Who Asked Me?

Spring has sprung – according to the window sign in Francesco’s pizza anyway. I typically look to Francesco’s for these reminders. Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Remember To Vote – this is the kind of stuff that slips easily past when you reach a certain age and don’t have a local food establishment there to clue you in. There’s still a particular communal, family-oriented vibe present in Brooklyn that’s lacking in San Francisco. It’s difficult to pin down, but I see it when I stop in Francesco’s to get a slice and small salad to go, and note two older Italian dudes having some pizza and talking about how they invest their money. “I’m getting at least seventy percent of it out of this goddamn country, I’ll tell you that ..” It’s there in the young family of four without time to plan a meal or make a reservation, sitting together and enjoying a casual dinner of just-ordered baked ziti while Frank Sinatra croons on Sirius Radio. It’s there in the fact that this joint is neither highly-touted nor exceptional, but consistent, always-open, and delicious. And it’s there in the fact that this place is far from one of a kind in Brooklyn.

I mean not to disparage my other main city out west; only to compare and contrast. Try getting an Irish Coffee in Brooklyn, for instance – particularly when it isn’t being served at my house or as a St. Patrick’s Day novelty item, in a ridiculous glass with half a can of spray-on whipped cream. Try finding some fresh, cracked Dungeness crab or comparing the Verrazano Bridge to the Golden Gate. Try finding a real hill, for God’s sake, or a view of something other than Manhattan that takes your breath away. Still, there’s something to those friendly, seasonal reminders posted outside the local pizza joint, and to being able to read them without being harassed for change or suspicion of being a Straight White Male.

I’ve noticed recent indications of the two respective cities (well, one city and one borough, technically) spilling over to one another. There’s the emergence of excellent new pizza restaurants in North Beach, and even a few spots where one can grab an average slice to go. Brooklyn has a few places to get a San Francisco Mission-style burrito, but if the Park Slope taqueria I tried the other night is any example, they’re about as close to figuring it out as Michael Jackson is to completing that European concert tour. Amazingly this place gets decent reviews out here. Somebody needs to call San Francisco for a delivery so they at least have a point of reference. Both the Park Slope and San Francisco restaurants see fit to give themselves the name “The Taqueria”, but only the latter lives up to this heady billing.  Perhaps it’s best that certain charms be left to certain cities. Vive la difference, as the French would be well-advised not to say in Brooklyn. There are enough constants in this world anyway… like Spring coming around just a little faster every year.

My buddy Tom Myers, who was in Los Angeles for his second consecutive Oscar nomination Sunday night, is on his way to becoming the Jeff Bridges of sound men. He lost to a Swedish dude with two middle initials who made a slightly less grandiose speech than the Indian guy who managed to work the definition of “Om” in to his thank-yous last year.  If Tom does follow Bridges’ route, and hangs in there until his sixties before taking home a statue, it may be the most savvy move in the history of technical awards. I don’t think they keep these behind the scenes types around if they’ve already won. They certainly don’t sit them front and center for on-camera eye candy like George Clooney, or even prop them up in back for the Ed Asner/Robert Duvall sympathy vote. My guess is that it’s a one and out kind of thing, so best to get in as many trial runs as possible while rubbing shoulders with Kate Winslet and Maggie Gyllenhaal at the concession stand. Tom sent me a text message Sunday afternoon (as close as I’ll ever get to the Big Show) telling me he’d suppressed the urge to yell “Hey now!” as Jeffrey Tambor passed him in the hall. I didn’t point it out at the time, but Tambor has never been nominated for an Oscar, and yet I’d put five minutes of his Hank Kingsley from The Larry Sanders Show up against anything I saw in The Hurt Locker.

Despite coming from a family with arguable ties to the film industry, my only interest in the last two Academy Awards has been in Tom’s nominations. It’s difficult to get past the self-congratulatory, celebrity circle-jerk element of the whole deal. If hearing Whoopi Goldberg tell her fellow actors “I’m really glad we do what we do, man – we are amazing” didn’t make me cringe, it would probably be time to call it a day. And this new trend of having one group of actors stand on the stage and shower glorious platitudes upon those nominated while the canonized touch their hearts and put their hands together in saintly appreciation is enough to make Joey Chestnut gag. Still, the brief mention of our company during a ’91 acceptance speech generated more attention than any ad campaign we ever ran. Tens of millions watch the broadcast every year, and I can’t make a solid argument that the interest is any more vacuous than my own in Joe Montana winning a Super Bowl or Tim Lincecum the Cy Young. Further, Tom Myers, the most prominent example among fellow employees to emerge from my era of working at our company, is also the most un-Hollywood type you could find. I just wish he’d worked a little harder on his pitching delivery, growing up playing baseball in Philadelphia. This won’t, however, prevent my rooting for his nomination again next year.

