Willie Mays, 1931-2024

In the summer of 1954 I was eight years old, and my parents and I returned from a three year sojourn in England, where my father, a U.S. Air Force officer, had been stationed. I had been the only American in an English school, so I had been thoroughly Anglicized. I knew of cricket, of what my schoolmates had called "football" but we call soccer, and of something called "rounders," which I later realized had some vague resemblance to baseball. Of baseball itself, though, I knew nothing. Neither of my parents were fans, so it hadn't been part of my acculturation. 

On September 29, 1954 my third grade classmates at the Eglin Air Force Base Elementary School and I were excused from our classrooms early in the afternoon to go to the "cafetorium," where a big black-and-white TV was set up on the stage for us to watch the opening game of the World Series, pitting the New York Giants against the Cleveland Indians. I don't recall having any rooting interest, though I may have favored the Giants since I had been to New York but never to Cleveland (I still haven't, unless you count the airport). One thing remains engraved on my memory from that game: Willie Mays of the Giants making "The Catch" (video above). That was enough to convince me that baseball was something worth watching, and knowing. Thank you, Mr. Mays. 

Willie Mays, considered by many the greatest all-around baseball player ever, died today at 93. I can't help adding that he ended his playing career with the Mets, and that his last hit was a run scoring single in game 3 of the 1973 World Series. Joan Whitney Payson, then the Mets' principal owner, had promised that his number would be retired, but she died in 1975 and her promise remained unfulfilled until Old Timers' Day in August of 2022.

Peter Myers, Octogenarian

The photo above is of three stalwarts of the Bells of Hell, a Greenwich Village pub that served as my second home from the summer of 1977 until it closed in the fall of '79. On the left is Barry Murphy, who tended bar and provided lively conversation. In the center is Pierce Turner, who, along with Larry Kirwan, as Turner and Kirwan of Wexford (their Irish hometown), were the house band at the Bells during much of my tenure there. On the right is Peter Myers, half owner of the Bells from the time he and Tony Heyes bought it from its founder, Malachy McCourt until the late weekend afternoon in '79- I was present at the time - when Peter and Tony got into a physical scuffle, started by Tony and Gary Sellers, the first person I met after first crossing the Bells' threshold in '77, and which resulted in Peter making Tony the sole owner while he went on to found Myers of Keswick, Keswick being Peter's English hometown. 

The occasion of the photo was a party to celebrate Peter's 80th birthday, given at Myers of Keswick. It was a grand affair, bringing together a sizeable collection of surviving Bells alumni. Specialties of the house, including Cornish pasties, Scotch eggs, and sausage rolls, were in profusion, as were beer and wine. I was able to catch up with some old friends I hadn't seen in some years. The store is now managed by Peter's daughter, Jennifer Myers Pulidor, whom I remembered as a kindergartener. By all appearances she's doing an excellent job. I also had some pleasant conversation with Peter's wife, Irene, whom I hadn't seen since the Bells days. 

The photo was taken as the party was ending, and Pierce was singing "The Parting Glass."

The clip above is of an exquisite rendition of this beautiful song by Celtic Woman.

As I was leaving the party, I saw Peter and a friend sitting on a bench outside the store. I stopped for a bit of last minute chat. Peter reminded me that, after his unfortunate encounter with Tony, I had offered my opinion that Tony's words, "It's your f---ing bar!" were not sufficient to transfer ownership, especially given Tony's state of intoxication at the time.  Peter was happy with this advice. 

I then recounted an anecdote I'd read some years ago, about an anthropologist who visited one of the remotest of the Scottish Western Isles and sought someone who would have a long memory and knowledge of the island's lore. He was directed to an old man who, when asked his age, said seventy-something. The anthropologist asked if there were any octogenarians on the island. The old man said, "Octogenarians ... oh, yes, there were two. But my brother shot the one, and the other flew away." I suggested that Peter should avoid the Western Isles. "I go there all the time," he said. Good luck, Peter.

The "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 - Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Chorus

Today is the 200th anniversary of the first public performance of Beethoven's Ninth, or "Choral" Symphony. It was unique in its addition of the human voice in the fourth, final movement. In his analysis of the Ninth in today's New York Times, Daniel Barenboim states that, of all Beethoven's works, it is the one "most likely to be embraced for political purposes."

