Goodbye, Black 47

I got to know Larry Kirwan back in 1978, when he and Pierce Turner, as Turner & Kirwan of Wexford, were the house band at the Bells of Hell, one of the two greatest bars (can you guess the other one?) that ever were in New York. The Bells closed in 1979, and Larry and Pierce continued on for a while, making a move into electronica and disco as the Major Thinkers, then each went his own way. For a while, Larry concentrated on his other talent, writing, and produced a play called Liverpool Fantasy, based on the question: What would the world be like if the Beatles never made it? (Larry has since expanded it into a novel.) Then, in the late 1980s, Larry got together with some other superb musicians and formed Black 47, a band that I love despite having once tongue-in-cheekedly described them as "traditional Irish hip-hop thrash metal punk" or something similar. In the video above, they do my favorite of their songs, one about the 1916 Easter Rising, "James Connolly":

My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die,
But to fight for the rights of the working man, the small farmer too,
Protect the proletariat from the bosses and their screws,
So hold on to your rifles, boys, and don't give up your dream,
Of a republic for the working class, economic liberty!

I've posted before about my visit to Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, where the surviving sixteen leaders of the 1916 Rising were taken and shot; the wounded Connolly having been tied to a chair to face the firing squad.

Larry has now sent word that, a little over one year from now, on the 25th anniversary of their first gig, Black 47 will disband. As their website notes:

There are no fights, differences over musical policy, or general skulduggery, we remain as good friends as when we first played together. We just have a simple wish to finish up at the top our game after 25 years of relentless touring and, as always, on our own terms.

In their remaining year, they'll continue to tour, and are working on one final album, Last Call. I will get a copy, and attend as many of their gigs as I can. I'll report more here from time to time.

Some interesting, if obscure, ceiling art at Grand Central Terminal.

Mention ceiling art at Grand Central and the immediate response is likely to be "Oh, yes! The backwards painted zodiac on the ceiling of the main concourse." It's stunning,to be sure, especially since all the accumulated tobacco smoke grime was removed in a process that ended in 1998. As to why the constellations are reversed, there are various theories.

Shortly after arriving in New York some forty three years ago, I noticed another piece of Grand Central ceiling art (see photo above). There is a corridor between the northern edge of the main concourse and Lexington Avenue, adjacent to the Graybar Building. (I never noticed those rat sculptures--have to check that out.) The corridor has a vaulted ceiling; from the center of each vault hangs a chandelier. The vaults are all painted white except for this one, on which each facet of the vault bears a painting.

The western panel--the one you see first as you're walking from the street toward the terminal concourse, shows a box cab type electric locomotive equipped to get power from a third rail instead of from overhead catenary wires.  This was the type of loco that brought trains to and from Grand Central in its early years of operation. In the painting. it's shown pulling a train on a line that's just passed under a very impressive looking viaduct. I'm not sure where this might be. Can anyone help? Update: thanks to readers Steve Kehoe and John Pavlakis I now know that the viaduct is the Highbridge, connecting the Bronx with upper Manhattan. The painting shows it in its pre-1928 condition, as a masonry arched viaduct; it was rebuilt as a single steel arch in order to allow navigation of the Harlem River by larger vessels.

The northern panel shows a construction scene, perhaps of Grand Central itself.

The southern panel appears to me to show workers laying track telephone cable (see below).

The eastern panel, which you see first as you leave the terminal headed to the street, shows four airplanes (is that a fifth to the right of the pylon?)--three biplanes, one with pontoons instead of wheels, and one monoplane--engaged in a race. Is the vague figure in the background a dirigible?

I presume these paintings were made around 1913, when Grand Central was opened [But see below.]. My web research, and cursory looks at published histories of Grand Central, has revealed nothing about them. Does anyone know about them, especially the identity of the painter?

Update--mystery solved: and to think, all I should have done was to ask Francis Morrone. He provides the following information:

That painting in the Graybar Passage is by Edward Trumbull, who also did the ceiling mural in the Chrysler Building lobby. He was a student of a student of William Morris and was once married to Brooklyn Heights's own doyenne of modern art, Katherine Sophie Dreier. The paintings date from the Graybar construction in the 1920s.

