2020, here's your hat. What's your hurry?

On New Year's day 1980, as I recall, someone observed, "Here's to the passing of a real kidney stone of a decade." The seventies had their ups and downs for me, but on balance more up than down. They began with my finishing law school and getting a job in New York. After a year I had to leave temporarily to do two years' Army Reserve active duty. When I returned, I settled into a Greenwich Village that was still an affordable neighborhood for artistic and journalistic sorts, and had bars like the Bells of Hell and the Lion's Head where I could enjoy their company. I had a brief marriage that didn't end traumatically; Joanna and I remained friends until her untimely death in 1993.

I found that the temptations of the Village demimonde didn't mix well with being an associate at what was becoming a high powered corporate law firm, so I left and took an in-house job with a corporate client. When I found even that more than I wanted to handle at the time, I decided to go back to school. My work in regulatory law had sparked an interest in economics, and New York University offered an MBA program with an econ major. With the GI Bill, indulgent parents, and the availability of part-time work, I was able to enjoy a slightly before mid life sabbatical from the demands of full time law practice. I ended the seventies as I had begun them, as a student. They also saw my brief moment of glory as a movie actor, thanks to my friend Charlie McCrann, who would later die in the World Trade Center. There's more about my late seventies adventures here.

Like the seventies, 2020 started for me on a comfortable note. I was still working; my profligacy in my younger days had assured that retirement would be a distant goal. Martha, my wife of over 28 years, was working on interesting projects for clients concerning their archives and genealogy. When COVID-19 hit, I was able to transition to working at home. Martha had already been doing most of her work on her computer here, with occasional visits to her clients to examine archival material. The COVID restrictions had no impact on our ability to continue our gainful employment. 

It did affect our social life, though not in a completely devastating way. About a month after the restrictions were imposed, our favorite place to sit at the bar, have a light supper with cocktails or wine, and socialize with friends or with strangers we met there, along with the bartenders and floor staff, and with Tim, the genial owner who would sometimes join us at the bar, Jack the Horse Tavern (Tim named it for a lake in his native Minnesota), closed permanently. Other places around us managed to keep going, and in good weather we could meet friends for drinks and snacks at outdoor tables, dine on take out, or dine indoors while it was allowed, with strict occupancy limits and spacing. Now that indoor restaurant dining is banned and winter weather is putting a severe crimp on outdoor dining, despite the gas heaters and overhead canopies many restaurants have provided, we fear for the survival of our other neighborhood haunts.

We live in a large building, and have several close friends in the building with whom we've been able to socialize in very small gatherings. We've had Zoom sessions with our more far flung friends and relatives. Our daughter, Liz, and her boyfriend came up from Philadelphia for two days during the week before Thanksgiving. We shared our Thanksgiving meal with one friend, and had Christmas dinner by ourselves.

As I noted here previously, the COVID restrictions imposed in March initially made us give up in person church services. These were replaced by Zoom and live streamed ones. When the infection numbers declined, unfortunately after Easter, we went back to in person services, but with attendance limited - reservations required - and strict social distancing. When infection rates went up, just before the Christmas season, we were required to go back to Zoom and live streaming.

The "New Normal" has, for Martha and me, so far been tolerable, though its long term effects may be less so. We support the requirements intended to limit the spread of the pandemic, such as mask wearing and social distancing. I know that COVID-19 has been disastrous for many other less fortunate people, often fatally. It has also intensified, or at least made more evident, a rift in our social and political fabric. I hope to do whatever I can, in my small way, to mend that rift. I know that those on my side of the rift - one of the few things I celebrate about 2020 is the outcome of the presidential election - have no monopoly on virtue. 

It's been my custom, sometime in January, to look back on the previous year and note those among my friends, relatives, and heroes who have died, along with those who have been helpful to my writing venture or inspirational in a broader sense. I will continue that custom this coming month. As for now, goodbye 2020. Don't let the door hit your backside on the way out. 

Ken Radnofsky and Damien Francouer-Krzyzek play the third movement, "Christopher Street," of David Amram's Greenwich Village Portraits.

I've been fortunate to know David Amram since my Bells of Hell and Lion's Head days. Last month he presented a performance of his recent works at Le Poisson Rouge, a performance venue that occupies the space once belonging to Art d'Lugoff's Village Gate. My wife and I attended, along with a good number of other Lion's Head alums. One of the compositions on the program was Greenwich Village Portraits, with three movements dedicated, respectively, to Arthur Miller, Odetta, and Frank McCourt. The last of these, titled "Christopher Street," evokes the memory of the Lion's Head, which was Frank's favorite bar. It was performed by saxophonist Ken Radnofsky and by Damien Francouer-Krzyzek on piano. I made the video above from our table, some distance from the stage, which explains the people walking past and the unfortunate clattering of flatware. Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised that the sound came through as well as it did.