It was played at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin; it was performed in that city again on Christmas 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Leonard Bernstein replaced the word “Joy” in the choral finale with “Freedom”; the European Union adopted the symphony’s “Ode to Joy” theme as its anthem.

Nevertheless,  Barenboim argues, "[m]usic on its own does not stand for anything except itself," and that the "greatness" of the Ninth "lies in the richness of its contrasts." In this respect, Barenboim states for music what Frank Stella did for visual arts.

The video above is of the climactic "Ode to Joy" finale of the Ninth, performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Chorus, under the direction of Thomas Søndergård.

Frank Stella, 1936-2024

Frank Stella, an American artist whose works included painting, sculpture, printmaking, and architecture, died today at his home in Greenwich Village at the age of 87. The video above, by Christie's, shows him giving a tour through his studio in 2019 in which he shows some of his works and talks about his creative process and his views about art.

According to his New York Times obituary:

Mr. Stella, a formalist of Calvinist severity, rejected all attempts to interpret his work. The sense of mystery, he argued, was a matter of “technical, spatial and painterly ambiguities.” In an oft-quoted admonition to critics, he insisted that “what you see is what you see” — a formulation that became the unofficial motto of the minimalist movement.

Despite his early committment to a minimalist aesthetic, his later works, some of which can be seen in the video, are exuberant in color and design. This might be expected of an artist who has cited Caravaggio as an influence.

Of Tom Rush, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young

Tom Rush has been a favorite singer of mine since I first heard him in the spring of 1968 on Boston's WBCN, which had recently adopted what came to be known as an "underground rock" format. I was in Cambridge then, finishing my first year of law school, and missed the chance to see him live at Club 47, now Passim. The clip above shows him singing "The Circle Game" at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport, Massachusetts on January 31, 2020. At 82 he's still doing shows, although he's limited his early 2024 travel to the New England and Middle Atlantic coasts.

In January I got on my Facebook home page this link to a post by Canadian music historian John Einarson that tells the story behind the song "The Circle Game." I had forgotten that it was written by Joni Mitchell, whom Rush got to know when they were both on the Boston/Cambridge folk circuit in the late sixties. Einarson quotes Mitchell from a talk she gave during a concert at London's Albert Hall in 1970:

"In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock 'n' roll band (...) he had just newly turned 21, and that meant he was no longer allowed into his favourite haunt, which was kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you're over 21 you couldn't get back in there anymore; so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it's one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn't play in this club anymore. 'Cause he was over the hill. (...) So he wrote this song that was called "Oh to live on sugar mountain" which was a lament for his lost youth. (...) And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there's nothing after that, that's a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It's called The Circle Game."

The friend who inspired Mitchell to write "The Circle Game" was Neil Young. It would be some time before the "better dreams and plenty" promised near the song's close came his way. As Einarson tells it, he went through a time of frustration trying to succeed as a folk singer in Toronto, where "Young's career stalled amid stinging criticism of his material." In December of 1965 he traveled to New York and the offices of  Elektra Records. He "remains unsure who secured this" but hoped for a full scale studio recording session. Instead, he was sent into the tape library and greeted by Peter K. Siegel, whom I heard discussing his experiences as a producer at Folkways and later at Elektra last November at the Brooklyn Folk Festival. Siegel gave Young what he, quoted by Einarson, described as "this funky old tape recorder" and told him to sing into it. 

One of the songs he sang into that tape recorder was "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing." According to Einarson,  

"Young identified 'Clancy' as his former Winnipeg high school classmate Ross 'Clancy' Smith. Young described Smith as a 'strange cat'—an aberrant figure tormented by others for singing blithely."

Young did not sing "blithely" for Elektra's tape recorder; consequently, Elektra had no interest in signing him. The clip above is audio of Young singing "Clancy," accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and by piano, at Carnegie Hall in December of 1970. In the five years since his failed Elektra session, he'd had plenty of "practice" to get there. This included his time with Buffalo Springfield (1966-68), which recorded "Clancy," with vocal by Richie Furay instead of Young, and issued it as their first single. It became a local hit in Los Angeles. It was also included in their self-titled first album.

