My work
On the Creative page of this site, I have posted a handful of travel essays I wrote for WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com, while podcasting and blogging in Europe.
They are not professional clips, but if you didn’t get a chance to read them this fall on WDSTL, see them here. Direct links below.
By Christopher Wink | Oct. 8, 2008 | WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com
Worlds – yes, disparate worlds – come to some form of a cross-section in red-eyed, late nights in train stations.
Early Tuesday morning, we were doing that, surfing the intersection of the young and the acutely itinerant – being reminded of the sociological difference between situational and generational poverty.
We, three, were in a 24-hour coffee shop just before 1 A.M., waiting on a 6 A.M. train. A security guard recommended the spot, a few modern chairs off to the side where people buy cups of foam and cream. A young man, a year or two my junior, sat beside me, tapping his foot and twitching in his chair, regularly, if subtly. The kind of movements you might expect at 1 A.M. in a late-night train station coffee shop.
By Christopher Wink | Oct 26, 2008 | WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com
He liked the movement of the mouse cursor on my computer screen. So I pried his hands from the keys and opened up Microsoft Paint. With a few interruptions to change color and tool, a four-year-old who stumbled upon me in a park in Budapest, Hungary drew me a computer-generated painting.
Children don’t likely understand the concept of language. I certainly don’t remember when I learned of the six billion people in the world, most don’t speak like me. The little boy with the dirty sweatsuit, dirt on his brown-olive skin, and sand in his bushy, black hair spoke on to me, in a language I couldn’t understand.
He shrieked, too. First when – hoping to get him to stop smacking my laptop – I took his underarms and lifted him into the hanging leaves of a nearby tree.
He was positively gleeful.
He got on toy horse near the swings and – with a strong-armed point and another high-pitched shout – demanded I get on one nearby. For a few good moments, he and I raced fast and long toward a Soviet-era apartment complex across the street.
Then he got off and wanted to be lifted more. Offering demand I still couldn’t understand, but smiling in a way I could.
I don’t know where he went. Someone called what I thought was a name – a woman in the distance. He asked me to lift him once more – into the branches and leaves. He spoke more to me, grabbed some leaves and tossed them at me – sand included – and was gone.
Running off with a green soccer ball. A young boy I’ll never know. Who shrieked in my ears, threw sand at my face and gave me a pleasant picture to keep.
Originally written for the travel blog WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com.
By Christopher Wink | Oct 9, 2008 | WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com
We meet Sander and Neek at the outskirts of Amsterdam’s Red Light District. Sean, his brother Brian, and I are on a bridge demarcating where the sex ends and the large, quiet residences begin. A small, sloping bridge over a small canal, 15-feet wide, on which covered bicycle taxis perch to take drunk tourists back to their hotels.
We’re deciding if one more walk through the alleyways glancing at half-naked women in their rented window brothel doorways would be one too many. Half-naked women tap on the glass under red fluorescent lighting – the most give and take you’ll ever have window shopping. They’ll sleep with you for a little money. This is one half of many people’s Amsterdam.
Sander and Neek walk by reminding us of the other half, shouting at us to ’smoke weed everday.”
Continue reading Weed and prostitutes: a conversation in Amsterdam
By Christopher Wink | Dec. 30, 2008 | Publish2
It is 11:55 p.m. on Dec. 30, 2008: minutes before deadline. Perfect.
I am very young and very green. Sometimes I spend entire hours thinking about everything I don’t know. Then I go ask a journalist.
My name is Christopher Wink, and I am the future of journalism because I don’t know anyone who loves the history of journalism and is excited by the future of journalism as much as I am. New media punditry is mostly filled with those who say print is dead and seem downright gleeful about it, and those who are still wondering, hey, why don’t all the newspapers get together and not put any content online?
I want to do both.
Continue reading I am the future of journalism (Publish2: 12/30/08)
Pick up a copy of today’s Philadelphia Weekly. My first freelanced article makes an appearance.
There are saints and prophets on all corners of Philadelphia, but on the 1400 block of North 11th Street few are Catholic and even fewer are Irish. So 50-year-old Father Kevin Lawrence, with a hardy laugh and soft, precise speech, might seem out of place—if he weren’t taking over for another Irish Catholic.
In fact, the future of one of the most dynamic and independent parishes in the Philadelphia Archdiocese rests in Lawrence’s hands. Yet the only thing anyone seems concerned about is that Lawrence doesn’t write poetry. That’s because Lawrence is replacing St. Malachy’s Father John McNamee, a North Philadelphia icon.
…
Read the rest on Philadelphia Weekly.com.
See two other photos of the pair after the jump.
Your boy Tom Infield had an 1,800-word (not including sidebar) profile of King of Prussia – the 27,000-person outpost northwest of Philadelphia famed for the mall of the same name – for the Inquirer yesterday.
It is the prototype for suburban sprawl that is trying to remake itself into green(er)-friendly, small city life to retain a growing environmentally-conscious and urban drawn population who still might be concerned by the rampant crime of Philadelphia.
The thing is I don’t think any of the 60 online comments for the story came after having read the whole thing – I know mine didn’t.
Because, while Infield’s piece suggests King of Prussia was developed by the convergence of major roads at its doorstep – 202, 422, I-76, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike – it didn’t mention anything about Philadelphia’s aggressive tax structure.
This is something I read quite a deal about for my honors thesis, which focused on Philadelphia’s Republican Party. Indeed, I actually posted on this very topic back in January on the blog I made for the thesis.
Continue reading King of Prussia: the child of Philadelphia tax structure
By Christopher Wink | May 08, 2008
One week from yesterday three strangers riding beside me on the 3 bus will be dead.
But I can’t know it. It hasn’t happened, and I’ve never spoken to them before and won’t in the future. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even like know they were there, except for the boy, and that was only because his iPod was playing so loud I heard the bass of his trashy hip hop.
In just six days he will die on the same day as two others he doesn’t know.
I just want to get home without listening to what’s left of the music in some teenage boy’s ears.
I work at my uncle’s deli near Wissinoming Park. Normally my boyfriend picks me up after his afternoon class at Holy Family and has dinner with my dad and me in Port Richmond, but he has some group project. So I’m on the 3 with Jimmy Quinn.
ONE WEEK FROM YESTERDAY three strangers riding beside me on the 3 bus will be dead.
But I can’t know it. It hasn’t happened, and I’ve never spoken to them before and won’t in the future. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even like know they were there, except for the boy, and that was only because his IPod was playing so loud I heard the bass of his trashy hip hop.
In just six days he will die on the same day as two others he doesn’t know.
I just want to get home without listening to what’s left of the music in some teenage boy’s ears.
I work at my uncle’s deli near Wissinoming Park. Normally my boyfriend picks me up after his afternoon class at Holy Family and has dinner with my dad and me in Port Richmond, but he has some group project. So I’m on the 3 with Jimmy Quinn.
This is a short excerpt. To read the rest of this piece and other writing, go here.
There is a suddenness to life in this city.
Surely it is exaggerated in the minds of those who live mostly in fears of their own creation. Four hundred dead of 1.5 million isn’t anything to the pain and poverty of many in this world, but murders on the streets of Philadelphia require a viciousness that can’t possibly come naturally.
The stories come and seem to portray great tragedies in their crushing art.
Tony Lain was a 42-year-old married father of two from Mayfair, a neighborhood of runaways from the gritty, urban decay of Kensington’s old Irish Catholic blocks.
This is a short excerpt. To read the rest of this piece and other writing, go here.
I am currently traveling. This was forward-posted on May 6.
