Over the last several weeks, as Cyrus and I have both been in and out of town — mostly out — and under multiple writing deadlines, we’ve let the blog languish. With luck, now that a new semester is upon us and we’ll be looking for relief from workaday woes, we’ll be back in action.

I really regretted not being able to write sooner about a recent street art installation/performance/”Happening” commemorating the Battle of Brooklyn — and raising our consciousness about the invisible but very real presence of wars, historical and contemporary, in our daily lives.

A street artist and high school art teacher living in Brooklyn, General Howe has spent the last two years installing street art that recalls New York City’s place in the American Revolution. In the most recent wave of work, he was accompanied by social networking guru and self-described Art Evangelist Kianga Ellis, who live-tweeted Howe’s progress installing miniature figurines and wheat-paste posters, rain or shine, and Jaime Rojo of the blog Brooklyn Street Art, who captured the work in breathtaking photos. I have more I’d like to write about the whole conceptual structure of the work and event, but no time now. With luck I’ll get to come back to it. Meanwhile, if you weren’t following along, you can see General Howe’s retrospective on the event at his Flickr stream; Brooklyn Street Art interviewed General Howe for the Huffington Post. For more on the Battle of Brooklyn, see the useful site for Barnet Shecter’s The Battle for New York.

Photo All rights reserved by General Howe

A pest control company called Terminix lists New York, Philadelphia and Detroit as the three cities most infested with bedbugs. And apparently there’s a new bedbug-related problem: people desperate to get rid of infestations are using pesticides intended for outdoor indoors. Take a look at this Huffington Press article.

Prevously.

It might make a good prompt for the exam in the “New York and Modernity” course that I’m teaching this January for NYU ABu Dhabi.

Well here’s an unexpected way in which we seem to be reliving the 1970s. What was it the Stones sang in “Shattered”?

We got rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown …

Now I grew up on the West Side and uptown. Yes, there were some rats, but the bugs I remember are cockroaches. Every morning, when I turned on the light in the kitchen of our prewar apartment on Riverside Drive, the little buggers would go scurrying. No amount of visits by the official exterminator seemed to help. And then my mother discovered boric acid, and the roach problem was solved.

Bedbugs, we never had. They did not loom in my imagination as I was growing up in the city in the 1970s. Not like muggers or “dog-doo” (pre-poop scoop New York, it was). But apparently the city had them. And it does again.

This time around, even the upper East Side has got ‘em, according to NBC News and New York magazine.

Bedbugs freak me out. When I heard about this article in the New York Daily News, which noted that movie theaters were a good place to pick up the critters, well, let’s just say I haven’t seen too many movies this summer.

And then, in Sunday’s New York Times, I learned this disgusting fact about bedbugs:

their sexual practices are bizarre even by insect standards: Because the female bedbug has no genital opening, the male inseminates her by using his hardened, sharpened genitalia to punch a hole through her abdomen. With no elaborate courtship ritual, males in a frenzied pursuit of sexual congress often blunder into and puncture the bodies of other males, occasionally inflicting fatal wounds.

Gross. This town’s in tatters. Uh-huh.

[Photo credit: New York magazine]

The summer of ’77, of course, is famous for the blackout that occurred in mid-July, setting off an orgy of looting and arson in all five boroughs.

I missed it; I happened to be in summer camp in Rhinebeck, NY that July, and I don’t think that the fact of the blackout made much of an impression on me when my parents told me about it on the phone.

So I decided to live it (I can’t very well say “re-live it”) by taking another look at Jonathan Mahler’s account of that year, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, which interweaves the story of the ’77 Yankees (who went on to win the World Series) and the story of the city in which they played. In New York City, 1977 was notable not only for the blackout but also for the arrest of the “Son of Sam” serial killer, David Berkowitz, the opening of Studio 54, the beginning of Mick Jagger’s affair with Jerry Hall, Keith Richards’s arrest in Toronto for cocaine possession, and the ascension of one Ed Koch.

The title of Mahler’s book refers to a line that the legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell was reputed to have said during the World Series when an aerial shot of Yankee Stadium captured the view of an abandoned elementary school burning nearby. New York, like many cities in the nation, suffered an epidemic of arson in the 1970s, as landlords essentially liquidated unprofitable buildings by selling them to their insurance companies. The South Bronx was hit particularly hard, resulting in the burned-out landscape for which it would become infamous. Mario Merola, then Bronx District Attorney and a navigator in World War II, told Time magazine that “the destruction is reminiscent of the bombed-out cities in Europe.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cosell said, “the Bronx is burning.” And so it was.

Except, it turns out, he never uttered the iconic line. The release of the broadcasts of the 1977 World Series on DVD apparently demonstrates that Mahler’s memory was faulty. (I write “apparently” because I don’t own the DVDs, being a Mets rather than a Yankees fan, and the disc hasn’t arrived from Netflix yet.) During the broadcast, reporter Keith Jackson comments on the size of the fire, and Cosell notes that President Carter has recently visited the area. In the second inning, Cosell noted that the burning building had been abandoned and that no lives were at risk. The fire wasn’t mentioned again during the broadcast.

During the making of the mini-series based on Mahler’s book, the producers investigated the provenance of the remark and couldn’t find it. The Wikipedia entry for Howard Cosell speculates that “Mahler confused the documentary with his recollection of Cosell’s comments when writing his book.” (You can read more about the discovery here.)

The title glitch aside, Mahler’s book is splendidly evocative of the time and well worth reading.