Now, back to Tom Rush. The song that made me a fan of his in the spring of 1968 was his cover of another Joni Mitchell song, "Urge For Going."

The clip above, audio only, is the version I heard on WBCN many times as I sat at my desk, often into the early morning hours, trying to focus on what I needed to know for my forthcoming first year finals. It was springtime in Massachusetts. Why did this song about autumn falling into winter resonate so with me? 

For thirteen years, from 1954, when my parents and I returned from our three year sojourn in England, to 1967, I had lived in Florida. We had "seasons" there, but nothing so dramatic as going from a New England winter with the ground covered in snow for months on end to a riotous spring with almost  every tree on Cambridge Common in bloom. Perhaps it was this sense of what I had missed that made the melancholy of "Urge For Going" meaningful for me.

"Spring Breeze" by Yuxian Deng, performed by the Joshua Guitar Band

A treat for Earth Day:

Why is a widely used app named for a tenth century Scandinavian king?

Your smartphone, like mine, likely has the logo at left on it somewhere. I knew that "Bluetooth" was the name given to an ancient Scandinavian king, but had no clue why the app was named for him. Now, thanks to Rick Spilman in The Old Salt Blog, I know the reason. 

The logo is the Viking rune of King Harald "Blåtand" Gormsson, "Blåtand" is "Bluetooth" in English. The rune is a "bindrune" that combines the runes for "H" and "B." Bluetooth was a Danish king (940-981) who united Denmark with Norway. According to Spilman, Jim Kardach, an engineer who was heavily involved in developing the technology that became Bluetooth, was responsible for giving it that name. Spilman gives a helpful link to an article by Kardach that explains the history. It's a long, complex, but amusing story, including an account of "a pub crawl through wintrily [sic], blustery Toronto." Kardach sums it up as follows: 

When asked about the name Bluetooth, I explained that Bluetooth was borrowed from the 10th century, second King of Denmark, King Harald Bluetooth; who was famous for uniting Scandinavia just as we intended to unite the PC and cellular industries with a short-range wireless link.

So, sometime soon, I will raise a glass of Aquavit and toast Harald Bluetooth, who inspired my ability to play WQXR on my stereo sound system from my smartphone.

 

Mets swept at home in season opening series

The Mets were swept by the Milwaukee Brewers in their season opening three game series at Citi Field. The last time the Mets began a season 0-3 was in 2014. That year they finished 79-83, tied for second in the NL East. Nothing great; but not disastrous. They did better than the fourth place finish that most pundits have predicted for the Mets this season. 

 

There's some reason for hope. Starter Kodai Senga is back to throwing in a recovery program that is said to be "making progress" and closer Edwin Diaz is back and has pitched one inning, allowing no runs and getting one strikeout. Still, injury problems keep cropping up. Tylor Megill, who is taking Senga's place in the starting rotation, was taken out of today's game after four innings, having struggled with control and feeling shoulder tenderness. He will get an MRI.

Along with problems on the mound, the Mets were weak at the plate. They were outscored 14-9, and had twenty hits to the Brewers' thirty one. In one respect the Mets were better: Mets batters struck out twenty one times to the Brewers' thirty. 

A reason to be upbeat is that so many times I've seen a hot start devolve into a "meh" season. My wife is a Red Sox fan. She believes it's a good sign if the Fenway lads struggle as the season begins. They're 2-2 now, in a three way tie for last in the AL East.  I guess she can feel cautiously optimistic, as do I about the Mets.

Pierce Turner, "Hail Glorious St Patrick"

Pierce Turner is an old friend from my days in the late '70s when I was a regular at a Greenwich Village club, the Bells of Hell, where Pierce and fellow Wexford native Larry Kirwan, as Turner & Kirwan of Wexford, were the house band for some time, playing songs that "mixed traditional Irish folk music with full-blown progressive rock."  Later they added a bassist and a drummer (as Turner & Kirwan, Larry banged a drum using a pedal while he played guitar and sang; Pierce played Moog and sang) and became The Major Thinkers. In 1985 Pierce returned to Ireland and began a very successful solo career as a singer and songwriter. Larry remained in New York, became frontman of Black 47, and later conceived and co-wrote the musical Paradise Square, which was nominated for ten Tony awards, including Best Musical. 