Regarding the date of the painting, I should have paid more attention to the aircraft. The monoplane (second in the race) looks remarkably like the Ryan christened Spirit of St. Louis and flown by Charles Lindbergh from Roosevelt Field, now a shopping mall, in Garden City, New York, to Le Bourget field, Paris in 1927.

Second update: Christopher Gray has kindly sent me a link to his New York Times "Streetscapes" column from September 3, 1995, in which he responds to a reader's question:

Q. In the passage that leads from Lexington Avenue to the Grand Central Terminal, under the Graybar Building, I think there used to be more than the single ceiling mural now there. Can you shed any light on this? . . . Maria Carmiciano, Manhattan.

A. You probably do remember more murals, but period photographs and written accounts indicate that they were only cloud forms...The artist Edward Trumbull painted an industrial panorama, four sections showing railroads, airships, telephone communication and skyscraper steelwork. Trumbull also did murals in the Chrysler Building and the Oyster Bar.

In 1927, The New York Times noted that the other ceiling panels were painted only in imitation of cumulus cloud forms, which have indeed been painted out, perhaps because later owners considered them just smudges of white. S. J. Vickers, writing in The Architectural Record, praised the main mural and regretted that Trumbull had not been retained to do all the vaults.

This corrects one surmise--that the workers depicted on the southern panel were laying track: actually, they are working on telephone cable--and answers a question: Were there once paintings in the other ceiling vaults? The answer is yes, but only of clouds.

Tania Grossinger, Memoir of an Independent Woman

Don't let the title Memoir of an Independent Woman make you think this is strictly chick non-fic. Most women will, I think, find it interesting and inspiring, but so, I think, will most men. It's also, I believe, an excellent, if necessarily idiosyncratic, account of what it was like to be part of the generation that preceded mine and came to adulthood just as we leading-edge boomers were rattling our demographic sabers and threatening to reshape the culture in our image. The breadth of popular culture covered in this book is extensive: from Ayn Rand (more about her below) to Timothy Leary, with Hugh Hefner and Johnny Carson in between.

I've known Tania Grossinger--whose self-description on her web page is "Author; Consultant; Raconteur; Talk Show Guest; Travel Writer; Troublemaker"--since sometime in the late 1970s, when we were introduced--by whom I've forgotten, though it was likely Dermot McEvoy--at (where else?) the Lion's Head. She was one of those honored by having a book jacket displayed on the saloon's wall. The jacket collection ranged from Kitty Kelley's Jackie Oh! through various novels and poetry anthologies to a textbook on statistical analysis. Tania's contribution to the wall was the autobiographical Growing Up at Grossinger's, about girlhood at the Catskill resort that was the jeweled buckle on the Borscht Belt. I didn't read it; tales about resort life and visiting celebrities didn't seem especially relevant to my interests at the time.

Tania's and my times at the Head didn't overlap much. She tended to be there early in the evening. I was part of the later night crowd, which wasn't helpful to my career as a corporate lawyer. Now, having read her Memoir, I regret not having gotten to know her better.

Over the course of her life, Tania came to know several people who have been important to me, though only at a distance. As a young girl at Grossinger's she became a friend of Jackie Robinson. (The Brooklyn Dodgers were my first love in baseball, and Robinson was one of those I rooted for while watching the 1955 World Series.) While working as the publicist for Playboy (my "how to be cool" manual during my college years) Tania had a very funny (imagine!) encounter with Ayn Rand.  (At thirteen, responding to a challenge from my eighth grade math teacher, I read Atlas Shrugged, then followed it with The Fountainhead. I decided that really smart, ruthless people should rule the world, and if being a brilliant, highly individualistic architect like Howard Roark could land me a girlfriend like Dominique Francon--never mind that I didn't look like Gary Cooper--that's what I wanted to be. I was safely over Rand by high school, but I'm still grateful to her for introducing me to the world of ideas, even if they were mostly bad ones.) To top things off, Tania once had her lunch tab paid by then Senator John F. Kennedy in gratitude for her having been his tour guide at Brandeis University several years before, when she was a student.