It’s dark in here; can’t see the sky – Tom Russell

Dave Alvin, who played the City Winery on Varick Street in Soho Tuesday night, has grown comfortably into his looks. Back in his punk/roots days with the Blasters, beside brother Phil, slicing through glass-sharp leads on his ’64 Fender Mustang, Alvin’s appearance was borderline unnerving. Red-faced and sweating, with a widow’s peak/pompadour that was a combination of the Eddies Cochran and Munster with a side of Joe Jackson, there was almost something too authentic about the guy. And indeed the Blasters were both ahead of and behind their time, never quite finding a fit despite opening for Queen and playing Farm Aid in 1985. They were hard to classify; Punk, Roots, American, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Rockabilly, Blues – they fit them all. Dave went on to play in several groups – X and The Knitters among them, and in recent years has hit a nice stride fronting multiple acts, most recently both the Guilty Men and Guilty Women. He’s also become to California what Springsteen is to New Jersey, including the state in many a song, album title, and musical theme. Alvin gets California in a way specific to his era and place of birth (Downey, in Southeast Los Angeles County.) He also understands an authentically western dimension to the state that’s as sprawling and rural as anything short of Texas, and that attracted Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam and Merle Haggard. Los Angeles is a hard place to pin down, and if you drive a little in any direction it gets even trickier.

But it was Manhattan on Tuesday night, with Dave trying to get his chops down on the opener of his current tour with two of the Guilty Women – Cindy Cashdollar (on slide guitar) and Christy McWilson (providing inspired harmony and vocal leads.) He joked that this was the reverse of the typical tour that starts in Alabama and works the kinks out along the way before New York City, but promised a heck of a show for anyone making the trip to Birmingham. It wasn’t necessary – there was nothing substandard about Tuesday’s performance and at times it was sublime. His cover of Tom Russell’s “Blue Wing” kind of justified his admission that he doesn’t always correct folks who tell him “hey, I really like that song of yours.” He owned the piece and embodied the lyrics. “Potter’s Field” was equally good, and before its performance some guy in back referenced Amy Farris who sang with the Guilty Women before her apparent suicide last year. “You touched a tender subject” Alvin remarked, but said nothing more before seeming to channel Farris in the song, which he and McWilson nailed. There was a heavy spirit in the air, and while he didn’t speak of Farris, Alvin did mention his close friend and sidekick Chris Gaffney, who also died last year. There’s a tangible sense of Western Blues in Dave Alvin’s music, and somehow the heaviness of the evening mixed well with equal parts levity and nerves, and the music soared.

The next night at home, I found myself thinking about the show and curious as to who Amy Farris was. I looked her up online and came across the obituary in the LA Times, along with a few other postings about her death. There was a MySpace page and a few blogs, and a lot of comments from people whose children had been among her music students. She was angelic and beautiful, exceptionally talented, and according to those who knew her, full of spirit. And she killed herself. I didn’t know her music that well – although I may have caught her appearing at one of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festivals in San Francisco. Some guy who was close to her wrote a nice piece about what she had meant to him, and remarked “she confided in me about many things, and in me is where those things will remain.” I thought that was kind of cool, and it reminded me of Dave Alvin the previous evening, choosing not to elaborate and then singing that beautiful song. There are plenty of sorts out there who can go on and on about troubled people they’ve known and what, exactly, contributed to their makeup. But keeping one’s mouth shut and carrying that load is a bit of a dying art. It’s about as common as finding someone who can sing a song, and put something in where you can really feel it, whether it’s technically perfect or not.

Every little thing is temporary – Vic Chesnutt

The late-thirty-something business chick at SFO’s International (and JetBlue’s Domestic) Terminal is holding court with two twenty-something, clean-cut, glad-to-be-employed underling dudes, all of them enjoying a responsible late-morning beverage at the Firewood Grill airport bistro. “The objective,” she asserts confidently, “is to get the team to collaborate on that strategy, and to be the owner of that strategy.” Something about the way she places great emphasis on the word “owner” reminds me of a quote from my buddy Tom Myers, regarding Gavin MacLeod of Love Boat fame and his performance as Captain Merrill Stubing: “I just want to put a spike through that guy’s bald head.” While the company-speak chick in question sports an adequate mane of Clairol-tinted locks, the sentiment remains firmly intact.

