Who Asked Me?

If I should fall from grace with God
where no doctor can relieve me  – MacGowan

I saw Steve Earle play the City Winery on Varick Street Monday night, a fine coastal transition the day after flying in from San Francisco. He opened with a geared-down version of the Pogues’ If I Should Fall From Grace With God and noted that he likes to play it that way because “you can’t hear the fuckin’ words when MacGowan sings it.” Earle has a point, but as with most of his points it gets you thinking “yeah, but ..”  Shane MacGowan wrote the tune and his reckless, toothless, sobriety-free delivery embodies the grace-falling theme. I was much more bothered that he consented to its use in a Subaru spot, of all things, than by having to give it multiple listens to discover that he’s as good with the pen as he is poor with the drink. Earle speaks from some familiarity, at least, having teamed with the Pogues for Johnny Come Lately on his Copperhead Road album. But as a live performer he sometimes makes the cardinal mistake of over-talking his songs. After finishing his great ode to Townes Van Zandt, Fort Worth Blues, he couldn’t let it sit. “That last line there is what you call poetic license,” he explained “I say that ‘Paris never was my kind of town,’ when in fact it is precisely my kind of town.” This was met with hearty, in-the-know applause from the crowd, most of whom probably had no connection with Steve’s Parisian affection . Seeing an artist live forces one to reconcile his idea of the work with the real person. Yeah, great to know that you dig Paris, Steve. But I’ll never listen to Fort Worth Blues the same way again.

Getting older can sometimes be an exercise in protecting the things that meant something to you the first time around. I was in Specs’ tavern in San Francisco a few Christmas Eves back, ordering a round of Irish coffees while Fairytale of New York spun on the CD player. I dig the song, but its seasonal poignancy can wear a bit thin if you’ve spent any time in Irish bars around December in New York and heard it rival Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl for most over-played jukebox tune of all time. The young, thoroughly inebriated guy next to me felt the need to share his emotions, having just discovered this melancholy Pogues tune that makes mention of Christmas Eve, on Christmas Eve. “This is the greatest fuckin’ song ever,” he slurred earnestly. “Yeah, it’s pretty good,” I offered, not exactly dismissively, but enough to set him off. “You just don’t get it man,” he told me,“you just don’t get it.” I smiled and said “Merry Christmas”, then returned to my table. What was I going to do, point out that I prefer the provincial poignancy of Sally MacLennane or note that I do relate to the truthfulness of the trade-off lyrics between Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl when he says “I could have been someone” and she retorts “well so could anyone“? Life is short and Irish coffees cool way too fast.

And so it is that I return to New York, which isn’t a bad place to return to, again. I caught the Super Bowl during the flight on the small screen in front of me, sharing some peanut brittle with a generous, slender, blonde divorcee sitting to my left. The next day I exited my apartment for a run and picked up on the conversation between the local fixtures hanging outside the corner bodega, all of them sporting victorious Giants blue. “Yeah .. it might not have looked like it on TV .. but if you watched the way they hit – I mean really watched the way they hit – that’s all you needed to know about how that team came together at the end.” I pulled my thermal hat down to better warm my head and began to jog. Sometimes all you need is a sentence or two, and you’re good to go.

smiling and waving and looking so fine – Bowie

Took a walk Sunday night after couching it with the NFL wild card all afternoon.Who does this Tim Tebow kid think he is, thanking his Lord and Savior and giving all credit to his teammates? Doesn’t he know that folks like their religious references kept obscure, like in ’82 when Montana to Clark changed a franchise and Dwight rose to unnatural heights to make The Catch? Clark concluded that it was “God or something” that got him up there. The “or something” makes all the difference and is potentially the most palatable, denomination-crossing phrase since “who wants pizza?” Anyway, it was reasonably cold and beautifully clear and I wore my long winter coat from Italy in ’89 and had the whole Brooklyn Promenade to myself. The new World Trade building stood across the water, dimly illuminated with work lights, facade creeping upward and cranes atop still adding on. It’s on these occasions that I have a vague and hardly unique sensation of wanting to somehow possess this city, or a small piece at least – put it in my pocket or make my name modestly associated with its own. Then God or something snaps me out of it, a gentle voice from beyond the Chrysler Building admonishing “don’t be an asshole.”

I spotted Paul Giamatti a few weeks prior while jogging past the corner of Pierrepont and Clinton in Brooklyn Heights. He’s a neighbor of mine, though the cognizance is uni-directional. Owns a fairly modest spread, by quirky-looking leading man standards, on Hicks somewhere. I’d finished watching the John Adams miniseries the week before and was looking all middle-age cool in my thuggish knit cap with shades and iPod cranked. For a moment I pictured myself yelling “Yo Paul – John Adams is the shit!” and he acknowledging in sheepish appreciation as I ran past toward Court Street. I didn’t of course, not being that type, though these sand-drawn lines are by no means uncrossable. I’ve still got an admirable set of pipes on the rare occasion I decide to speak up in a crowd. Giamatti’s got an unusual speaking voice too and would make a fine modern-day Charlton Heston choice for The Tim Tebow Story, putting the game-winning calls in the boy’s head. “Brown-left-slot spring right option, snap on two. And go easy with my name in the post game.”

Faith has no provable evolutionary precedent. As my Scottish friend Denis once wrote “I’ve been reading the King James VI biography. He dies in the end.” So why would anyone begrudge a 24 year-old quarterback exercising his god-given right to take a prayerful knee in the end zone for reasons other than volunteering a safety? Tebow passed for 316 yards on Sunday; his favorite biblical verse being John 3:16. He wears the reference written in to his eye black on occasion, along with other passages. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. It’s a nice sentiment, but at the risk of exposing my blasphemous soul in print, wouldn’t that eternal life thing take some of the shine off of Montana to Clark, and other once-in-a-lifetime experiences? John 3:16 has enjoyed widespread and resurgent public recognition since Sunday’s game, which is fine with me and better placed than in major political party debates. As it says in Isaiah 39:8 “Good is the word of the Lord thou hast spoken.” And there ain’t nothing like a little eye black and Google to give it some legs.

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.