The movement begins with a sprightly Irish jig tune, the name of which escapes me (perhaps a reader can help) announced on piano, then developed in variations on sax. At 2:40, the piano announces the second theme, based on "Wild Mountain Thyme (Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?)," picked up by the sax at 3:50. At 4:59, Radnofsky begins a variation at turns happy and mournful, but at 6:00 this gives way to a lively development that resolves back briefly to "Wild Mountain Thyme" at 7:50 before ending joyously.
 
"Wild Mountain Thyme" was a traditional closing song at the Lion's Head. The video above is of David playing it, and assembled Lion's Head veterans joining in voice, at the Cornelia Street Cafe two years ago.

Addendum: David offers the following news about future events:

They are presenting an evening of my chamber music, performed by members of the New York Philharmonic,  The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the Boston Symphony April 29th. Woody Guthrie's daughter , Nora Guthrie will also be there to speak about the   formal release of my new CD THIS LAND: Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie, which I conducted with the Colorado Symphony, based on her father's iconic song, and the evening will be dedicated in memory of Pete Seeger, with whom Amram often collaborated with for the past half century.

The opening event will be April 26th with a screening of Lawrence Kraman's new documentary film "David Amram:The First 80 Years".

following the Q.and A. after the screening, there will be an urban hike through the Upper West Side, where I will revisit many of the places where I have collaborated musically over the last  60 years with a great variety of gifted people

We'll begin our hike by visiting The Lincoln Center itself, where Leonard Bernstein appointed me as the New York Philharmonic's first-ever composer -in-residence, and go the the park outside near the fountains where i did concerts of every variety for years. 

We'll go to the old site where  Birdland once stood, as the final remaining landmark from the golden days of 52nd street, where i played with the jazz greats during the 1950s.

We will see some of the Broadway theaters where I composed incidental music for fifteen dramatic productions

We will walk by  Thelonious Monk's old dwelling (which now is landmarked by the city), where he took me under his wing and mentored me in the early 50s, when i was playing with Charles Mingus at night and studying composition at Manhattan school of /music during the day.

We will take a stroll to the old site where Shakespeare in the Park had their first season, before the Delecourt Theater was built, where Joseph Papp had me as the festival's first composer and musical director for 12 seasons, where i composed  scores for 30+ productions,

We will visit  the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater where i worked with Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan as their first composer for three years, while the building was being completed and many other venues in the neighborhood  where i conducted free out of doors Symphony concerts, played jazz.folk and world music concerts, performed for peace gatherings, political campaigns, jazz/poetry readings and all kinds of events. 

Programs, photographs, articles and videos of all of these endeavors are now documented in my archive which the Lincoln Center Library has acquired.

 I hope these activities and viewing of the archive itself  will be of value to young people who may come to any of the events this April and then check out the archive.

Hopefully it will make them feel that everyone of us can have a great life if we work hard, stay the course, refuse to accept career councilor's advice (which is usually to give up pursuing your path before you are even sure what that path is) and just go out start all over every day with renewed energy, share what blessings we have with others, show respect for every person who crosses our path, try to always do better than is expected and ENJOY life!!

J. Press gets the New York real estate squeeze; Gray's Papaya in the Village goes down the hatch.

This post is about two New York City institutions--although the first is principally a New Haven institution and my first contact with it was in Cambridge, Massachusetts--that have recently disappeared, although in the instance of the first one the disappearance may be temporary, and in the instance of the second it is fortunately not complete. That I'm sorry to see them both go reflects two disparate--some might say incoherent--sides of my personality.

My first contact with the clothier J. Press was in the late spring of 1970. I was about to graduate from law school, and needed a suit. Press had a store on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, and I'd gotten word that they sold good clothes. I showed up the day after a big Harvard Square anti-war riot, and found that all of the store's windows had been broken and covered with plywood. I was about to turn back, but saw a hand lettered sign by the door: "We're open, please come in."

It was a bit gloomy inside, but before long I found a suit I liked, one that spoke to my characteristic desire to achieve two incompatible goals: to be at once conventional and daring. It was a traditional natural shoulder center vented three button with plain fronted trousers in charcoal gray, but with a subtle electric blue windowpane check. As I was trying on the jacket, I said to the salesman, "It looks like you bore the brunt of the attack yesterday." "Oh, yes sir," he said, "I was here through the whole thing. These people, sir, they were the very scum of the earth. You could tell by the way they were dressed."

