Has the Venter Institute created artificial life?

In a sense, yes, but in my view, mostly no.

Wall Street Journal: Heralding a new era in biology, scientists for the first time have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions, which can survive and reproduce itself, researchers at the private J. Craig Venter Institute announced Thursday.

"We call it the first synthetic cell," said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. "These are very much real cells."

What the Venter Institute scientists did was to create a complete, artificially sequenced genome, insert it into an existing bacterium cell, and thereby cause that cell to transform itself into a different species, which can reproduce itself in the new form. This new form has characteristics that distinguish it from other bacteria of the same species. This is a significant advance in biotechnology, which previously has been limited to splicing segments of genetic code onto existing genomes, thereby changing in some respect the characteristics of the cells with the altered genomes.

The use of existing, living cells as hosts for the artificial genomes means that life has not been created, as it were, from the ground up. It would, I imagine, be possible to do that by synthesizing from inorganic sources the chemicals that make up the body of the cell, assembling an artificial cell body from them, then inserting an artificial genome including nucleotides that themselves have been synthesized. This, I suppose, would be a very difficult project. Someone may do it some day, just to be able to say it could be done. The availability of ready made cell bodies to serve as hosts for artificially sequenced genomes, however, means there is probably no practical reason for such an undertaking.

Sampling Brooklyn Brewery's lineup.

Having previously sampled the Sam Adams and Saranac lines of beer and ale, I've finally gotten around to what I should have written about first: the products of a brewery located not far from where I live, the Brooklyn Brewery. A few months ago, I bought a bottle each of the six Brooklyn brews available at my local market and, over the course of a couple of days, tasted them and made notes. Then I misplaced the notes. Last week, I noticed that Brooklyn Summer Ale (see photo above), which wasn't available when I did my earlier tasting, was back on the shelf. So, I bought a bottle and had it with lunch. This inspired me to do a thorough search, in which I uncovered my notes from the winter. Since I've had the Summer Ale most recently, and summer is approaching, I'll start with it.

Brooklyn Summer Ale: Rich golden color; nose yeasty but with fruit overtones. My first reaction on tasting was that this ale lacks any outstanding qualities; it's pleasant without there being anything memorable about it. The finish has a slightly fat, glycerin-y quality. However, as I tucked into my falafel sandwich from Damascus Bread & Pastry Shop--I get mine with the works: lettuce, tomato, pickle, red cabbage, tahini and hot red sauce--I noticed the ale reacting nicely with the spiciness of the sandwich to produce a sublime tart apple-like flavor. The Brewery's website recommends pairing it with "lightly spicy dishes". That seems good advice but, heck, I'd like to try it with a vindaloo curry.

Brooklyn Lager: The brewery's flagship. Deep orange color, aroma like freshly-made toast, with a hint of banana. Good malt-hop balance, with a suggestion of carrot in the finish. This is a robust beer that goes well with heartier foods like grilled meats, roasted or fried chicken or fried fish. The website describes this as "in the 'Vienna' style"; this description was also applied to Saranac's "Season's Best" issued in 2008, which I liked very much.

Brooklyn Pilsner: Deep golden color shading to amber; herbaceous, hoppy nose. Hop bitterness is predominant, but not too assertive, leading to a pleasant, citrus-y finish. The Pilsner style, a kind of lagered beer that originated in what is now the Czech Republic, is the style of most mass-marketed, and many local stalwart, beers in the U.S. It's versatile: Pilsners go well with most kinds of food, including spicy Asian and Latin American cuisines, and it takes well to chilling, so can be enjoyed alone as a thirst quencher on a hot afternoon.

Brooklyn Pennant Ale '55: Deep amber color; yeasty aroma. On the tongue, it gives a suggestion of apricots, then finishes with a pleasing nutty taste. This is a sentimental favorite of mine. I fell in love with baseball, and with the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, when I was nine years old and living in Florida. The brew was named in honor of the Brooklyn team's only World Series victory--they lost to the hated Yankees in '56 and moved to L.A. in '57. As I recall, the Brewery was pressured to remove "'55" from the label by the Dodgers organization, which is notoriously zealous in attacking anything it can arguably construe as a trademark infringement. Apparently, the Brewery prevailed. In my view, the Dodgers should be held to have forfeited any claim to anything involving Brooklyn, or the team's history here, when they went west.

Brooklyn Winter Ale: Red-orange color; aroma suggestive of peach blossoms. Slight hint of banana on the tongue and, like the Summer Ale, a slippery, glycerin-y finish. I haven't tried this with food, but suspect that, like the Summer Ale, a bit of spice might improve it. Not a bad brew, just nothing special.

