On Chapel Street, in New Haven, Connecticut, opposite the Old Campus: from the time of glaciation, cultivated by the Quinnipiac; in 1614, charted by a Dutch explorer; in 1638, colonized by the Puritans; throughout the American Revolution, home of the signer, Roger Sherman, his second wife Rebecca Prescott-Sherman, their fifteen children, and the family store; in 1860, industrialist Gaius Fenn Warner's Italianate villa, by Henry Austin; in 1880, Marshal Peter R. Carll's Opera House; in 1884, the Republican League; in 1887, the Hyperion; in 1903, the Union League addition, by Richard Williams; in 1926, the Roger Sherman Theater; beginning in 1976, a tradition of French fine dining, that continues today. While the Roger Sherman house is no longer standing, it holds up all right.
"Jean-Michel's paintings contain spiraling active forces, and these forces are a constant. One force is script. Nothing makes him more righteously angry than to get this question, 'Tell me about your graffiti.' What Jean-Michel did was not graffiti. There were statements, there were epigrams, and he wanted you to see them so he wrote it out always in capital letters. That is one current always flowing."
"'One night, it was almost closing time and a dude grabbed the conga then started chanting: ‘Aguacero de mayo [‘May showers’].’ I wrote: ‘Perhaps this has reference to the religions in Cuba.’ Cut thirty years to 1985: I’ve been assigned to interview Toni Morrison, who said, ‘My mama said you should jump out in the first showers in May’—and I froze. Lydia Cabrera, the queen of Afro-Cuban anthropology, wrote: When you prepare the prenda, the Kongo charm, one ingredient may be rain from the first showers in May; it comes direct from God.'"
"Parts of these chapters were written on the tables of Jean Michel Gamme and Jean-Pierre Vuillermet's Union League Cafe in New Haven. I was equally welcome to write at Caffe Adulis, where the three Eritrean brother-owners — Sahle, Fiere, and Gideon Ghebreyesus — even went so far as to twist dials to cast extra light on my table. Similar courtesies were extended by Jeff Horton at Scoozie's Restaurant and John Clark at Zinc. All of these restaurants are in New Haven."
"'Rap has really begun to get around the mainstream culture,' said Robert Farris Thompson, a professor of African and Afro-American art history at Yale University. Hip-hop words from what was once an underclass subculture are now common parlance among America's youth. 'Rappers are persons of words, and those words are getting into the language,' said Professor Thompson."