Her most important accomplishment as a publicist was her work for Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. As Tania tells the story, Friedan was one tough sell. At their first meeting, Friedan told Tania "she was out to change the world" and that Tania "was going to help her do it...and that was that." Tania did just that, although it was no easy task. At first, Friedan seemed determined to undermine her own project. Tania was able to schedule an appearance on a TV show called (I'm not making this up) Girl Talk, hosted by an old friend of Tania's, Virginia Graham. Before the show, Friedan insisted on stopping at Sardi's for a drink. When she went on the air Friedan was fried. Graham immediately challenged her, asserting that "girls" preferred being homemakers to having careers. Friedan answered by telling the viewers that Graham just wanted them to stay at home to be her "captive audience." During a commercial break, Friedan faced the studio audience and said that if Graham didn't let her have her say, she would "say the word 'orgasm' on television ten times!" This was very much a no-no in 1963.

Tania didn't let this disaster derail the project. She called in a chit to get a very reluctant Merv Griffin, one of the top TV hosts of the day, to allow Friedan on his show. Betty was at her best, and buzz for the book burgeoned. (I still have this thing for alliterations involving the letter "b.") Afterward, Tania was hired by the publisher, W.W. Norton, to handle publicity for The Feminine Mystique full time. One detail not to be missed from this time is the "Jewish mother" letters Tania would periodically receive from Friedan. Tania's success in promoting the book was such that, during my senior year (1963-64) at Robinson High School in Tampa, it seemed that at least half of the girls in Mrs. Blalock's Advanced English class gave book reports on something they invariably called The Feminine Mystic, which I assumed was about women who held seances, did tarot readings, or gazed into crystal balls.

(Speaking of which, Tania has a chapter on her experiences with "Psychics, Seers, and the Supernatural." I suggest you read it and decide.)

Another of Tania's assignments, from the publisher Stein & Day, was to promote the novel Down All the Days by Christy Brown, the Irish writer, poet, and artist who had a form of cerebral palsy that made him barely able to speak, and unable to write except by tapping out code with the toes of his left foot. Tania had some success getting excerpts from his book read on TV, accompanied by scenes of where he'd grown up. Still, she wanted to get him on camera, and speaking. To accomplish this, she needed to find a good interlocutor. She introduced him to Malachy McCourt, an actor and founder of the Bells of Hell. At the Bells bar, they quickly became friends, and alcohol loosened Brown's tongue. Tania convinced the now recently deceased David Frost to have the two of them on his show. Frost initially objected to Tania's condition that they both have had a few drinks before going on air. "What if Christy falls off his chair?" Frost asked. Tania said he'd be strapped to his chair, and that, if the strap should break, "we'll take a commercial break, focus on the Irish musicians we've hired for the spot, pick him up, and proceed from there." The show was a great success, and the book sold well enough to be made into a movie with the title My Left Foot, in which Christy Brown is portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis.

Memoir isn't all tales of Tania's adventures with celebrities, although she's the sort of person for whom failure to name-drop would be a character defect akin to hiding one's light under a bushel. One story I found especially poignant is from Tania's time as a college student. She was a psychology major, and volunteered to help in a hospital for mentally ill children run by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. On her first day there, she noticed a girl who was being punished severely by the staff because she failed to respond to orders. Tania, who had learned basics of American Sign Language during her time at Grossinger's, guessed that the girl was deaf, and signed to her. The girl responded. When Tania pointed this out to the staff, she was asked to leave, and Brandeis was told not to send her back. Such were conditions in supposedly enlightened Massachusetts in the early 1950s. In 1966, Frederick Wiseman made a film, Titicut Follies, that exposed mistreatment of inmates at another Massachusetts facility, Bridgewater State Hospital.