Brooklyn Brown Ale: Reddish brown color; yeasty nose with floral overtones. Sweet start; tart finish, with a coffee-like astringency. This is a very well crafted ale. The website suggests pairing it with beef or cheese. It's good as a stand-alone drink, too.

Brooklyn East India Pale Ale: Amber color; aroma of herbes de Provence with citrus undertones. In the mouth, forward hop bitterness is nicely balanced by malt warmth, leading to a finish like brioche or a croissant. I've long been a big fan of IPAs, loving their intensity of flavor. This one is a fine example of the genre.

Missing from this lineup is the Brooklyner Weisse, which I haven't seen since last year. I'll add a review as soon as I can find some.

All of the above bottled beers and ales are brewed under contract (and, according to the Brewery's website, under the supervision of the Brewery's brewmaster) by F.X. Matt in Utica, New York. Matt also makes the Saranac line of brews. However, according to the Brooklyn Brewery website, there are four bottled brews, none of which I've ever seen, that are made at the Brewery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. These are: "Brooklyn Local 1, Brooklyn Local 2, Brooklyner-Schneider Hopfen-Weisse, and Black Ops." I'll be grateful to anyone who can tell me where to get these. Some of the Brewery's cask brews are made in Williamsburg, too.

A few years ago, while attending a conference on Brooklyn's economic future, I had the pleasure of meeting Brooklyn Brewery's President and co-founder, Steve Hindy. I asked if he could say there would never be a "Brooklyn Light"; he assured me this was not in their plans. I later learned that his wife was the principal of my daughter's middle school.

There are other craft breweries in Brooklyn today, including Kelso and Sixpoint, both of whose brews I have enjoyed on tap at local taverns. I'll be writing more about them later.

Folk fest: Amy Speace, Buskin & Batteau, and a Mother's Day greeting from Christine Lavin

I first heard Amy Speace on a friend's CD about a year ago, and tagged her as a singer to watch. At the time, I couldn't find any videos on-line of her in performance. On Friday, Eliot Wagner posted on OTBKB a link to the video above of Amy doing the ballad "It's Too Late to Call It a Night", as earlier posted on Now I've Heard Everything.

Among the musicians backing Amy on this song are David Buskin and Robert Batteau. Some years ago, I caught them in performance at the late, lamented Bottom Line, and this was part of their set:


As I recall, Buskin & Batteau were on the same bill with Christine Lavin, who is seen here doing a song appropriate for Mother's Day:


Thanks to piddlepuddle for this clip of Christine performing at the Unitarian Center in Ashland, Oregon.

Continuing, sort of, the Mother's Day theme, I'll close by returning to Amy Speace, doing "Double Wide Trailer":


Thanks to bprism for this clip, made at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in 2008.

Windy

Casements clatter; outside,
trees do legless tarantellas
as molecules schuss the isobar slope.
Gas gives as good as it gets.

¡Viva México!

Bob Sheidler reminds me that I almost let Cinco de Mayo pass unnoticed. Fortunately, he posted on Facebook the above YouTube clip of Los Lonely Boys, accompanied by Carlos Santana, doing a medley of "La Bamba" and "I Don't Wanna Lose Your Love", in honor of the holiday. According to the notes to the clip, this was performed at the 2004 Latin Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Los Lonely Boys are the Garza brothers: Henry (guitar and lead vocal), Jojo (bass), and Ringo (drums, natch). They hail from San Angelo, Texas. The shout-out, "Erica, we love you!" is for their niece, who was hospitalized at the time of the performance, but recovered from her injury.

Mets rise to first in the NL East: can we really stop the season now?

So, all I had to do was ignore them for a while, and they rocket from the cellar of the NL East to first place, sweeping successive series from the Braves and Dodgers. I was sure their tenuous grip on the top rung would slip tonight, as they faced the defending National League champion Phillies in Philly. Not so.

Just as an amusing game, let's imagine what would happen if the regular season were over now. In the National League, the Cards, winning the Central and having the best record in the League, would open with home field advantage against the Giants, assuming they win tonight; they lead the Rockies 5-2 in the bottom of the sixth. (Should Colorado rally to win, the NL wild card would go to the--believe it or not--Nationals.) The East champion Mets would have home field advantage facing the West winners, the Padres. In the Phony Baseball League, the best record would belong to the East winning Rays, who would face the West winners. That could be the Mariners, should they win a game with the Rangers that's now tied at zero in the bottom of the tenth; if Seattle loses, it would be the winner of a one-game playoff between the Angels and Athletics. Meanwhile, the Central champ Twins would face the wild card Yanks.

