Who Asked Me?

When you ain’t got nothin, you got nothin’ to lose – Dylan

The San Francisco Giants are going to the World Series for the second time in three seasons and I’m reminded of a lunch my father had a long time ago with his banker Chad Ertola and a story Mel Brooks told on The Tonight Show about meeting Cary Grant. To quote Chad: “I was having lunch with Rich,” (as those from the old neighborhood call my father) “and he was particularly anxious .. even by his standards. Being a close friend I knew that all was well with his family and being his banker I knew that his financial situation was equally secure. So I asked him what was wrong and he told me … ‘Everything’s going too good.’ ” The Mel Brooks story (available via the link I’ve provided) is similar but with a twist. Brooks is a young writer who’s come to Hollywood to write a movie and is bowled over upon seeing Cary Grant at the Universal Studios commissary. He’s further awed when the screen legend invites him to lunch not once but repeatedly over the following weeks where they run the gamut of polite conversation from favorite sports to party games. The next Friday when Grant calls Brooks’ office to ask him to lunch Brooks emphatically instructs “I’m not in! ..”

While I’m in for the Giants games and have anxiously followed their tortuously successful progression to this point, this embarrassment of recent riches has me feeling a bit like one of those twenty-six year-old frat boy Yankees fans I’ve run in to on this coast. They go around bragging on twenty-seven world titles even though they’ve only been alive for five of them. The difference here is that the Giants have only won one World Series in their fifty-three seasons in San Francisco and I saw it happen. Now they have another shot with Season 54. Some faces from 2010 remain but the narrative has shifted. Shut-down ace Tim Lincecum isn’t quite so shut-down this season and bearded closer and Beach Boy namesake Brian Wilson hasn’t closed anything since early April. Marina Triangle area bars are devoid of now retired legendary swordsman Pat Burrell. His buddy Aubrey Huff is still on the roster but prone to disability with every ground ball legged or panic attack suffered. New story lines have emerged including that of a thirty-six year-old Venezuelan second baseman acquired late-season from the Colorado Rockies. Marco Scutaro is the latest in a string of normal-sized sensations including Lincecum and Sergio Romo who remind us that in baseball you don’t need a head the size of Barry Bonds’ to do spectacular things. (With deference of course to Bruce Bochy, whose natural-grown bean makes even Bonds look like a pinhead.) Center fielder Angel Pagan, taken from the Mets, has (as my buddy Tom Myers points out) one of the great “duality-of-man” names of all time and even looks like a Satan worshiper. Shortstop Brandon Crawford’s facial hair is reminiscent of Michael J Fox mid-transition in Teen Wolf. And crazy-eyed right fielder Hunter Pence, while capable of making the play, possesses a fluidity of motion that makes Jerry Lewis look like Usain Bolt running the hundred meter dash.

But as they say in baseball, just get there and anything can happen. The Giants have a single day of rest to recover from the six elimination games they encountered in the playoffs and get ready for the latest Greatest Pitcher of All-Time, Detroit’s Justin Verlander. The Tigers clinched early enough playing the Yankees to take a cruise, get their Christmas shopping done, and play a half-dozen inter-squad practice games. It’s looking like Barry Zito will be taking the hill for San Francisco after the Giants used their two strongest bets in Vogelsong and Cain to close out the St Louis series. Zito signed a $126 million contract in December of 2006 that has become synonymous with poorly-conceived executive decisions and that led to managing partner Peter MacGowan stepping down from his post. He redeemed himself somewhat in 2012 but lasted only a few innings in his first playoff start against the Reds. Then something peculiar happened last Friday with the Giants down three games to one in St Louis. The handsome but often beleaguered Zito, looking slightly fuller-faced and older, got out of an impossibly tight jam with no outs and runners on second and third in the second inning. He then proceeded to pitch in to the eighth, painting the corners with a masterful selection of balls varying in both speed and movement. He won the game and, with Vogelsong, set the stage for last night and the Giants celebrating their second pennant since 2010 in a joyous late-October San Francisco downpour. It would seem enough to instill one with that rarest and most elusive of perspectives, hope. Or you could conclude that things are going too good and stop taking phone calls from Cary Grant. Regardless of chosen outlooks two facts remain: there’s more baseball to be played and it’s a welcome distraction from the ongoing and off-putting political circus. Go Giants.