I've focused above on some of the personalities and incidents described in Tania's Memoir, but I haven't discussed the book's major underlying theme: identity. Like me (I was a military brat), Tania had a peripatetic early life. She was born and lived in Chicago until shortly after her father died, when she was eight. Her mother then took her to Los Angeles, where they stayed until her mother lost her job with a high fashion hatmaker and, at the invitation of her father's cousin, they moved across the continent to Grossinger's, where her mother worked as a hostess. In L.A. Tania had been sent to a Christian Science Sunday school; it was only on her arrival at Grossinger's that she learned she was Jewish. At sixteen, having completed the requirements for high school graduation, she entered Brandeis University in the Boston suburbs. After college, she returned to L.A. for a while, then back to Chicago, the site of her unfortunate marriage. Tania's frequent changes of venue required her to re-establish her identity with new sets of schoolmates, friends, and others with whom she had frequent contact.

Tania also explores the question of identity through accounts of her loves, both failed, as in her early and brief marriage, and fulfilling, as in her relationship with Art D'Lugoff, a well known Greenwich Village club owner, which blossomed in her middle years and lasted through his death. Following that, for a time, Tania wrote, "I lost track of the real me, even doubted at times that there was one."

The one problematic love that is a thread throughout the book is that between Tania and her mother. Karla Seifer Grossinger's identity remains to some extent a mystery to her daughter even now. Born into a fairly prosperous Polish Jewish family, she went to Vienna and studied at the university there, though as Tania later learned she never received the degree she claimed.  Karla eventually came to Chicago, where she married Max Grossinger, an undistinguished businessman who was a cousin of the founder of the resort, and who died under mysterious circumstances that Karla would not discuss with Tania. Many members of Karla's family died in the Holocaust. She had two brothers who survived, but Karla was not on close terms with either of them. She was never abusive or harsh to Tania while her daughter was growing up, but always remained at something of a distance. Toward the end of her life she became emotionally demanding, to the extent that they became estranged. The penultimate chapter of Memoir has the title, "Trying to Reconcile with Mother."

Tania acknowledges that her relationship with Karla was the principal cause of her decision never to have a child. She does not, in retrospect, question this decision. Still, she was moved to write Memoir as a series of letters to "Natasha," a daughter she never had. She begins the final chapter, "Looking Back: Childless by Choice":

Knowing this will be my last letter to you, Natasha, saddens me more than I anticipated. Through this one-sided correspondence, I've made an attempt to share and make sense of my life, only to discover that lives may not be meant to be made sense of....At times it's been as if I'm writing about someone I'm meeting for the first time. I've been so many different people in so many different situations in so many different places that one needs the skills of a magician, which I most definitely am not, to pull it all together.

At the close, she notes that she is writing at the beginning of the Jewish High Holy Days, "[t]he one holiday that even secular Jews like myself observe." (Even I, a non-Jew, have come to appreciate the Days of Awe.) She observed the custom of Tashlich, "symbolically casting [her] sins (via nuggets of bread) on the waters, in hopes they will be forgiven." I'm writing this on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. May your coming year be fruitful, Tania. May your Memoir find the success it richly deserves, and may you produce more good works.

Memoir of an Independent Woman is published by Skyhorse Publishing, New York City (2013).

"Gift" is a noun, "gifted" is an adjective, "give" is a verb.

I'm on my usage high horse again. It isn't all that high. As I've said before, I'm not some fusty pedant who worries about split infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions. I usually don't object to the verbing of nouns; note that I just used the verb "to verb." I do have my pet peeves, but I like to think that I limit them to instances where error will cause confusion.

Today, though, while reading a news report about a court decision concerning efforts to save Long Island College Hospital, which serves our community and where my daughter was born, I saw this:

The Wednesday ruling also required SUNY Downstate to account for the Othmer Endowment Fund by Sept. 20—a $130 million endowment gifted to LICH by the Othmer family.

--Sarah Matheson, "Ambulance Services Restored at Brooklyn's LICH," Epoch Times, September 6, 2013 (emphasis added).

The reason I've Italicized "gifted" in the quotation is that it's incorrectly used as a verb. It's an adjective that roughly means possessing greater than average intelligence or skill. The correct word in the context of the quoted sentence would be "given," the past participle of the verb "to give."