5/1 update: of course, all I had to do was start watching them, and they imploded. The "of course" may seem gratuitous, but I'm enough of a narcissist (or is it solipsist?) to wonder if my act of observing them alters the facts on the ground. Are the Mets like Schroedinger's cat?

5/2 update: so much for brief dreams of glory. If Santana can give up ten runs, I'm back to ignoring baseball.

Harvard Law Dean Martha Minow on the Stevens succession and other things.

Martha Minow is the twelfth Dean of Harvard Law School (not counting those who have served in an acting capacity) since the deanship was established in 1870 (the Law School itself was established in 1817), and the second woman--the first of whom was her immediate predecessor, Elena Kagan--to hold that office. She and Kagan, who left Harvard to serve as Solicitor General, are now both under consideration as the successor to retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Last weekend, I attended a class reunion in Cambridge, and Dean Minow spoke to the returning alumni. As expected, she concentrated on what was happening at the Law School, prominent among which was the curriculum revision, the first of any real substance since the Law School's first Dean, Christopher Columbus Langdell, introduced the case method. Minow had been appointed by Kagan, while she was still Dean, to take on curriculum reform, and so was instrumental in adding to the first year curriculum (by reducing the traditional courses such as contracts to four hours from five) courses on legislation and regulation, as well as a January inter-term devoted to problem solving.

When she invited questions, Dean Minow got many about Law School issues, but some on national ones as well. One alum asked how she felt about a former student of hers, Barack Obama, becoming President. A Yale Law alumna, she responded with a paraphrase of the final words of another famous Yalie, Nathan Hale: "I only regret that I have but one faculty to give to my country." She explained that, since President Obama's inauguration, Harvard Law had lost seven faculty members (Kagan presumably included) to Washington.

Inevitably, she was asked her thoughts on replacing Stevens. She said that his were "very big shoes to fill." She recalled being called into his chambers, during her time as a clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, and told by Stevens that her memorandum had caused him to reconsider his position on a case. In any event, she said, she hopes his successor equals his qualities of character, independence, and conscience.

Joe Queenan is my kind of Yankee-hater.

Enough about me for a while. It's time to engage in one of my favorite pastimes: name dropping.

Joe Queenan is a friend of a friend. I've conversed with him on several occasions, at said friend's birthday parties. He seems an all around fine fellow, despite being a Republican. Joe once wrote that anyone under 35 who isn't a Democrat has no heart, and anyone over that age who isn't a Republican has no brain, or something to that effect. Needless to say we disagree on that point. Anyway, one matter on which we heartily agree is this: we both loathe the New York Yankees. In his essay, "Keep Your Team Out of My Book", published in last Thursday's New York Times, Joe tells of putting down David Benioff's novel, City of Theives, despite good recommendations.

“City of Thieves,” set during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, is about a Russian teenager who will be shot by Stalin’s police unless he tracks down a dozen eggs to be used in baking a wedding cake for a colonel’s daughter. Since cannibalism has already broken out in the city, eggs are clearly going to be hard to come by. So, as I opened to the first page, I was primed for a rip-­roaring adventure.

But almost immediately the whole exercise was ruined. The narrator, the young boy’s grandson, reveals on Page 2 that after the war, his grandfather came to America and became a “devout” New York Yankees fan. I found this revelation crushing. The idea that someone who had escaped the siege of Leningrad would then voluntarily join the evil empire in the Bronx struck me as repellent. So I set the book aside and donated it to my library. Maybe some Yankees fan would enjoy it. I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Joe goes on to note that (like me) he has no problem with "homegrown" Yankee fans, though he adds (again with my concurrence), "Yankees fans born in Queens or Brooklyn, it goes without saying, are Iscariots." (A particularly egregious example of the latter, in my view, though perhaps not Joe's, he being a Republican, is one Rudolph Giuliani.) What Joe, who grew up in a housing project in Philadelphia, in his words a "fiendishly inbred sports town", can't stand is "the kind of parvenu, out-of-town front-runner who becomes a 'die-hard' Yankees fan without any moral, cultural, ethnic, genetic or geographical connection with the team."

Returning to City of Theives, Joe writes:

[I]t is simply unconscionable that a survivor of the siege would become a Yankees fan. Stalin would have been a Yankees fan. There’s a guy who loved to gang up on the weak and defenseless. There’s a front-runner if there ever was one.

In the Grand Central Food Hall

In the Grand Central Food Hall,
I'm sampling wild boar salami
while Jon Corneal asks the musical question:
"Do you know how it feels to be lonesome?"
I'm in love with the modern world.

Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky take a tugboat ride.