The song "Hail Glorious St. Patrick" is "[b]ased on a hymn that was first published in 1853, with words attributed to Sister Agnes, of the Convent of Charleville, County Cork." The music, according to Pierce, "is credited with being 'ancient' -- an apt description, as the melody is as familiar as your mother's scent -- it slips on like an old woollen winter coat, there is no avant-garde challenge." For his version, Pierce kept the chorus and second verse of the original, and "rewrote the rest updating the song for the 21st century, for a world where 'a new kind of evil has blinded our minds.'" 

Pierce's old partner, Larry, has this to say:

Pierce Turner is an Irish national treasure. So, what better man to reimagine Hail Glorious St. Patrick. This is a track for the ages. But don't just take it out for the big day -- it will sound great on the other 364 too. I'll be playing it.

Beannechtai na feile Padraig!  

Flaco the Owl, 2010-2024

Flaco ("skinny" in Spanish, though he appeared anything but), a Eurasian eagle owl, was hatched in a sanctuary in North Carolina in March of 2010. Two months later he was taken to New York's Central Park Zoo, where he lived alone in an enclosure until February 2, 2023 when a vandal broke the screen and allowed him to escape. In the photo (Wikimedia Commons) he's peering through the window of poet, playwright, and lyricist Nan Knighton. 

During his year of freedom, Flaco was often seen in and around Central Park, though he occasionally ventured to other parts of the city. Not surprisingly, he became a local celebrity and favorite photographic subject. To the dismay of his many admirers, though to the relief of the local rat and pigeon populations (but they still have to contend with red-tailed hawks), yesterday Flaco was found dead on an Upper West Side sidewalk, apparently the victim of a collision with a building.

Adios, Flaco. Gracias for the joy you gave to so many during your flights around the city.

Peter Schickele ("PDQ Bach"), 1935-2024

Peter Schickele, who died Tuesday at 88, was a serious composer of "more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber works" who also did arrangements of folk music for Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie; however, somewhat to his regret, he was best known for a fictional character he invented, P,D.Q. Bach, the least known of Johann Sebastian Bach's myriad children. Schickele claimed to have discovered P.D.Q. and his works while serving as professor of music at the University of Southern North Dakota's branch campus at Hoople.

The clip above shows Schickele introducing P.D.Q. Bach's "Classical Rap," followed by audio of the piece. Schickele explains that P.D.Q. wrote it about a neighborhood in early 19th century Vienna, but that he modified it to describe life on Manhattan's Upper West Side. 

Martha and I were fortunate to attend several P.D.Q. Bach concerts some years ago. Most began when Schickele "slid down a rope suspended from the first balcony." If I recall correctly, the opening number for one was another favorite of New Yorkers, the Concerto for Horn and Hardart. For non-New Yorkers, Horn and Hardart was the company that owned the famous "Automat" restaurants.

Thomas Curtiss, Jr., 1941-2023

The photo is of one of the the last times Tom Curtiss and I were together, some years ago, when he and his husband, Charles Neeley, visited New York from L.A., and Martha and I had lunch with them at a Midtown restauruant.

Tom and I were classmates at Harvard Law School from 1967 to 1970.  He stood out in the photo book given to entering students because he was wearing a dress Marine Corps officer's uniform. It showed his home as Novelty, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. We didn't have much contact during our first or second years. The third year we both joined a club for law students called Lincoln's Inn, named for one of the London Inns of Court. After we had been together there during meals and parties, he invited me to join a group that met in his large corner dorm room on Friday evenings to drink beer or cheap Scotch, socialize, and listen to tapes on his Akai reel-to-reel deck. These included Joan Baez's Farewell Angelina, Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home,and a collection of Wagner orchestral pieces, including the overture to Die Meistersinger

The gatherings at "Club 222," as we called it after Tom's dorm room number, were typically all male. Tom was known to date women from time to time. One, a fellow Clevelander, became known by the sobriquet "Long Suffering Kate." There was a proposal to open membership in Lincoln's Inn, which had been male only, to women. I was in favor. Tom said, "A woman should be a date on your arm, not a competitor for a seat at a table." Tom lost; women were admitted. 