Why do I care? Because "gift" is a noun that doesn't need to be made into a verb, There's already a verb form, "give," that has no more letters than "gift," and therefore gives us no advantage in economy of expression. Consider, for example: "To verb a noun," thereby using the noun "verb" as a verb, has an advantage of brevity over "To make a noun into a verb." By contrast, "He gifted a book to his daughter" is longer, and clumsier, than "He gave a book to his daughter." Also, to use "gifted" as the past tense of "to gift" creates confusion with its use as an adjective. Would "a gifted child" mean a child blessed with talent, or one who was made available for adoption (not that they mightn't be the same)?

Addendum: I should mention that "give" is sometimes used as a noun, in a way that doesn't bother me. It's used as a synonym for "flexibility," as in, "There's some give in it."

Second addendum: Ugh!

It used to be. It's been dumbed down.

(Note the use of "dumb" as a verb. Very useful, I think.)

Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013.

I confess to having read very little of Seamus Heaney's poetry, just snippets quoted here and there. They were enticing; Heany is one of those poets and other writers I have an ongoing resolution to read. I own a copy of his widely praised translation of Beowulf, which I've promised to read aloud to my wife and daughter over what will necessarily be a period of some weeks.

I may even have been in the same room with Heaney without knowing who he was. One of my friends reported on Facebook that he was known to visit the Lion's Head when in New York.

A Catholic born and raised in Protestant dominated, and British ruled, Northern Ireland, Heaney had a sharp sense of the way tribal divisions affect communication. His poem "Whatever You  Say, Say Nothing," quoted in Saturday's New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox, concludes:

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

Some of Heaney's compatriots found his work insufficiently engaged with the political conflict in Northern Ireland, condemning him as "accommodationist."  According to the Times obit, his reply was in an essay on Osip Mandelstam, exiled by Stalin:

“We live here in critical times ourselves, when the idea of poetry as an art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry as a diagram of political attitudes,” [Heaney] wrote. “Some commentators have all the fussy literalism of an official from the ministry of truth.”

While most criitcs praised Heaney's work, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995, he had his artistic, as well as political, detractors; those who, the Times observed, found his work "facile." The obit quotes Al Alvarez, in a 1980 review of Heaney's Field Work:

If Heaney really is the best we can do, then the whole troubled, exploratory thrust of modern poetry has been a diversion from the right true way. Eliot and his contemporaries, Lowell and his, Plath and hers had it all wrong: to try to make clearings of sense and discipline and style in the untamed, unfenced darkness was to mistake morbidity for inspiration.

The reference to "clearings of sense and discipline and style in the untamed, unfenced darkness" made me think of a poem I love, Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West." It begins with the image of a woman walking on the beach, singing, against the sound of surf. Stevens observed:

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.

The poem continues:

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Stevens took particularities--a woman singing on a beach; the lights on boats at anchor--and used them to illustrate how artifice imposes order (also see his "Anecdote of the Jar"), making, if you will, "clearings...in the untamed, unfenced darkness." Heaney gave us particularities, as in the short poem "Nerthus," which Alvarez quotes in its entirety:

For beauty, say an ash-fork staked in peat,
Its long grains gathering to the gouged split,

A seasoned, unsleeved taker of the weather,
Where kesh and loaning finger out to heather.

This poem includes an artifact--the ash-fork--that is simply there, a "taker of the weather." It does not impose any order or scheme, it was simply, in Heaney's view, beautiful. The natural features--peat, kesh, loaning, and heather--have their own beauty, but the ash-fork is beautiful in their context. It could be beautiful in some other context, or none, as well.

The modernists Alvarez contrasted to Heaney--Eliot, Lowell, and Plath--had in the critic's view what Stevens (whom I would add to that group), in the final stanza of "The Idea of Order at Key West" called "blessed rage for order."  (I believe that his "Connoisseur of Chaos" supports that argument.) Heaney didn't rage; he showed us what is there. He didn't idealize or prettify it. He could, for example in one poem, "The Skunk", that Alvarez cites as an example of Heaney at what, in the critic's view, is his best, compare his memory of his absent wife to the skunk that visits his porch in California:

It all came back to me last night, stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-line nightdress.