This short, silent film was made in 1969, when Allen Ginsberg and his partner and fellow poet Peter Orlovsky were invited to ride on the trial run of the newly built tugboat Elsbeth. Ginsberg became friends with the tug's builder, Latham Smith, while observing the boat's construction. There's more about this in the current New Yorker.

More morning walk photos: Brooklyn, Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan

Cadman Plaza Park, Brooklyn.


Looking north from Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian and bike path toward Foley Square, Manhattan (McKim, Mead & White's 1914 Municipal Building at left; Cass Gilbert's 1936 U.S. Courthouse, with tower of St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church in foreground, at center; Gruzen & Partners' 1973 NYC Police Headquarters at right). Oh, yes. Cherry blossoms, too.


Cactus and hyacinths, Manhattan entrance to Brooklyn Bridge.


Racing yachts, North Cove, Battery Park City, Manhattan.


City Hall Park, Manhattan. More cherry blossoms.


Building under construction, lower Manhattan, seen looking south from Brooklyn Bridge.


Tug approaching Brooklyn Bridge.


North entrance to Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Yet more cherry blossoms, and some forsythia.

Mets win opener; Yanks lose theirs--can we stop the season now?

Oh, wait, the Braves and Phils both won, too. Why must life be so complicated?

Last night we were visiting friends. After dinner, we watched the first four and a half innings of the Yanks-Red Sox game. I had already pretty much written off this season in advance, and as the Yank batters kept pounding Beckett, my gloom seemed confirmed. My Bay State born wife argued that the Sox never do anything until the seventh inning, but in the top of the fifth our host, a fellow Yankee-hater, declared the game over, and we switched to the NCAA women's basketball semifinal between Connecticut and Baylor, a game made exciting only because our host had the Huskies* giving 24 points, and his son had the other side of the bet. We left before the half, and this morning, listening to WQXR on the clock radio, I learned that the son won the bet, as UConn's margin of victory was a mere twenty. More surprising, to me, was that the Sox had rallied to a 9-7 win over the Bronx Bullies, though my wife said, "Of course. I only worry when they get ahead early."

Today, as a vouchsafe for my sanity, I resolved not to watch the Mets game. Around mid afternoon, as I was coming in from an errand, I heard game noise on the doorman's radio. "Any score?" I asked, with some trepidation. "Two to one", he said. "Two to one who?" "Mets", he replied. "What inning?" "Top of the sixth." Great, I thought, that lead will evaporate soon enough. Had I the courage to turn on my TV when I got back to my apartment, I would have seen the Mets score four in the bottom of the sixth, then add another in the seventh and cruise to a 7-1 victory over the Marlins.

Alas, one game does not a season make. (Note to Twif: you've already accused me of sounding like a Cubs fan. BTW, the Cubs were on the losing end of their opener with the Braves. Atlanta scored two touchdowns, with one missed PAT, and a field goal, while Chicago could manage only a FG and a safety.)

Update: Duke edges Butler in the NCAA men's basketball final, thereby adding evidence for the theory that "Same old, same old" usually applies in sports.

4.6 update: UConn continues its stranglehold on the women's NCAA championship, but Stanford gives them a run for it, just as Butler did Duke in the mens' tourney. Meanwhile, the Yanks even their series with Boston. My wife could have called this one, as the Sox scored first, and led by 3-1 going into the fifth. The final was 6-4 Yanks.

4.7 update: Twif explains the mascot thing. It's just a bad pun: UConn Huskies, geddit?

Yanks win again, and Mets lose in ten. Sanity, alas, is returning to the baseball universe. Time to concentrate on other things.
__________
*Ohio is the Buckeye State, and Ohio State's teams are the Buckeyes. Connecticut is the Nutmeg State. Why aren't Uconn's teams called the Nutmegs? I mean, what do huskies have to do with Connecticut, anyway?

Someone from Tehran just visited this blog.

The web search term was, "please bang my wife."

John Lennon recites Kerouac, and more on Walt Whitman and the Beats

Dr. John Lennon, Assistant Professor of English at St. Francis College, Brooklyn, reads the 241st Chorus of Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues in Greenwich Village on March 28, 2010. Across the street is the former site of Cafe Bohemia, a jazz club where Kerouac, among many other luminaries, was a frequent customer.



The story of how Charlie Parker, subject of the 241st Chorus, made Cafe Bohemia a successful jazz spot despite never playing there, is told here.



