Philadelphia police fire back

Yesterday Philadelphia police shot and critically wounded a 24-year-old man whom they say pulled a gun on them, the Inquirer reported.
There have been 11 shootings at police in which the cops fired back in the last year. Four of the civilians were killed. It isn’t a recent phenomenon.
In a city that hasn’t overcome the imprisonment of convicted cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal, and such high profile deaths as Officer Chuck Cassidy in recent memory, none of this can be good.
As previously posted, just two weeks ago, a man, also accused of pulling a gun on cops, was shot on the Allegheny Avenue subway platform of the Broad Street Line, my stop.

A blog for the Village of Arts and Humanities

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It is difficult for me to believe, sometimes, that it has been nearly 18 months since I first started working with the students at the Village of Arts and Humanities, a multimedia recreation center at 11th and Alder Streets in North Philadelphia’s Fairhill. It was last December when I first started working with high schoolers there on filming and video editing, coming into what was already a fairly established program.

Today, in working with the kids, I really got to thinking how we haven’t done enough to publicize their work, to let others see the short videos they’ve made.

So, in just a few short hours, ditching the outdated Web site of the nonprofit, together with a couple of the kids, we made a WordPress blog, outfitted with several of their videos uploaded on the class’s new Youtube account.

More to follow, but I’m awfully proud of the work and was surprised just how excited a few of them were to have their Myspace accounts linked. New media has teaching capabilities to be sure, but there are elements that seem to be needed.. like Myspace.

Why I am everywhere online and you should be, too

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Understand, I take relish in few things as much as I do in being an old head, knowing little about technology, what is new and fresh.

The trouble is that I am modestly pursuing a career in media. I graduate from Temple University in less than three months, with no job, little direction, and few goals. My chances for success just got smaller.

So, it was in early December 2007, with my fears and worries just beginning to rumble, that I launched this Web site. It was, as I first described it, a modest foot print in what, I assumed, would someday require a great deal more structure. The world’s dependent on the Internet is not lessening. This is the best, most effective way to market oneself.

I wasn’t going to blog. I promised myself I wasn’t going to blog. But then, there wasn’t much chance I could keep steady readership to develop a community (hello!) but also to increase my searchability on Google, (currently tops for “christopher wink” and second for “chris wink“) -It doesn’t help that someone of quasi-fame shares my name, as Chris Wink is the founder of the Blue Man Group.

Continue reading Why I am everywhere online and you should be, too

The supernatural: graves and ghosts at Temple University

By Christopher Wink | Oct. 30, 2007 | The Temple News

Temple University has been built on the backs of the dead. It’s late October, and we think about the old, the hidden and the dead. Temple has its ghosts, indeed.

TEMPLE BY GRAVES

In the 1880s, Russell Conwell was laying the groundwork for what would be Temple University. He was tutoring young men by low light in the back of Grace Baptist Church, in a room called “the Temple.”

Across North Broad Street was a rambling grave site called Monument Cemetery, already half a century old and filling quickly.

By 1929, Monument had been filled to capacity with 28,000 burial services. Its 11-acre compound had been encircled by a dense urban landscape of rowhomes filled with Philadelphians of German and Irish descent. It sat like that for nearly thirty years, assuring Temple remained a decidedly east-of-Broad institution.

CONWELL WALKS

Conwell was one of the last notable Philadelphians to be buried in Monument Cemetery. He died in 1925, 15 years after his wife. After his wife’s passing, Conwell turned cold and perplexing. He stayed on in his fine home at 2020 N. Broad St., along with at least one maid, but Sarah was on his mind.

Not long before his death, Conwell was searching for his Civil War discharge papers but neither he nor his staff could find them. Legend has it that his wife came to him in sleep and told him where to find them. The next morning, the dream proved prescient, prompting Conwell to celebrate his wife’s reemergence to a maid.

Of course, the maid labeled it lunacy. To counter, Conwell had his maid hide a pen, without telling him where. That night Sarah came to her husband and told him where to find the pen. The next morning, Conwell came to his maid, pen in hand. Sarah, it has been said, was insulted by her husband’s desire to prove her. She never visited Conwell again.

GROWTH UNCOVERS

Like most city neighborhoods, North Philadelphia had a population jump after World War II, before a precipitous decline in the 1950s. Monument Cemetery became an obstacle. For growth. For homes. For Temple.

In September 1955, a court order was passed, ordering the city to begin transporting the remains from Monument to Rockledge’s Lawnview Cemetery in Montgomery County. Russell and Sarah, together once again, were entombed at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, an act paid for by Temple.

By 1956, Temple bought the cemetery site. The rock walls that separate the Broad Street sidewalk and the parking lot between Montgomery and the Student Pavilion are the last visible reminder of 28,000 dead in Temple’s neighborhood.

Three years later, in June 1959, Temple welcomed two back home. Russell and Sarah were buried in the sidewalk alcove that rests along North Broad Street between Conwell and Wachman Halls. There were photos and coverage from all the major media of the day.

It took more than a decade, though, for the Conwells to have a final resting place, then with much less attention. Just a single clipping from a yellowed copy of The Temple News is all that presented itself to show the last trip Russell and Sarah took. That a short walk to what was then a newly constructed Founder’s Garden. They were settled there late in the summer of 1968. Questions remain whether they have explored other homes for the future.

Text as it appeared in The Temple News on Oct. 30, 2007. See it here.

So far from home

By Christopher Wink | March 1, 2008

She enrolled in St. Joseph’s that summer, her first time away from home.

She didn’t grow up too far away – she went to Merion Mercy – but college is about the time, not necessarily the place, and so, for her, Sourin Hall could have just as well been about a million miles away.

“I was the apple of my father’s eye,” she wrote me once, which either showed her complete lack of personal phrasing or was a better characterization than even a thousand poets working a thousand years could develop.

Her father loved her in the same way he loved her when she was seven and twirled on his feet during the father and daughter dance held by Girl Scout Troop 154 memories ago. Fathers always love their daughters as they loved them when they were seven and twirling.

Her mother only wished she could get as much attention as her daughter got.

Continue reading So far from home

So far from home: excerpt

She enrolled in St. Joseph’s that summer, her first time away from home.

She didn’t grow up too far away – she went to Merion Mercy – but college is about the time, not necessarily the place, and so, for her, Sourin Hall could have just as well been about a million miles away.

“I was the apple of my father’s eye,” she wrote me once, which either showed her complete lack of personal phrasing or was a better characterization than even a thousand poets working a thousand years could develop.

This is a short excerpt. To read the rest of this piece and other writing, go here.