work on harmony and diction, play your banjo well
and if you have political conviction, keep ’em to yourself  – J Cash

I hate this time of year, every four years. It’s worse in the wake of ‘social networking,’ which becomes a euphemism for mass polarization. People who would normally reserve opinion on subjects as benign as their preference for a sports team are more than willing to spout political idealism and derision. It’s distasteful and ignores the reality that political choice on a national level always involves compromise. Yet it’s broken down daily by these acutely insightful sorts to siding with the heartless or the caring; the pragmatic or the careless. You’re either an anti-American freeloader or a clinic-bombing billionaire. As always, I prefer the ambiguity of song lyrics and titles (regardless of the leanings of those who wrote them) and in this case would point to Springsteen and Zappa, respectively:

you may think the world’s black and white
and you’re dirty or you’re clean
you better watch out you don’t slip
through them spaces in between 

.. Shut Up ‘N Play Yer Guitar.

Underground, 53rd & Lexington

–Seger

Been slogging through another New York City summer. I realized I was in the middle of it yesterday when I started out for a run and passed two guys working construction on my Brooklyn street. “They got restaurants on Court?” asked the one. “Yeah they do,” the other answered. “But more on Smith – all up an’ down the motherfucker.” This made me smile which caused the first guy to acknowledge me. “Big man .. you gonna run in this heat?” The entire exchange lasted all of thirty seconds but put an official stamp on my summer. I can now carry on to fall, knowing that I was here.

I get a lot of ‘big mans’ in this city though by my estimation there are many bigger. I got two in one day the other week walking through Times Square to the library. There was some kind of world record setting yoga sit-in going on with hundreds of earnest looking practitioners locked in to various asanas atop non-slip mats in the ninety-degree heat. I can think of far more yoga-like places than Times Square but perhaps that was the point. Still, they didn’t look so comfortable; a whole flock of muscularly emaciated types red-faced and sweating bullets in the afternoon neon while an instructor advised on their next contortion via microphone. I could use a few good asanas, specifically for achilles and lower leg pain and general anxiety. Would also take one for insomnia and hair loss if they’re passing them out. And yet I push on unenlightened and not even properly stretched, taking my ‘big mans’ where I can get them.

I said a long time ago that all one really needs to understand this city is a subway pass. Like much of my writing it was an over-simplification but one of my better ones. I believe the subway is the Great New York Equalizer. Feeling old, lonely or unattractive? Or perhaps you’re on a strong, beautiful and superior kick. It’s all there – the middle aged across from the decrepit and the disengaged next to the abandoned. The odd beside the truly weird, attractive abreast the stunning. Worried about the young ass-kicker who just boarded at Penn Station? Fear not, as there’s bound to be an ass-kicker’s ass- kicker joining the car at 42nd. The subway is like Perspective Theater, lending proper place and context to all. It’s a great place to remind yourself that you’re neither exceptional nor unworthy; just another denizen holding out for a temperature change.

I’ll be getting a temperature change at month’s end when I travel back to Northern California and San Francisco. I’d make an argument for this above most other annual American city-swaps. It’s difficult to espouse the charms (or flaws) of one place over the other but being allowed regular access to both is a privilege. I was working on a piece covering this topic (the Brooklyn/North Beach neighborhood shift) for a small San Francisco magazine and asked my mother for editorial and grammatical input when I finished. You could choose worse for an editor; her education as a Scottish schoolgirl included Latin. They didn’t mess around with the few they deemed suitable for higher-education in that country. She pointed out, gently, that I tend to use too many commas. Easily the solidest bit of advice I’ve gotten in the last several years. Now, if I can only make it through, the rest of this summer.