John's performance marked the close of a two day conference on the topic "Walt Whitman and the Beats", presented by St. Francis College. The first day included eight panel discussions among which twenty four scholars presented papers on topics relevant to both the poetry of Whitman and the literature of the Beats a century later. The keynote address was given by noted Beat Generation scholar Ann Charters, who built her talk around Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California", a part of which is:

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

The following day there were two walking tours. The first was of "Whitman's Brooklyn", of which, unfortunately, little physical evidence remains. The tour was led by Greg Trupiano, Artistic Director of The Walt Whitman Project, shown in the photo above standing next to Whitman Close, the townhouse development that replaced the building that housed the Rome brothers' print shop, where Whitman labored over typesetting to produce the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Greg is holding up a booklet about the print shop. Photos of this area before it was leveled to provide space for the townhouses and adjacent high rises are here; as you scroll down through the photos, beginning with the fourth photo you will find a building with a red sign on which is "restaurant" in white letters. This was the building that housed the Rome print shop.

Following the Whitman tour, your correspondent and others took the subway to Manhattan to explore landmarks of Beat Generation history in Greenwich Village. Fortunately, thanks in part to the efforts of Jane Jacobs, many of these have survived, although in some instances in different guises.



We gathered next to the Minetta Tavern, where William S. Burroughs would treat his less affluent friends, Ginsberg and Kerouac, to dinner.



One Beat landmark rendered unrecognizable is Fugazzi's, now remade into "Kudo Beans", partly obscured in the photo above by the marquee of the International Film Center. It was immortalized in Ginsberg's Howl:

...who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox...

This is the door to the brownstone house in which the poet, playwright and political activist Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, lived for a time in the 1950s. Standing next to the door is Fiona Anderson, of Kings College London, who, the previous day, read her paper "A trail of drift and debris: Traces of Whitman in the correspondence art of Ray Johnson", and thereby introduced me to an artist associated with the Beats with whom I was previously unfamiliar (see clip below).





The tour concluded with Dr. Lennon's reading of the 241st Chorus of Mexico City Blues, but at the beginning (unfortunately, he was well into it before I had the sense to think of video) Dr. Thomas Bierowski, Assistant Professor of English at Alvernia University, treated us to a recitation of the 228th Chorus, which concludes:

Praised be the embrace of soft sleep
--the valor of angels in valleys
of hell on earth below--
Praised be the Non ending--
Praised be the lights of earth-man--
Praised be the watchers--
Praised be my fellow man
For dwelling in milk

The New York Times' Homeric nod.

This just in from the Gray Lady:

President Obama and his Russian counterpart, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, have broken through a logjam in their arms control negotiations and expect to sign a new treaty slashing American and Russian nuclear arsenals in Prague next month, officials from both nations said Wednesday.

Russia and the U.S. both maintain nuclear arsenals in Prague? Does Vaclav Klaus know about this?

Scenes from a morning walk.

Lady Liberty versus the smog monster. Shot from the Brooklyn Bridge while walking toward Manhattan.


Greenwich and Murray streets, lower Manhattan. All of these buildings are of recent (post 1990) construction. On the left is an apartment building. The tall structure in the background is the new Goldman Sachs headquarters, designed by Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, now nearing completion.


Heather growing on the Irish Hunger Memorial. In the background are apartment buildings in Battery Park City.


Willows next to the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The main building, to the left, is hexagonal in reference to the six pointed Star of David and in remembrance of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. To the right is the newer Morgenthau Wing. Both were designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates LLC.


This shot was taken facing north from the edge of the World Trade Center site. The small plaza was created after the area was devastated by the collapse of the towers. In the center is Jeff Koons' sculpture "Balloon Flower (Red)". A video of the artist discussing his work is here.


On my return leg toward Brooklyn, a tugboat passed under the Bridge.

The Wolfe Tones, "My Heart is in Ireland"

From dmcpromotions:

The legendary Wolfe Tones performing My Heart Is In Ireland at the openair Siamsa Cois Laoi, Cork, in 1986. Over 40,000 fans bouncing to the Tones!

Balder returns.

Just over two years ago, I spotted the self-unloading bulk cargo ship Balder going seaward on the East River. A few days ago I glanced through a window in my apartment and saw something large and bright orange coming through the channel between Governors Island and lower Manhattan toward the East River entrance. I grabbed my camera and went across the street to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where I got this shot of Balder, fully loaded and headed to a berth at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I get occasional visits to this blog off web searches for Balder. A few days before I took this photo, I got such a hit from somewhere in Quebec. There are several ships, including Balder, Atlantic Superior, and Alice Oldendorff, that have hauled crushed stone from Canada to the Navy Yard.

Mets win spring training opener.

What's more, they beat the Braves, a traditional nemesis. Nevertheless, there had to be an injury-related worm in the apple, as pitcher Elmer Dessens is removed after a line drive hits his knee.

