Who Asked Me?

“Of course the coffee’s HOT! So don’t be stupid!” Mazzola bakery, down the street on Union, includes this admonishment on their coffee cups. It’s the little shit that I appreciate about New York, still found in select corners and available to anyone willing to pay attention. I was giving a young visitor a tour of Manhattan last year when she stopped in the middle of a typically crowded street, looking upward. As the oblivious masses passed on either side of us she pointed to ornamentation on the buildings – cornices adorned with eagles and gremlins, faces of all description – just above our field of sight. It was a temporary revelation. I knew subconsciously that they were there, these small details, on many structures beyond the Chrysler and Empire State buildings. But how often did I really see them?

It passes you quickly, life and this city, and is impossible to take in minute to minute whether you have all the time in the world or none at all. It comes in moments, watching your kid kick a ball for the first time or walking with your father in to a newly constructed ballpark. The realization is overwhelming; these instances are finite yet surround us daily. My early experiences in New York are still fresh in my head. A lot of the in-between has faded yet I can see that first drive in from JFK on the BQE with my friend Sara, so thankful that there was someone here to greet me yet struck by how ordinary and ugly the roadway was. The next morning, up after a sleepless first night in an unfamiliar sublet, I walked around Brooklyn brick and brownstone sipping coffee while my brain began the weeks-long process of settling. A few hours later, disembarking the F for the first time at 42nd .. “holy shit” .. about summing up where my head would be in the coming months. “Real-time appreciation” as I put it in what I was writing back then. This seemed about as good a description as any.

We’re always running or hiding somewhere, doing something to get us out of that real-time. I realize this is no novel concept and entire wings of bookstores are dedicated to living in the present, be it via yoga and meditation or scaling mountains and jumping out of airplanes. I recall being in the kitchen, late night, at a party on the Upper East Side about a year after I moved here, practicing signatures on a small black chalkboard with a woman who told me she got the feeling that I was running away from something. It was no Svengali Moment, but as I considered the plethora of life points from which one might run, I kept coming back to death. Running from or toward it are equally pointless but attempting to ignore it is futile as well. Perhaps running (walking, sitting) with it is the trick .. but I’ve indulged the point enough.

I’ve been looking at real estate lately. Just the term “real estate” is a bit ridiculous for what qualifies in this city. Living spaces that would be considered constricted corners in many parts of the globe are referred to as ‘spectacular’ and ‘unique’ without a hint of irony. Brokers urge buyers to act quickly and bid high, mostly with good reason. As I squeeze in to these tight spaces with the affluent minions, sweating as is my way and trying to size up who these folks – most younger than I and in some cases just out of college and with their parents – are, I can feel the last vestiges of my real-time appreciation slipping away. It isn’t that the pursuit is pointless. Buying houses and nicer cars and having kids and friends and parties and careers .. I mean hell, I’m OK with it. You can’t sit on a Tibetan cliff every day of your life giving careful consideration to a branch. But something in me, even at this late stage and perhaps as result of misguided privilege, wants to reject .. well, giving it so much thought. And waiting out on a point in the harbor on any given night is that statue, stone-faced despite copper exterior, delivering what I imagine to be the greatest straight-line in the history of urban comedy.

I’ve been listening to Mark Knopfler’s ‘Privateering‘ of late. It was released six months ago but I wouldn’t have tripped on it had I not seen him in November when he opened for Dylan in Brooklyn.  A friend bought the double CD for me after we attended the show and made fun of the ‘Knopfler Knuts’ sitting in front of us – a quartet of 30ish chubby dudes and nerdy girls going crazy for their hero on the stage below. This is often how I come across worthwhile stuff, by first mocking those more perceptive than I enjoying it. I’ve always liked his guitar playing though I was never a huge Dire Straits fan. I did like the quieter stuff like ‘(walking in the) Wild West End’ and the ‘Notting Hillbillies’ album he put out a long while back.

Giving a closer listen to Privateering I concluded he’s more than a decent lyricist. It also occurred to me that giving anything a ‘closer listen’ these days involves quite a complex process. The entire album has to be good enough that I’m not inclined to switch over to another disc or shut it off mid-listen. Knopfler has been influenced by JJ Cale’s guitar playing. More is less and simple note shifts and finger-picking within the same minor chord pull the listener unconsciously in. The same holds true for his singing and lyrics – they play almost in the background the first ten times through. I often mis-hear some of the songs I end up liking most. In the title track I was sure I heard him sing:  “The people on your man o’ war are treated worse than scum / I’m no fuckin’ captain though by god I’ve sailed with some.” Except it’s ‘flogging‘ captain which works equally well. These are small details but they add up to some illusive whole for me. There’s also a cool song about New York and the Statue of Liberty – Radio City Serenade – that begins with the line “you got to have no credit cards to know how good it feels.” It reminded me of Neil Young’s ‘Thrasher‘ where he sings “burned my credit card for fuel.” I give it three of four stars and a rare ‘check it out’ rating . At the very least you can keep it on in the background without strong objection. 