Tom had the sort of background that, before I arrived in Cambridge, I feared most of my classmates would have, and that would make them consider me, a public school and state university graduate from the South, something of a yokel. He was a corporate executive's son with impeccable prep and Ivy credentials: Exeter and Yale. The friends he chose for Club 222 didn't conform to those specifications.  They were more like our class as a whole, except for the absence of women or Blacks, both of which groups were under-represented in our class.  They were almost all non-Ivy graduates, about half from state schools, and from middle class families with homes in various parts of the country.

As Tom and I spent more time together we found common interests beyond drinking and music. I was from a military family, and was in Army ROTC during law school as draft deferments for graduate students had ended the year I entered. Tom had deferred law school to join the Marines. He told me he had been accepted by both the Harvard and University of Virginia law schools during his senior year at Yale. When his four year Marine Corps tour of duty was almost over, he wrote to both schools, noting that he had been accepted before going on active duty, and asking if he could now attend. Virginia turned him down, saying their admission standards had increased, but Harvard said he was still welcome. Tom gave me some advice on what to expect during my active duty term. We also found a common passion in running. One time, after the party at 222 went later than usual, I collapsed on his couch. In the morning he said he was going for a run and invited me to join him. We ran down to the Cambridge bank of the Charles River, went about half a mile downstream, crossed to the Boston side, then ran back. We repeated this several times before graduation. 

I found a law firm in New York that was willing to take me on knowing I would have to leave for a possible two year Army commitment a year after graduation. Tom chose a firm in Los Angeles, a city he had come to love during his active duty Marine years. In October of 1970 I took my first vacation from my law firm and visited Tom in L.A., a city with which I was then unfamiliar. Tom was sharing an apartment with Joe, another Marine, Tom told me there's no such thing as an "ex-Marine"; one is a Marine for life. He suggested dinner at a Mexican restaurant. We got in his car and went a mile or so on the freeway, exited, and foud the restaurant closed. He said, "There's another not too far away." We got back on the freeway and went what seemed like three or four miles in the direction opposite from which we'd come. We had a delicious Mexican meal, and I gained an appreciation of what "not too far" means in L.A. terms.

The rest of our short visit Tom showed me the Santa Monica Pier and some things off the usual tourist trail. One of these was a sprawling outdoor farmers' market. Several years later he told me he had walked by a live poultry stand and spotted an unusual looking rooster. Intrigued, Tom bought him and took him to the backyard of the house he'd bought on Micheltorena Street, where he made a coop. Hearing his staccato crowing the next morning, Tom gave him the ironic name Chanticleer.

Over the succeeding years Tom and I got together in L.A. and New York several times, and once at a Law School reunion. After a succession of housemates, Charles Neeley became a constant. I began to suspect that Charles was more than a housemate when Tom called and said both of them would be staying in New York for a few days before leaving on a trip to Europe.  During that visit Martha had a commitment one afternoon, so Tom, Charles, and I took Cordelia (then known as Liz) in her stroller on a tour of SoHo and the Village. Martha developed an immediate liking for both Tom and Charles.

Their last visit to New York was about fifteen years ago. They went with Martha, Cordelia, and me to mass at Grace Church, and after to brunch at Jack the Horse Tavern, a favorite neighborhood spot named for a lake in Minnesota, the owner's native state. During brunch, I asked Tom if, during our law school years, he'd been so far in the closet he didn't know he was there. He said , "No"; he had known he was gay since his teens. He also said he'd had a discreet affair with one of the Club 222 members.

After brunch I invited Tom and Charles to join me on a walk down to Brooklyn Bridge Park. Tom regretted that he couldn't; he was bothred by neuropathy. After that his health went into decline, and our communications became, apart from Christmas cards, exclusively electronic. It came as no surprise when Charles announced his death on December 23.

Tom's and my friendship lasted over fifty years. We came from different backgrounds and had some differing views, but it was a friendship from which I believe we both benefited. I will miss him.