So, what does this mean in the great scheme of things? In the immortal words of Mr. Natural, "Don't mean shee-it." Remember, they won the spring training opener last year.

Remembering some 1960s pop music: Dave Clark Five, Gale Garnett, We Five.

Many of us boomers think of the 1960s as the acme of pop music. Several genres had their origin, and sometimes their demise, in that decade: Motown, Philly and Memphis Stax/Volt soul; surf; Phil Spector's "wall of sound"; British invasion (itself consisting of several sub-genres such as Merseybeat, the Oxford sound, and various R&B influenced styles: London--think the Rolling Stones; Newcastle--think the Animals; and Belfast--think Them and Van Morrison); folk rock; San Francisco psychedelia; and even an early sort of disco exemplified by Joey Dee and the Starliters. In this post, I've collected a few of the perhaps less enduringly famous remnants of that decade which I nevertheless remember fondly. Some of these are grainy black and white videos with less than perfect sound, but I hope you can enjoy them.

The Dave Clark Five, "Glad All Over" and "Bits and Pieces":
During 1964 and '65, this group--unusual in being named for their drummer--rivaled the Beatles and Stones in popularity. The British Pathé news clip above introduces the band and shows "live" (lip-synched) performances of their first two hits: "Glad All Over" and "Bits and Pieces".

Gale Garnett, "We'll Sing in the Sunshine":

The radio soundtrack for my first term at the University of South Florida in the fall of 1964 prominently included this song, along with Manfed Mann's "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy", Gene Pitney's "It Hurts to Be in Love", and "She's Not There" by the Zombies. Gale was later an occasional visitor to the Lion's Head, but I never met her.

We Five, "You Were on My Mind":

We Five were not quite a one hit wonder; after "You Were on My Mind" a later recording, now forgotten, made it to 31 on the pop charts. "You Were on My Mind", written by Sylvia Fricker Tyson of Ian and Sylvia, reached number three on the Billboard "Hot 100" in August of 1965. Much of its success, and that of the subsequent album, can be attributed to the style and vocal range of their lead singer, Beverly Bivens. She has been compared to, among others, Fairport Convention's first female singer, Judy Dyble.

Baseball (yawn!) is happening again.

For some years now, the words "pitchers and catchers report" have, for me, been a tonic in bleak February. Not so this year. I'm a Mets fan, and what I've learned to expect from the Mets is MOTS (More Of The Same). "The same", of course, is disappointment, compounded of anemic hitting, porous defense, inconsistent pitching, and, mostly, a DL that, as the season progresses, comes to resemble a casualty roster from Anzio. This year, with spring training just starting, Carlos Beltran is out until at least May following surgery and ace starter Johan Santana is coming off surgery, though evidently looking good in his first bullpen session. The acquisition of Jason Bay adds a good hitter to the outfield, but one who is (the Mets really need this) prone to injury. For a wrap-up of the Mets' offseason, it's hard to beat Jon Lewin's Mets Hot Stove Roundup: the Pilot Light is Out. (Jon asks readers to buy him a coffee on PayPal. I don't have a PayPal account, but if Jon should have occasion to visit Brooklyn Heights, I'll be glad to treat him to some of Lassen & Hennigs' premium joe.)

If there's any reason for hope, it's that the Mets don't have, to invoke a well-worn phrase, the burden of expectations. I'm keeping my expectations low: a few days ago, I posted as my Facebook status that I was rooting for them to finish no lower than third in the NL East. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm convinced I should be happy if, once again, they can finish ahead of the Nats.

Update: Twif (a.k.a. Ethel, as in "Stop torturing me,..."), who either is as hostile to capitalization as e.e. cummings or has the same difficulty with the shift key as Don Marquis' archy, says: "hey, don't forget that the phillies went out and got roy halladay."

Dale Hawkins, 1936-2010

LaVern Baker, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Bo Diddley, Don and Phil Everly, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Ritchie Valens: these are the stars of the first generation of rock and roll. Today only Chuck, the Everlys and (improbably) Jerry Lee survive. There were others of that cohort who didn't achieve the same degree of fame but nevertheless influenced the history of rock. Among these were Charlie Gracie, Janis Martin, Big Joe Turner, Link Wray, and Dale Hawkins. With the death of Dale Hawkins last Saturday, Charlie Gracie is the only survivor of these five.

The clip above, from Dale's own YouTube channel, shows him performing a tribute to Bo Diddley, backed on guitar by James Burton, who has played with, among others, Elvis and Marshall Chapman.

Thanks to Michael Simmons for giving me the following Hawkins quote; his advice to aspiring rockers: "Study the masters, man. . . . Grab the roots and see how it evolved and know what's real."