Young Roger Ebert (right) and Russ Meyer

I’ve been reading Roger Ebert’s memoir, Life Itself, on my Kindle. The Kindle is a device I was slow to embrace. I purchased it for the same reason I buy most electronic crap – it looked cool and those I saw using one on subway appeared to have their act together more than I do. It hasn’t helped me get my act together, but I’ve been reading a bit more and I’ve made a habit of finishing one book before I purchase and download the next. The device represents one more step down the internet-based road of removing actual human contact. Way back when, I’d go to a bookstore to purchase something to read. Then I started ordering books through the mail on Amazon (along with most other things) which subtracted the human element but still ran the risk of running in to my mailman or UPS guy. Now I press a button and every chapter, page and word is stored almost instantaneously in the internal workings of a slim, sleek device. There isn’t even the human involvement of some unseen warehouse worker putting my book in a box with my name and address on it. Somehow this is all slightly less offensive than emails replacing actual conversations or letters, or Facebook as an artificial means of sustaining friendships. The words are all there, just minus the physical pages, book covers, inside sleeves, etc. Having worked briefly for a literary agency I was made aware of the cynical nature of modern publishing and that having a pretty face to put on the inside flap has, in some cases, come to match the importance of competent writing, particularly in the “chick lit” genre. The Kindle is, in some ways, a means for circumventing this fluff.

Roger Ebert’s face isn’t so pretty these days. He’s had multiple surgeries both for cancer in his salivary gland, and then to attempt to restore his appearance. The cancer treatments have been successful, although his particular ailment can never be completely eradicated and he reckons that it will kill him, eventually. But the attempts to make him look ‘normal’ again have not worked and he notes, in matter of fact manner and with no trace of self-pity, that he’s come to resemble the Phantom from the original film version of Phantom of the Opera. Ebert was never a matinee idol type to begin with, and his appearance befit his role as the nation’s most noted movie critic. He was a fat man who made no apologies for how he looked, and the combination of his weight and manner of speech and inflection gave the impression of assumed intellectual superiority. He’s always been adept with words and writing, opting for a concise, straight-forward approach that shuns flowery prose. He doesn’t hide behind his vocabulary or try to obscure any point he makes with how he delivers it, and this same eloquent and plain-spoken manner seems to help him take on subjects others might avoid. His surgeries have also left him without the ability to talk or eat, and he returns time and again in the book to fond memories of meals, food and restaurants from his past. It’s fitting in a way; as a corpulent critic his physical appearance encouraged public derision. We’re typically suspect of those who pass judgement for a living and tend to do the same ourselves when it comes to fat people. But he’s no longer fat and his physical deformities are obviously no fault of his own. Where one might have previously assumed a lack of self discipline there is now a certain admiration for his courage and desire to push forward. All that said, there’s still something a bit amusing about all his references to Steak & Shake restaurant in the book, and it would seem the old adage “once a fat guy always a fat guy” holds true.

Ebert faces other difficult truths bravely, including his lack of courage in standing up to his dominating, interfering mother’s influence on his own personal relationships and how this shaped the better part of his years. He’s understanding  when describing his own faults and those of the people who filled his life, but he doesn’t flinch either. The chapter on Gene Siskel, his long-time foil, rival, television partner, and fellow film critic, is particularly good. Ebert recounts their relationship which was marked by rivalry and competitive barbs (Siskel once famously described Ebert as resembling a ‘mudslide’ when he would don a brown sweater) but also affection and genuine connection. There was a passage I particularly liked where the two are backstage, about to appear on Jay Leno’s show, and Ebert self-consciously asks Siskel “Gene, do I look OK?” Siskel replies “Roger, when I need to amuse myself, I stroll down the sidewalk reflecting that every person I pass thought they looked just great when they walked out of their house that morning.” There was something innately touching about two guys who could rip the shit out of each other, but be there unquestioningly when the other needed assurance. Siskel died in 1999 following surgery for a cancerous brain tumor, and Ebert obviously misses him. It’s a good book; Ebert’s led a heck of an interesting life and continues to write ambitiously and enjoy things despite his current limitations. It’s a lesson even the folks at Steak and Shake could learn from.

