Who Asked Me?

This is the Chiclets Mansion, also known as the Thomas Adams, Jr. House, at 119 Eighth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I lived here for a spell in 2004 and even wrote about the experience. The mansion is converted in to apartments, and mine was just below the attic level and seen as the four upper, full-sized windows visible in this shot. Adams invented Chiclets gum, a veritable milestone in the non-digestible foodstuffs industry. I’m no architect, but from what I’ve read the house is considered to be one of the greatest examples of a privately-owned Romanesque Revival home in the city. For a short while, it also made me one answer to an often-asked Brooklyn trivia question: I wonder who lives in that place?

The house also features the first example of an elevator installed in a private Brooklyn residence, and this became the center of a well-known ghost story. According to legend, three Irish servants got trapped and died in the elevator when the family was vacationing. I used the lift on a daily basis during my stay and can attest that it’s no space for a moderately fat person, let alone three Irishmen – so the details of the story are plausible even if they raise further questions. As to the ghost part, I can’t claim solid recollection of any “screams for help with heavy Irish accents” but I do recall several spooky moments. You try living in a place like this without getting creeped out every now and then. It’s all kind of foggy, but I think I was drinking a lot of Jamesons back then, so I may have confused ghost sounds with actual bartenders that I met.

I took this picture on a recent, beautiful Fall afternoon in New York City. People have had kids for less-substantial reasons than the potential to walk by a place like this and tell them “I used to live there,” before transitioning in to Edgar Allan Poe mode. All of which is indicative of my frequent ‘should’ve’ thinking, which is similar to shouldn’t’ve thinking with the potential for greater ruminative regret. One of my more palatable should’ve’s is “should’ve bought a house by now,” but this likely would’ve subtracted from some varied living experiences and cost me at least one decent Irish ghost story. The game ain’t over yet.

What a gloriously perplexing place America must be to the outsider visiting for the first time. This was my thought yesterday, waking to an Internet news blurb about the actor Joseph Son, a super-sized martial arts expert who fulfilled the American Dream by landing a solid role as Mike Meyers’ henchman, Random Task, in the Austin Powers film series. Son, serving time for the brutal 1990 Christmas Eve rape of a Southern California woman, murdered his cellmate, thereby dispelling any lingering doubts that the general population may have surrounding Hollywood casting agents. Deciding that this item alone would suffice for my daily news fill, I grabbed my backpack and headed across the Brooklyn Bridge in to the city. It was time to check in on the Occupy Wall Street folks to see for myself what was going on. Kanye West had done this just the day before, and I fancy myself as one whose thought process runs identical to, if one step behind his own. It’s a little-known fact that I was sitting front-row at the 2009 VMA Awards, ready to grab the microphone from Taylor Swift had Kanye not beaten me to it.

For those either slightly behind the curve or gainfully employed, the movement was initiated by a Canadian group about a month ago and lacked initial steam until a pepper spray incident and some viral Youtube videos got the ball rolling. Since then it has spread to other cities and gained significant attention. It’s difficult to find fault with what seemed to be the protesters’ initial stance, that the inequity and imbalance of wealth-distribution and political influence of banks and large financial corporations has gotten seriously out of whack. But when you get up close to the deal, any sense of a coherent message quickly falls apart and you start to question your initial assumptions. “Ronald Reagan Sucked Balls” – this was the first protest sign that I could make out from a distance, approaching from the north on Broadway. As I closed in, the most obviously organized factions were the police patrolling and media covering the event. The protesters themselves were randomly dispersed, ranging from a thoughtful young woman in a knit cap hypothesizing to a foreign radio crew on the nature of American greed, to a drum circle at the opposite end of the park featuring punked-out chicks with dyed mohawk haircuts, doing a rain dance.

It would be too easy to tie the Canadian origins of this movement with some of the discrepancies in message and the lack of a specifically stated objective, but I’m going to do it anyway. “Occupy Wall Street” is, as many have observed, a misnomer. Anyone familiar with the geography and nature of post 9-11 lower Manhattan could tell you that Wall Street itself is one place no sitting crowd is going to occupy. Had the group attempted to set up camp in front of the stock exchange, the NYPD would have intervened in short order .. and we’re not talking pepper spray here. Instead they hunkered down two blocks away, taking advantage of a loophole in a city law allowing for occupation of privately-held land.The Wall Street label stuck because, well, who’s going to pay much attention to a movement dubbed Occupy Zuccotti Park? The name also represents a generic mislabeling of the prevailing theme concerning the government bailout of the country’s largest banks. If these people had their act together, they’d move the protest up to midtown Manhattan and the corporate headquarters for Bank of America and Citibank. This may have presented practical concerns, as there are no large, privately-held spaces there available for occupation. But they could have chucked the “occupy” bit and just loitered at the foot of Bank of America’s massive new tower in Bryant Park. Hindsight, as any Canadian will tell you, is 20-20.