Townes van Zandt, "Rake"

Townes van Zandt (1944-1997) had a voice and a lyric pen I'll always miss. The clip above (courtesy of lapislazuli42) was, according to its caption, made at a "private concert" at a Holiday Inn in Houston, in 1988. I think this must have been done late at night, following a gig, or perhaps after a long day's travel. His voice sounds a little weary, but that fits the song perfectly.

The splendor that was steam: Nickel Plate and Pere Marquette Berkshires in action.

To get the full effect of this video, double click twice to bring it to full screen size, and crank up the volume.

Because I was born on the leading edge of the baby boom, I was able to witness what train buffs, among whom I count myself, call the "transition period", during which steam still supplied a significant portion of motive power on railroads. My childhood memories include Union Pacific's enormous Big Boy and Challenger articulated locomotives pulling seemingly endless blocks of bright yellow-orange refrigerator cars over Sherman Hill in Wyoming, streamlined steamers on high-speed passenger runs on British Railways, and the Pennsylvania Railroad's formidable array of steam power on both freight and passenger trains that thundered past my mother's home town, Tyrone, Pennsylvania.

So I was delighted to find this short (ten minutes) video of two locomotives from the last years of steam (both built in the late '40s or early '50s) that have been preserved in working order, pulling a train of restored transition era freight cars, running on the tracks of the Great Lakes Central Railroad across the flat farmland of central Michigan. Both are of the "Berkshire", or 2-8-4, type, with two (one on each side) forward small "pilot" wheels; eight large, powered driving wheels; and four small trailing wheels under the large firebox. They are of virtually identical design, having been built for railroads under common ownership, that followed parallel routes. The Nickel Plate, officially the New York, Chicago & St. Louis (it got its nickname because it was a high-speed route with top quality trackage, built entirely for cash), followed the southern shore of Lake Erie from Buffalo across Ohio to Chicago. The Pere Marquette, named for a French priest and explorer, followed the most direct route from Buffalo to Detroit, across southern Ontario to the north of Lake Erie. Today, these roads are under different ownership. Nickel Plate is part of Norfolk Southern, one of the two great surviving rail systems in the eastern U.S., while Pere Marquette is part of its rival, CSX.

This video is by Lerro Productions and JoMiFu. Thanks to silverprint2002 of NYC Maritime for the link.

The song of the hour.

The great Satchmo, who would have loved tonight's Super Bowl result.

Update: Someone commented on this post, in Chinese. Using Babel Fish, I got the following translation:

The human must cherish hoped that only then the live joy, the day only will then cross substantially, meaningful, will have the vitality, will have the confidence.

Seems on point to me.

Lower Manhattan architectural contrasts, redux.

In my almost daily walks across the Brooklyn Bridge and back I've found time to admire the examples of various architectural styles represented among the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan (see this earlier post). In the photo above, taken from the Bridge, the American International Building casts its shadow on One Chase Manhattan Plaza. American International, designed by the architectural firm Clinton & Russell, Holton & George, was completed in 1932 for the petroleum and utilities conglomerate Cities Service, and was later sold to the now-distressed insurance giant AIG. It is a fine example of the art deco skyscraper style that came to dominate the New York City skyline (other well known examples being the Chrysler, Empire State, and General Electric buildings in midtown Manhattan) during the 1920s and 30s. There are some very good photos of details of the building here.

One Chase was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Bunshaft and SOM were influential in making the international style of architecture dominant in post World War Two New York office building design. One Chase was completed in 1961 to serve as the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank, now merged into JPMorgan Chase. When I first settled in New York in the early 1970s, the law firm with which I was associated had its offices in One Chase. From a distance, the building has a light, almost lace-like appearance. I found, however, when I first approached it, that the huge load-bearing exterior columns on the north and south facades give it a massive, almost forbidding aspect.

Other buildings prominent in this photo are 60 Wall Street, the building with a truncated pyramidal roof immediately to the left of the American International Building, and 180 Maiden Lane, the building sheathed in green-tinted glass immediately to the left of 60 Wall. These buildings, both completed in the 1980s, exemplify very different architectural styles. 60 Wall is in the style sometimes called "postmodern", which reacted to the austerity of the international style by incorporating decorative elements evocative of neoclassicism or art deco. 80 Maiden Lane is in what could be said to be a direct offshoot of the international style, in which the rectangular box form was forsaken in favor of structures with walls meeting at acute or obtuse angles, and beveled edges, giving the impression, as one commentator put it years ago, of buildings produced by machine tools.

Is civilization a product of intoxication?