After I graduated and started work at a New York law firm, my suit caught the disapproving eye of a partner who was the firm's unofficial sartorial enforcer. That electric blue check didn't please him. He suggested I try Brooks Brothers. I did; they had a branch conveniently located downtown near my firm's offices. On my first visit there, another man asked a clerk if they had what were then called "permanent press" shirts. "Oh, no sir," the clerk said witheringly, "We are an all cotton store." I bought some sufficiently conservative togs there, though I later managed to push the envelope a bit by getting a dark brown suit with maroon chalk stripes.

I also found J. Press's New York store, on 44th Street between Madison and Fifth avenues, just around the corner from Brooks's main store at 346 Madison. I shopped at Press on occasion, although I don't have a clear recollection of what I bought. Vaguely, I can summon from memory a mustard yellow blazer--or was it a blue blazer and mustard yellow slacks? They also had good ties. As years went by, I became more of a Brooks loyalist; I don't recall the last time I went into J. Press, but it was certainly over twenty years ago. A few years ago, I was walking along 44th and saw their storefront was vacant. My heart sank a bit. Though I hadn't shopped there in years, I still cherished the memory of my first encounter with Press in Cambridge. Moreover, I liked their commitment to the classic three button jacket style, as in the photo above, and their willingness to do things a little bit daring, like putting the jacket over a tennis (or cricket) sweater, or like the windowpane check on my suit. I was relieved to learn that they had just moved their store to a new location at Madison and 47th Street.

Now I've learned, through the good offices of Francis Morrone, that the store at Madison and 47th has closed because the landlord is renovating the building, although my further research shows that the owners may reopen the store at a different New York location, perhaps in 2015. If they do, I will go there and buy something, even if it's only a tie.

And now, as the Pythons were wont to say, for something completely different:

Gray's Papaya at Sixth Avenue (that's Avenue of the Americas for non-New Yorkers) and Eighth Street was my resort for a quick and satisfying tummy fill and revitalizing fruit drink on many a decadent Greenwich Village night in my dissolute unmarried days (and a few post-marriage ones, about which my wife had something to say). I always got the "Recession Special" (available no matter what the condition of the GNP, the unemployment rate, or the stock market: $1.95 back in the 1990s* for two dogs, which I always got with mustard and kraut, and a sixteen ounce papaya drink) and left feeling much the better for it, which is more than I can say for most fast food outlets. 

Sad as I am about losing this connection to my mid-life crisis, I'm even more distressed to know what's replacing it: "a shiny health food shop that sells pricey liquified kale and wheatgrass." Not that I have anything against "health food"; I occasionally indulge. The key is "pricey": the Village has lost its Bohemian charm and become a bedroom community for the well-to-do as well as a place mostly catering to tourists. In this respect I must re-post here some of what my friend Dave Coles had to say:

Walking east toward Sixth, I find only interlopers: sushi bars and designer hair salons; sterile boutique windows lit by laser-tight pins of light; card shops touting ribbons and balloons, any kind of trifle; coffee chains and sandwich franchises, the commerce and character of Village streets having become nearly indistinguishable from any in Cleveland or Wilmington or Naperville.

I remember reading somewhere that Lou Reed liked to get his "mystery tubesteaks" at Gray's. Perhaps it's fitting that the Village Gray's died shortly after its perhaps most famous regular customer. At least the Gray's at Broadway and 72nd Street survives for now. Someday soon I'll make the trip to the Upper Left Side.
__________

*According to Gothamist, in 2008 Gray's raised the price of the "Recession Special" to $4.45, after previous increases in 2002 and 2006. The article quotes Mr. Gray: "It's always very traumatic for me as well as the customers."

Sam Edwards, "In the Last Days of the Empire."

Sam Edwards, I'm told, was a bartender at "55," the joint next door to the Lion's Head. I seldom went into 55; whenever I did my nostrils were assailed by the smell of insecticide. There was good jazz there, but in those days I'd yet to develop an ear for it. My few visits were occasioned by hearing that someone I liked who'd been 86'd from the Head (which, despite its raffish reputation, maintained fairly strict standards of decorum) was having a drink there. It was owned by Bradley Cunnigham, who also owned Bradley's, an upscale bar and restaurant on University Place where my appreciation for jazz got a jolt one evening from listening to Joanne Brackeen. I heard that Bradley made more money off 55 than from Bradley's. Bradley's, like the Lion's Head, is long gone, but 55 survives.

Sam's video and poem, for which I must again offer thanks to Michael Simmons, is about Greenwich Village before I arrived; the Village of my high school and college aspirations that I, and others like me, unwittingly helped to destroy. Like Michael, I was delighted to see, in one of the photos in the montage that accompanies the reading of the poem, a poster for a concert by David Amram.