Having seen enough, I wandered another few blocks over to check out the progress at Ground Zero where the new Freedom Tower* and surrounding structures are going up. Freedom Tower – here’s proof that poor naming choices aren’t limited to Canadian protest groups. Why not just call it the Yay America Building? Still, what we lack in appropriate restraint and subtlety we make up for in unbridled urban development. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they don’t, but protests and buildings rise, get knocked down, then spring back up again. This is, after all, America.

*Further research reveals that they changed the planned Freedom Tower name to One World Trade Center back in 2009. Good to see that more sensible heads prevailed – even if it doesn’t work as well in making my point.

Herb Caen, the much-celebrated, pre-Internet columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, used ellipses to separate the segments of his daily writing and called his work “three-dot journalism.” It was really just a device to string together a series of unrelated, gossipy blurbs, and call it a column. And it worked. Success, in whichever form it takes, is pointless to challenge. Caen wasn’t a hugely talented writer but he had contacts in every corner of the city, never picked up a restaurant tab, and possessed a knack for coining cutesy phrases that captured the popular imagination. This knack in turn led to being credited with other clever things he never said. His was a good gig, and his persona, for many, came to embody the city. That he also coined a phrase to describe his style and that it too caught on is further testament to his ability to elevate what he did beyond what it was. There was a time when I looked upon this with some disdain, but age has a funny way of replacing scorn with reverence.

Herb Caen’s work was a precursor to that which would come to define the Internet, but with some salient distinctions. It was in print and went through an editor; two points which can occasionally equate to thought and restraint, and that separate Caen from a modern-day fluff-scribe like the pudgy Perez Hilton. It’s hard to imagine a time when Hilton’s work will come to be viewed in a reverential light, but who knows, things are declining fast. This occurs to me whenever I check out my Facebook “News Feed.” Many have complained that Facebook doesn’t have a “dislike” button to accompany “like,” but this will never happen. It would lead to a bitter disintegration of the Social Network. That you can only instantly “like” millions of inane postings is testament to the fact that this isn’t an open and social exchange, but in fact a highly controlled environment. Besides, “dislike” alone would never cover it. They’d have to add dozens of other buttons, including “go away”, “nobody cares”, and “if your child was of reading age and saw this, he’d seek foster care.” Again, I’m open to the possibility that mine is simply the opinion of a bitter, old, anti-social crank, but I can’t help thinking that Herb checked out at the right time.

I do have one particular Herb Caen story that I enjoy telling, to the mild chagrin of my good buddy Coleman Miller. Back in the day when Coleman was going by “Scott” and was a brash, young, transplanted Midwestern upstart knocking San Francisco on its ear, we ran in to Herb Caen in a North Beach bar. This was shortly after the Chicago Bears had won the Super Bowl, and Miller was fond of wearing his Bears hat around town on the Friday or Saturday night before they played the 49ers. One of Scott’s favorite phrases was borrowed from Deputy Barney Fife’s description of Ernest T Bass, the rock-throwing, backwoods mountain man on television’s Andy Griffith Show: “He’s a NUT.” It was shortly after midnight and we’d just walked into The Saloon, San Francisco’s oldest bar. It was crowded and when we finally edged up to order a drink the bartender insisted that Scott remove his Bears hat before he would serve him. This did not sit at all well with Miller, but his protesting only caused the guy to move on to other customers. Several minutes later we caught his attention again and Scott lifted the hat slightly above head-level, uttering in condescending concession “Three Budweisers, tough guy..” Being a Niners fan, the whole thing was worth the wait for me.

We barely had time to put a dent in our Buds before spotting Herb. He was cutting his way through the crowd toward the exit, making quite the iconic San Francisco impression in the process: a sixty-something, suitably inebriated writer in an askew Fedora with an attractive thirty year-old woman on either arm. Miller, sensing the chance to recover from the bartender incident, righted his Bears hat and rose to the occasion. Just as Herb passed within earshot he let out a boisterous exclamation: “HERB! .. You NUT!!” There was a pause in Caen’s step and a notable drop in crowd volume making it unnecessary for him to project as much as Scott had to be heard. “You’re pretty crazy yourself,” Herb said in matter of fact tone, and continued on his way. The Niners beat the Bears that weekend, and we didn’t go back to the Saloon for a while.

I watched The Deer Hunter the other night – for the first time, really. I’d seen it on Showtime when I was a kid, back when uncut films playing on pay television were a novelty. I realized, revisiting it, that I’d never watched it through to completion. It was a conversation about George Dzundza, of all things, that brought the DVD to my house. Tom Myers sent it via Fed Ex from California, following a late evening chat about original Law and Order cast members one hot, mid-July evening on my Brooklyn roof. Not sure how the topic came up – probably had to do either with staring at the blue-green glow of lower Manhattan from an almost aerial vantage or simply because it’s fun to try and say “Dzundza” after having had a few beers. Whichever the case, Tom was all over it, his knowledge of film and actors being near encyclopedic. “George Dzundza,” he noted. “He was in The Deer Hunter.”