So, what do I prefer: the "rage for order" or the savor of the particular? My answer is typical for me: I prefer neither, and like both. I've sometimes been accused of wanting to have my cake and eat it, too. My answer is, "Who wouldn't?" To me, the modernists and the particularists are like the Thatcher brothers in Peter Wheelwright's As It Is On Earth, epistemological yin and yang, forever connected and completing a whole.

And, as an epitaph for Heaney--I promise to read Beowulf and more of your original poetry soon--I offer a paraphrase of Auden's elegy on Yeats:

Earth, receive an honored guest;
Seamus Heaney is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

But, though the vessel lie empty, let the poetry live on, and on... .

Addendum: Christopher Benfey remembers Heaney as a teacher in this New York Review of Books piece.

Photo: By Sean O'Connor, cropped by Sabahrat (File:Seamus Heaney.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Pete Seeger, "Solidarity Forever"

I was surprised and delighted when I walked into Key Food early this morning and heard this playing on the PA system. Some of my fellow shoppers appeared bemused when I started singing along.

Happy Labor Day.

Happy 68th, Van Morrison.

May there be many more happy days...and Wild Nights.

Addendum: Returning from my Sunday morning walk, with my iPod set on shuffle, I heard an almost subliminal guitar from my headphones, followed by Van's voice: "We were born before the wind... ."

The Blind Boys of Alabama, "Free at Last," live at the White House.

"Now is the time to make real the promise... ." Dr. Martin Luther KIng, Jr., August 28, 1963.

"Catnip Capers": a Terrytoons animation from 1940

A little weekend silliness. Some of us can remember when a visit to the movie theater began with a newsreel and an animated cartoon, along with previews of coming attractions, before the feature film. The cartoons I remember were mostly from Walt Disney (e.g. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse) or Warner Brothers (e.g. Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig), but there was another studio, Terrytoons, that gave us some lesser known but interesting characters like Heckle and Jeckle, and a few that became TV staples like Mighty Mouse and Deputy Dawg. I don't know the name (if he had one) of the cat in the toon shown above. He bears some resemblance to Warner's Sylvester, and he has as much trouble with the mice as Sylvester does with Tweety. His adventures in this episode can only be described (despite its 1940 date) as psychedelic.

"C'mon Everybody": Led Zeppelin covers Eddie Cochran.

Led Zep does tribute to one of my favorite early rock artists, Eddie Cochran, at the Royal Albert Hall ("Now they know how many holes..."), London, on January 9, 1970.  In Jimmy Page's initial guitar attack I hear adumbration of the Ramones.

Here's Eddie doing his biggest hit, "Summertime Blues":


Eddie Cochran died in a car crash during a tour of England in 1960. He was 21 years old.

Okay, so I have this thing about dolphins.

I've had a soft spot for dolphins since I was seven years old and saw them sporting around the French liner Liberté as my mother and I crossed from England, where my father was then stationed, to visit my grandmother in Pennsylvania. My affection was solidified two years later when, back stateside and in the fourth grade, I read Children of the Sea, by Wilfrid S. Bronson, which told the story of a bottlenose dolphin to whom Bronson gave the generic name Tursiops (the species name is T. truncatus) from his birth in the shallow waters off Florida's Ten Thousand Islands, along the Gulf coast below Naples, through his travels with his mother and the rest of the pod around the Straits of Florida and northward into the Atlantic, with lots of accounts of his encounters with various and sometimes bizarre sea creatures. One of these encounters, with sharks, leaves him injured, and he finds refuge in Nassau harbor, the Bahamas. There he befriends a poor boy named (as I recall) Sam*, who dives for coins tossed into the water by passengers on cruise ships.

As I grew I learned more about dolphins: about Pelorus Jack, who guided boats through tricky waters in New Zealand; of their being said to have saved drowning humans; of the size and complexity of their brains; and of their having what seemed to be a language made of whistles and clicks. Recent research even indicates that they know each other by name.