A few hours later and a thousand miles out of San Francisco, the cosmic interconnectivity of it all is called home when the very same Gavin MacLeod appears in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show playing on my JetBlue DIRECTV. Granted, he’s a gifted thespian – but how many times during an average day do I pause to make some circuitous mental connection to the man? And here he is, only hours later, on the small screen in front of me. It’s all too much to ponder and I quickly reach for the armrest button to flip over to Celebrity Rehab, where Dennis Rodman is offering very little in the first group meeting (to the apparent chagrin of a puff-lipped Heidi Fleiss and jarringly sincere Mackenzie Phillips) and explaining that he’s “way beyond this” and only there “for court.” It seems a fair enough assertion, and it occurs to me that the singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt would have made a compelling guest on this program had he survived the Holiday Season.

A few mornings later, having ostensibly survived the above-mentioned season myself, I’m on a Manhattan-bound F Train, standing next to a tall fortyish fellow with a neatly trimmed gray goatee, stylishly creased blue jeans, and unmarked red sneakers. He proceeds to remove a straight-razor knife with decorative mother of pearl handle from a dark cloth pouch in his breast pocket, and touch its blade with his finger. His expression conveys calm satisfaction more than it does menace, and were it not for the context of his actions everything would be more or less cool. “Paranoid schizophrenic,” a more qualified interpreter explains to me later in the day, but in the moment things move too quickly to worry about such labels. I choose instead not to make eye contact, and he exits the train two stops later, the blade safely back in his coat pocket. He apologizes politely for bumping an oblivious passenger on his way out.

Still later in the afternoon, on the same line but now Brooklyn-bound, an amiable, middle-aged black dude with skull cap starts singing a semi-original composition that he’s preserved in neat cursive writing on a crumpled piece of binder paper. “Seen good times and bad times with fortunes untold / but I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold.” This does not, however, stop him from requesting a donation after finishing his song. I don’t give him anything, but do consider asking if he’s checked the price of silver or gold lately, as they’ve shot up markedly. Instead I say nothing and offer a pleasant (if tight) grin. Off the train I stop at Esposito’s Pork Store on Court for turkey on a roll with mayo, and take some odd comfort in the way the huge deli guy with impressive guns, shaved head and ample tats refers to me repeatedly as “my brother.” I wonder what he would have done earlier on the train with Straight Razor Man. A framed, autographed photo of the establishment’s owner with Tony Soprano is nailed above the register: Best porkchop I ever had – James Gandolfini. Really says it all.

I’ve been watching the Paul Giamatti John Adams mini series of late – a fine show if you can get past the emphasis on accurately portraying the barbaric medical practices of the time. Open-wound smallpox cures, bloodletting and anesthesia-free surgery quickly lose novelty in a post-dinner environment. It does help illustrate the collective colonial fortitude necessary to get a new country off the ground. We’d never make it past the Boston Massacre today, soft lot that we are, using prostate examinations and swine flu vaccinations as legitimate reason to avoid doctors. What would John Adams think? The production also places emphasis on the poor dental hygiene of the era, and pronounced absence of teeth-whitening. Giamatti pulls the look off admirably – much better than, say, George Clooney might have. His street cred as a former baseball commissioner’s son lends itself to the role of a Founding Father, and pulchritudinous attributes aside, the guy can act. Still, there are close-ups toward the end of the series that validate the decision to cast him in place of Sean Penn for the part of Larry Fine in the upcoming Three Stooges movie.

Adams, as portrayed by Giamatti, is a flawed man of considerable achievement whose determination and energy are matched only by his lack of people-skills. Nowhere is this more evident than in his relationship with his sons, whom he sees as having every advantage in life and needing only to continue on the path he’s carved. They all suffer as result, whether abiding his wishes or not. Colleagues and in-laws are also subjected to his my way or the highway approach, and one mildly-disgraced son in law resolves to “head west” where he’s identified some “prospects.” Things beyond the Appalachians were sketchier then, and prospects didn’t include a gig on the back lot at Universal Studios.

I was thinking about this idea of “heading west” watching the show. Perhaps not so coincidentally, I’ve also been listening to two solo albums by Blasters guitarist Dave Alvin – West of West and King of California. Alvin covers the Kate Wolf song Here In California on the first collection, and the lyrics include the admonition: “there’s no gold, I thought I’d warn you / and the hills turn brown in the summertime.” I have a friend who moved to California from Boston and she remarked on how this death-brown summertime hue bothered her at first – perhaps because it was contrary to every mythically regenerative promise of western migration. Over time her appreciation broadened, and she came to see the expanse of golden brown hills punctuated by dark oak patches as intensely beautiful. I’m still waiting for similar revelation to take hold regarding the gentle waft of voluminous curbside trash amid stifling August heat in New York City. It’s a process and hardship is relative, as any colonial settler or Donner Party traveler might tell you. What’s more remarkable is that this innate instinct to move remains intact for so many- whether fleeing British taxation, narcississtic John Adams parenting, or just the nagging sensation that if you stand still you’ll die. However you cut it, it all catches up with you in the end anyway.