I've long considered the moderate consumption of alcohol to be a useful, if not essential, adjunct to civilized life. According to this Der Spiegel article, however, booze may have been, if not the mother, at least the midwife of civilization. Among the interesting recent anthropological discoveries: beer may have been invented in what is now Iran, where having a tipple today can get you a flogging.

Note the comment by reader "hxie", who observes that "[i]n the days before mechanised agriculture in Europe beer supplied a large proportion of the sustenance required for physical labour during the harvest."

Thanks to Michael Simmons for the tip: I owe you a beer the next time you're in New York (or I'm in L.A.).

My SOTU trivial observation.

The President had to make do with having his head flanked by Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. Governor McDonnell, giving the Republican response, had the advantage of hand-picking his audience and his camera angle, which had him bracketed by an African-American woman and an Asian-American man. In both instances, the male member of the flanking pair nodded affirmatively almost incessantly. How soon will we see a Biden bobblehead on the market?

Update: No need to wait, sez the ever-alert Twif. There already is one (but get your order in fast; they've sold like hotcakes and there's, as of this writing, just one left).

It seems I'll have to watch the Super Bowl, after all.

I've never been much of an NFL fan. As I've explained before, I came of sports fan age in Florida long before there were Bucs or Jaguars, or even Dolphins. Back in the 1950s and '60s, the college game was the Real Deal. I took an occasional interest in pro ball; for a while, I was a fan of the Baltimore Colts because my dad and I had watched their star running back, Lenny Moore, when he played for the Eglin Air Force Base Eagles. (For a time, I thought the horseshoe design on the Colts' helmet was a "U" for Unitas.) Still, I was always more interested in the fortunes of the Florida Gators and Florida State Seminoles. Having no connection to either school, I rooted for both, but usually rooted for State when they played Florida because of my weakness for underdogs. This later changed when Bobby Bowden built the 'Noles into a superpower; my algorithm then was to back whichever team had the best shot at post-season glory.

After moving to New York, and having read Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes, I declared myself a Giants fan. In 1976, however, the Tampa Bay Bucs came on the scene, tempting me with old hometown loyalty. I went to the Lion's Head to watch them play the Giants, who had just forsaken the City to play in their new stadium in the New Jersey meadowlands. I arrived, checked the score on the TV, and said to Tommy the bartender, "Looks like my home town team isn't doing so hot." "Yeah," Tommy said, "Jersey's beating 'em."

After that, my interest in baseball began to eclipse that in football, though I still followed the college game. I would watch the Super Bowl, usually rooting for whichever team was rated the underdog. I did root for the Giants in 1986, when they beat the Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. However, in 1990, when they played the Bills in XXV, I secretly (since I watched the game at the apartment of a Giants fan) rooted for Buffalo because of their underdog status and my (some would say perverse) liking for the Queen City of the Niagara Frontier.

This year I was impressed by the Saints, and thought it would be a good thing for poor New Orleans, another city I love, to get a championship. Then along came the Jets, rising from mid-season near disaster to defeat the Colts, I team I have loathed since Robert Irsay deliberately sabotaged the franchise in Baltimore, then shipped the team's equipment out of town under cover of night. I thought the Bengals would prove the Jets' nemesis, but against all conventional wisdom they won two games from them, both decisively. It seemed too much to hope they could pull off a fourth miracle, and it was.

Had the Vikings won the NFC crown, I'd have sat out this year's Super Bowl, but Brees and company came through, so I'll cast my lot with them.

Haiti: special needs.

I've been dilatory in posting about the disaster in Haiti, not out of lack of concern, but because I believed I had nothing of value to add by way of blogging, as opposed to contributing, which I did through Episcopal Relief and Development, an organization I know to be trustworthy and effective. I made my contribution in memory of my friend Charles A. McCrann, who was in his office on the hundredth floor of One World Trade Center when the first plane hit on September 11, 2001. He left a lovely Haitian American wife and two children.

My Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague T.K. Small posted this comment on BHB:

This afternoon I spent some time creating my own fund-raising campaign for contributions to the Haitian relief efforts. Specifically, it concerns me that people with disabilities are at the absolute bottom level of society and, even under the best of conditions, experience unimaginable poverty.

Through some research I was able to find an organization which has expertise and a track record of providing relief to people with disabilities. Based upon the recommendation of a personal friend of the legitimacy of the organization, I made a contribution. But still I wanted to know more and called the organizer to get a better sense of what they were doing. Very quickly I realized that this is a credible initiative. The organization is called:

Portlight Strategies, Inc.
2043 Maybank Highway
Charleston, SC 294
http://www.portlight.org

My Frayfriend Hipparchia also posted this on her blog.

If you've already given, thanks. If not, please do.