‘Gomer Pyle’ Star Marries Male Partner. I caught this Internet headline at 3 a.m. this morning in my typically sleepless state. 82 year-old Jim Nabors decides to ‘officially’ come out of the closet and tie the knot with his partner of almost four Hawaiian decades. To steal a line from Dennis Miller in reference to similar revelations from i-less center square and Ted Knight co-star Jm J Bullock: “Consider those tea leaves read, Jimbo.”

The blurb did lead me to a good and overwhelmingly appropriate Pyle episode on YouTube: The Secret Life of Gomer Pyle. Our favorite Marine finds himself on a break from rug-hooking classes one Sunday down by the Santa Monica pier and runs in to two unscrupulous photographers who dupe him in to posing for shots that they later insert bikini clad babes in to for a girly magazine.”Sunday Is Fun-Day” is the the article, and who should be perusing said periodical the very next weekend (the publishing industry had a faster turnaround time back then) than Pyle’s tightly-wound drillmaster, Sgt Carter. “Look at this guy,” he remarks enviously to the innocuous Corporal Boyle, “..and a Marine, too. Some guys get all the luck.” And then .. wait for it .. “Heyyyyy…. WAIT A MINUTE …”

The episode got me considering a lot of things, including whether Vince Sutton, who portrayed Sgt Carter and died of a sudden heart attack at fifty, was a Lee Strasberg graduate. That brand of elevated blood pressure is difficult to pull from thin air. Also relevant was the simple fact that they don’t make them like this anymore. While one could argue that we’re living in the golden age of episodic television, you can’t find the 2013 equivalent of “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” All of which leads me to something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for some time but, due to lack of blogging and general expressive apathy, have not: What’s up with the popularity of this “Homeland” show? A recent grievance with the reprehensible Time Warner Cable led to my receiving six free months of Showtime and I figured “at least I can watch that Mandy Patinkin series that Obama digs.” And … What a colossal piece of shit.

I don’t know what’s so discouraging, the overwhelming popularity of this program (although, as spoofed in a recent SNL skit, it is largely among white people – our President not withstanding) or that several ‘insiders’ have proclaimed it the most accurate portrayal yet of inner-CIA workings. This certainly won’t relieve my habit of late-night waking. Apparently the agency assigned to protecting this country from foreign threat is lined with ginger-haired, bawling chicks who are in insult to bi-polar disorder and get re-hired at the drop of a hat after weekly incidents of compromising national security. The show flat-out sucks.

Though it may seem counter-intuitive to some I’m certain that the cultural drain circles have become faster and smaller in the decades since Gomer Pyle aired on CBS in 1964. And while there’s some consolation in a long-closeted television actor being able to marry in the twilight of his years, it’s really just a token of progressiveness in what is the final drain approach. Or maybe that Homeland show just got under my skin ..

In his triumvirate/kinda top-three
Well there’s Bob and there’s Neil and there’s me
–Loudon Wainwright III “My Biggest Fan”

Shot. Wrecked. Like oil sizzling in a pan. Bob Dylan’s voice has drawn unflattering description in recent years but it’s not like they were ever comparing him to Johnny Mathis anyway. Last week was the second time I’d seen him perform in my neighborhood and he spoke even less. Four years ago at the Bandshell in Prospect Park he paused momentarily halfway through a two hour set, noting “gee I wish the Dodgers still played in Brooklyn” .. and that was it. Not exactly the social commentary some of the older hippies in attendance were hoping for. This time it was all in the songs, and you had to listen carefully if you were going to catch it. It isn’t the rasped tone of Dylan’s voice that strikes me most but the staccato inflection he forces upon each chopped verse. On the recordings he’s pushed to forefront, undeniably rough but clear. Live he takes on a more desperate quality accentuating both his age and the time in his career. You have to squint to make him out, too. He’s illuminated on stage by what appears to be a few yellow-tinged 45-watt bulbs and no spotlight. A few medium-sized framed mirrors are haphazardly arranged and leaned audience-facing and floor-level here and there. It’s as though he’s made a last minute stop at Bed, Bath and Beyond after deciding “let them look at themselves ..”

It’s the manner in which Bob’s recent efforts hit me that indicates how he’s holding up. Tempest was an impulse buy along with a couple of other CDs. I gave it a few spins and decided it was OK despite its featuring a fourteen-minute song about the Titanic. A few weeks later I found myself at altitude in the California Sierras, circling the block at four in the morning .. staying up late and making amends, as it were. “Scarlet Town” (track #6) was playing, forever jamming itself in my head. Up on a hill where the chilly wind blows fighting my father’s foes. You’ve got legs / that can drive men mad / lot of things we didn’t do / that I wish we had. The boy can flat-out write. You heard it here first.

