire and Flowers of Evil, I tell him “This was going to be my subject for this week. There’s a show On Daumier’s caricatures at the Zimmerli museum in New Brunswick — .”

“So you’re an art critic!”

“No, I’m not a critic. I’m an anti-critic, sort of. I mostly write about things, books, music, films, that move me. Which is what happened this week. I kept putting the review aside to dive into Humans of New York. Really. The thing is, Daumier’s doing a kind of brutally satirical version of what you do, using a pen instead of a camera. And nobody writes about Daumier better than Baudelaire. To be honest, I wasn’t going to bring you into the review until your book changed everything. If you’ve got a minute, let me read you this bit.” I open the book: I’ve got the place marked. “This is Baudelaire on Daumier, from an essay about French caricaturists: ‘I want to speak about a man who each morning keeps the population of our city amused, a man who supplies the daily needs of public gaiety and provides its sustenance. The bourgeois, the business-man, the urchin and the housewife all laugh and pass on their way, as often as not without even glancing at his name. Until now his fellow-artists have been alone in understanding all the serious qualities in his work, and in recognizing that it is really the proper subject for a study.’ See what I mean? Of course the great thing about your people is they’re so far from being caricatures. Humans, like the title says. I’ve been reading a lot of Chekhov lately and he’d relate to what you’re doing. And as a writer, one of the best ever, he’d admire the way you know how to choose exactly the right words for each picture.”

“People give me the right words. I just have to be patient.”

“But like the song says, it’s ‘Your Own Choice.’ Like the photo of the middle-aged married couple all dressed up for some cultural event. You probably had a bunch of quotes from them both, but out of all that you picked one sentence, what the husband says about the wife, ‘She still gets giddy when she sees a firefly.’ That’s beautiful. There’s a Chekhov story in that.”

———

As of December 2015, Brandon Stanton had 16.2 million likes on Facebook, around 4.4 milion followers on Instagram. Humans of New York (2013) enjoyed a long run on N.Y. Times Non-Fiction Best Seller List, and Humans of New York: Stories, which was released in October 2015, remains near the top of the list. Both books are published by St. Martin’s Press.

David Bowie

Driving to work Monday, I gave Schubert’s last piano sonata a rest and, thinking of David Bowie, went to 88.5 FM in time to hear one of the most unlikely duets ever recorded, Bowie and Bing Crosby singing “Little Drummer Boy” only months before Crosby’s death in October 1977. Since my copy of Hunky Dory is long gone and all the Bowie CDs at the library were checked out and going fast at the Record Exchange, I had to go online to find one of the great records of the 1970s. Listen to “Life On Mars,” “Oh You Pretty Things,” “Kooks,” “The Bewlay Brothers” (with that mysterious “I might just slip away” fadeout ending), and most of all, listen to Bowie tell his story, putting life and death together in “Quicksand,” its closing words, “knowledge comes with death’s release.”