Perth at Night

Croquet lawns, village greens
Victoria was my Queen – Ray Davies

I was in Scotland last week, having arrived just in time to enjoy the full one hundred and sixty eight hours of non-stop television coverage devoted to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Elizabeth herself was a bit further south in London, floating around the Thames on a giant barge in a wide assortment of pillbox hats, offering that one-quarter, cocked-wrist wave to the millions who turned out, braving the typically bleak English weather. “A magnificent spectacle,” as American Jon Stewart put it, “that you could almost see from the inside of the car wash that is England in June.” I must be careful where I tread here, because in the past I’ve fallen in to the unfortunate habit of bad-mouthing British culture, perhaps largely out of ignorance. No doubt there’s plenty about America that throws your typical Englishman for a loop, and the closest thing we’ve had to royalty is a family of good-haired Irishmen who descended from bootleggers and drove cars in to lakes. But it’s hard to sit by idly while some poncy Frasier Crane-esque TV commentator remarks for the umpteenth time on an 83 year-old broad’s remarkable constitution for showing up in bad weather to her own party and how the whole shindig represents “the best of what Britain is all about.”

OK – screw what I said before. I flat-out don’t get the place, and I’ve been going there since I was fourteen years old. It isn’t just the English and their open-ended rhetorical questions (“wouldn’t want to do that now, would you?”), condescendingly effete posing, or assumed air of intellectual superiority while glassing each other up in pubs over football disputes and vomiting violently in daylight gutters trying to beat ridiculously early last-calls. Scotland is equally weird in its own suspiciously provincial ways. There is no greater chill available to one’s spine than passing the Half A Tanner pub in Perth at ten-thirty at night to the strains of a half-dozen blitzed Scots karaoke-ing Meatloaf’s “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.”

Eye wan-cha’
Eye neeeeed cha’
But thaer ain’ nae way eem ayre ginnae love ye
So dinnnnnnn’t beee saaaaaaaad …

My mother is Scottish and I’m more than familiar with the accent. But it hits you every time as soon as you land in Edinburgh from Newark and hear the announcement “fer those passengers arrivin’ frae Nyrk.” And that’s exactly how it’s pronounced – “Nyrk” – without a vowel in sight. I consider myself rather adept at deciphering what the heck they’re saying but even I was thrown for a loop on my way out of the country when the United Airlines attendant commented “ye’ve got an un-youshyul’ sir-num..” He was commenting on my last name but I could have sworn he was accusing me of hiding a bomb in my luggage. What good are these elaborate safety checks if all you can do is nod and smile to all the questions about who packed your bags?

It isn’t that it’s any better or worse than this country, it’s just that it’s different. It’s like visiting your cousins’ house where things are enough like home to be familiar, but dissimilar enough to make you feel like you’re walking in some foggy haze. Light switches go down to turn on, the steering wheel is on the right side, and washing machines are cooler-looking and double as dryers, but less effective. There’s much talk of how English cuisine has improved in recent years, but watching the numerous home-cooking shows contradicts this notion and reveals these folks as the anti-Italians in most things food-related. I’m sure there are some fantastic restaurants in London, but in the typical Midlands home cupboards of baked beans and sweeties still reign supreme. We didn’t do much eating as it turned out; there was a stomach bug going around and it hit all of us eventually. It may have originated in the Gleneagles Hotel, where more than a hundred guests fell ill the weekend of our arrival. Edinburgh had its own health scare, and a portion of the city was cordoned off with a Legionnaires’ outbreak. “It’s always something..” Dad observed. “.. Legionnaires’ .. Mad Cow ..”  

I promised my Scottish friend Denis Munro that I wouldn’t go overboard on bad-mouthing his homeland, and with typically cheery aplomb he responded “just match every derogatory remark with a complimentary one about me.” Denis is testament to the virtues of clean living, having survived decades on plain oatcakes, lentil soup, and unsalted bread. While his distaste for alcohol is decidedly out of step with the bulk of his countrymen, he’s about as proud and knowledgeable a Scot as you’ll find, rejecting the knee-jerk logic of Scottish Independence for a more measured and genuine love of country. And I couldn’t help but observe that he’s got something there on the rare occasion that I broke away from the daily bullshit of travel; whether it was walking back to my car by the North Inch in Perth with traces of daylight still visible at eleven at night or driving to the airport early Saturday morning to the first breaks of blue on the persistently white-washed horizon. It may be a bit backwards to my clumsy American tastes, but it’s one beautiful place.