I followed up Dylan this week with Neil Young and Crazy Horse at Madison Square Garden. Call me Mr. Rock & Roll (just don’t call me late for dinner.) Neil, at a spry 67, is Bob’s junior by four years and still takes the white hot spotlight directly on him, its searing shine serving to obliterate fine details and outline him in grunge god purity. The New Yorker calls Crazy Horse “the most elemental of all Young’s musical vehicles” and I’d go along with that description. He’s been coming back to this ensemble – Ralph, Billy and Poncho – for over forty years and once described them as the “third best garage band in the world.” It’s a hell of a trick turning the Garden in to your personal garage but he’d pulled it off about five minutes in to the soaring opener, Love and Only Love. They work new songs within the songs and this time I was almost certain I could hear “Smoke on the Water” jammed in between Neil’s over-driven leads. Something eternally refreshing about a 67 year-old dude who can breathe new irony-free life in to a tune called “(Why Do I Keep) Fuckin’ Up”. The picture above was self-snapped at West 30th and 7th Avenue, a block or two from the gig and at an exclusive little bistro that goes by The New Pizza Town II. Sausage rolls and Crazy Horse .. long live New York City.

Hives are gone, lost my bees
Chickens are sleepin’ in the willow trees
– J Cash

Odd few days here in NYC, and this may be the greatest understatement since Noah told the Mrs “looks like rain..” It began last Friday with an epic three-state Skype session with my pals Miller and Myers, segued in to the ridiculous spoils of a second Giants World Series victory in three years and culminated with the largest Atlantic hurricane on record. This global warming crap – or ‘the warming of the globe‘ as Will Ferrell impersonated George Bush proclaiming – is developing in to one large pain in the ass. I have personally reduced my carbon footprint in recent years by moving to a city that stresses public transportation over cars and good pizza over decent burritos. But given recent developments and where one sides on the man-made argument, this might not be enough. The power was still out as of mid-week in much of Manhattan and the stock exchange just fixing to re-open. Subways are flooded and closed. Many are reconsidering whether the Indians got the better of that twenty-four dollar deal for what is and will always be an island, isolated and vulnerable to shifting tides.

As is guiltily typical in these events, I escaped relatively unscathed save a harrowing six hour period when the cable was down and my Pawn Stars marathon interrupted. My personal sacrifice extended to potentially never knowing what became of the dust-up between Chumlee and the Old Man over some misplaced ’72 Sizzlers cars. Local bars and restaurants were packed with affluent, youngish, uppwardly-mobile white people in full hurricane mode, comparing notes on how their brownstone facades held up. Just a mile away in Red Hook an entire neighborhood was displaced and more than a hundred homes burned down in the seaside community of Breezy Point. There’s nothing like a natural disaster to put a fine point on the real estate mantra “location, location, location ..”

Meanwhile back in San Francisco (As Van Morrison sang on his epic. globe-spanning ’72 cut ‘St Dominic’s Preview’) they were celebrating a second Giants’ World Series victory in three seasons and holding another parade just two years after the last one. They’re becoming rather adept at these parades and despite the new mayor mispronouncing Madison Bumgarner’s name (“Bumgarden”) the affair was well-organized and attended, closing with Tony Bennett singing his trademark song. What’s there to say about a team you’ve followed through mediocrity most of your life suddenly reaching unimaginable levels of success? You get used to it in a hurry. I had a similar experience back in the 80’s when the 49ers went from joke to dynasty, seemingly overnight. Some of the poetic waxing from the first championship inevitably falls by the wayside but the appreciation remains largely intact. And while it might seem odd that the Giants have come together as I’ve thrown myself to the bi-coastal wind and become a transplanted east coaster, it’s strangely fitting too. They did used to play here and I’ve always been a strong believer in the link between distance and appreciative perspective.

The same can be said of my friendship with the aforementioned Miller and Myers. As I’ve noted before you can’t make new old friends. The phrase itself is fitting, borrowed from someone I used to know but no longer do. There are no guarantees in life and people tend to drift, die or move away. You figure you’ll know them forever but you won’t. Some stay in touch but change into new versions of their old self that don’t jibe with your stubbornly un-evolutionary ways. None of this artificial Facebook bullshit changes anything. When it’s looked back upon by subsequent generations it will be credited with achieving the opposite of its professed intent and having made us less connected. That’s why the stock is tanking. There’s something intrinsically depressing about the whole deal.  But not so with Myers and Miller, who have remained a pleasant constant and, in an increasingly fragmented world, allowed me to feel less isolated. Enough on that though — as I said, poetic waxing is best reserved for maiden championships and these guys didn’t win the World Series. Here’s to continued friendships and receding water.