Robert DeNiro is in the film too, along with Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep and John Cazale. Tom included a note saying that they “don’t make films like this anymore” which would have been cliched if not pointedly true. It’s three hours for one thing; an instant hurdle in trying to pass a movie through the studio system. And it takes its time to develop, including a wedding scene that seems to run almost in real time from formal vows to drunken reception. I found myself becoming impatient, perhaps a result of Internet Age conditioning. And yet as the film progressed, and even several days after watching it, the manner and nuances of the characters established during this sequence came back to validate their subsequent actions. It was almost true to life, like recounting a long, shared trail with seasoned friends and commenting on the stuff you might have seen coming. It’s odd to note that, as I get older, many of the things I retain longest seemed unremarkable upon initial occurrence.

Deer Hunter is an imperfect film, implausible in parts and difficult to accept in an historical context. But the performances make most of this irrelevant. DeNiro gained sixty pounds to play the older Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull and drove a cab in New York City to prepare for Taxi Driver, but it was Deer Hunter that he called the most physically and emotionally demanding project of his career. He got in-role by socializing with local steelworkers in their Pennsylvania homes and drinking with them in the bars. Watching the film you get the sense you probably would’ve wanted to steer clear of him for several months after the production. This was not the same guy cranking out Meet The Fockers sequels today. Cazale was near the end of his life during the filming, sick with cancer and in a relationship with Streep. She threatened to quit upon learning the producers wanted to drop him because of his illness. There’s a rawness of emotion pervading Deer Hunter that would seem difficult to create from nothing.

Michael Cimino directed the film, a reputedly difficult character himself who was obviously at the top of his game. With rare exception, Hollywood is reluctant to put loose-canon geniuses at the reigns anymore. There is no modern-day equivalent to Deer Hunter, and it’s indeed true that they don’t make them like this anymore. Maybe it’s a good thing that they don’t even try.

I got nothing. Not literally, of course; I’m not so oblivious as to discredit family, friends, or my general good fortune. But sometimes it’s reflexive – the first thing that pops into your head when trying to think of something to write or offer something to say. I got nothing. “I’ve” would be the correct form, of course, but this only emphasizes my point.

“Read anything good lately?” I was asked this at a dinner party over the weekend by a tall guy with glasses in a white cotton shirt. It was Summer 2011’s hottest day thus far, which, ironically, is saying something, and I’d been hovering over a corner air conditioner on the fifth floor of a Manhattan apartment, picking at a small portion of lamb and rice on my plastic plate. He looked a little like a towering, Cuban, Steven Soderbergh with Paul Lynde inflection. One of those guys who possesses the kind of on-command exuberance I’m decidedly lacking, but only miss on rare occasion at dinner parties. I told him I was reading a book about the Mitchell Brothers, and that the last thing I could remember reading before this was Crime and Punishment. My mind wasn’t focused on the words coming out of my mouth, but rather on the probability of having to explain who the Mitchells were, followed by a passably thoughtful analysis of what Dostoevsky was getting at. I got nothing .. I got nothing.

The Mitchell explanation led to a brief exchange on the definition of redeeming social value, and we both agreed that Dostoevsky had something. He’d been reading a five hundred page book on the CIA and was much better at selling it than I would have been. Outside of the length and subject, I can’t remember a thing he said. Not because I’m a dismissive, disinterested sort, but rather because I’m not good at channeling my brain and compartmentalizing neurotic rumination. I did a better job earlier in the evening, listening to a pretty, Asian, Dartmouth grad deal one liners on how the first Japanese farmer discovered Kobe beef. Among humor’s many advantages is the option to throw in a well-timed “that’s what she said” as suitable alternative to paying attention.

On the way home I discussed this phenomenon of having nothing with a close friend who agreed I was on to something. The problem, we concurred, was that while social obligation dictates getting out to the occasional dinner party and mixing it up with new people, there is no true motivation to get to know anyone. “That’s what the first grade is for,” she said. “You’re thrown in to a room with a bunch of kids you don’t know, and you’re too little to know anyone besides your parents, so it’s sink or swim.” It continues in this fashion, she explained, until you’re about thirty, at which time you have no need to make new friends unless you move somewhere new or lose all your existing ones in some kind of mass tragedy. I’m sure there are exceptions to her theory, but it made me feel slightly better about my social shortcomings.

I met Tom Myers, who visited me in Brooklyn a few weeks back, well before my thirtieth birthday, thereby excusing me from having to justify the connection. I was home from college, playing on an employee softball team for my dad’s company. I arrived late and rocketed the first ball I threw over Tom’s head while warming up. He reserved external judgement while chasing it down, which may have been an early sign that we’d get along, and I got things under control by my second toss. Tom was visiting Brooklyn as a stopover on his way to Vermont and a reunion with more old friends. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure trip – they were paying respects to the widow of another old buddy. We bar be cued a Newport steak, hung out on my roof, did some socializing, and got dinner in the city one night. I probably rambled a bit more than usual when he was here, likely the result of lacking people who really go back in my current existence. I’m sure he would have gladly taken “I got nothing” by the end of his stay, but it was a good few days.