From Bronson's book I learned that people in the Bahamas called bottlenose dolphins "herring hogs" because of their appetite for fish. As a child, I was horrified when I read an account by Dr. John Oliver La Gorce, then President of the National Geographic Society, of a fishing trip from Nassau in which he and his companions spotted "a kind of large porpoise[**] called a 'herring hog'" which, "because this species destroys many food fish," they harpooned him, hauled him to the boat and "dispatched him."  I was later to learn, through an old issue of National Geographic, that there had been a fishery for bottlenose dolphins on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, in which they were entangled in nets, hauled ashore, and butchered for sacs of oil in their foreheads; the oil was considered ideal for lubricating fine timepieces. (These sacs, I later learned, were essential to the dolphins' ability to echolocate, i.e. to use "sonar," as a means of spotting prey and underwater obstacles.) I was relieved to read that this fishery ended in 1929.

As I grew older and began to focus more on girls than on dolphins, I was happy to know that they had become protected by law, at least from deliberate slaughter. As a young adult, I was troubled to know that hundreds of thousands of dolphins were dying as collateral damage in commercial tuna fishing. I gave up tuna for a while, until the companies began putting "dolphin safe" labels on the cans. (Yes, I trusted.)

So, I went for some years not concerned about the well-being of dolphins, until I learned of the annual mass slaughter of dolphins in a cove near the fishing port of Taiji, Japan. This clip tells the story:


As the video reports, the scale of the killings has been declining in recent years. While this is heartening, a Scottish woman, Shona Lewendon, is leading a campaign to have it brought to a definitive close. Her leverage is Japan's bid for Tokyo as venue for the 2009 summer Olympics. and the International Olympic Committee's requirement that host nations adhere to environmental standards.
_________

 *My memory may be playing tricks with me here. Bronson was a prolific author and illustrator of children's books. Along with Children of the Sea, my elementary school library had three other of his: The Earth for Sam (geology and paleontology); The Sea for Sam (marine biology and oceanography); and The Stars for Sam (astronomy), all of which I checked out frequently. I seem to  recall in the forewords to these books that Bronson identified Sam as a nephew. I still recall that he also called the boy in Children of the Sea Sam.

**The words "dolphin" and "porpoise" are sometimes used interchangeably. Strictly speaking, they are two different types of small cetaceans, the class of strictly aquatic mammals that also includes whales.

Broken Darling, "Dust"

I found out about this song, and the band Broken Darling, through a comment on Brooklyn Heights Blog by a neighbor of mine whose nom de blog is "Remsen Street Dweller" (Remsen Street, although called "Remsen Drive" in the show, is known to us boomers as the home of Patty Lane, the character played by Patty Duke in her eponymous TV comedy; Remsen is one block south of Montague Street, where I live). Anyway, R.S.D., as a way of breaking from a tedious debate on "Open Thread Wednesday", posted a link to the YouTube video above, noting that Lia, the female vocalist, is a cousin. I watched it and posted back:

Oh. My. God. I love that song. I'm going to re-post it on my blog soon. This is a very talented group, and Lia is a darling indeed. It also helps that I'm a train buff.

Watching the video, one thinks "Appalachia," which it really is, but Wikipedia points out that Hunterdon County is considered part of the New York metropolitan region.

Yes, I'm very impressed by the song, which has the quality of coming straight from the heart, and the video, which is compelling. As a railfan, I found the scenes of disappearing trains and abandoned, weed-choked tracks particularly moving. Broken Darling is: Mark Bodino, vocals and guitar; George Mandala, guitar; Lia Menaker, vocals; Tony (no surname given), bass; and Jason Nagelberg, drums. You can hear their songs here.

Karl Junkersfeld's "A Tale of Two Bridges"

My Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague made this video. He gave it the title "A Tale of Two Bridges" because it includes scenes of and on both the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, but it concentrates on the latter, lesser known span. Lesser known, that is, until recently, according to this New York Times article. The Times piece attributes its new found popularity on the fact that its Brooklyn anchorage is next to DUMBO ("Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass"), a neighborhood that has undergone roughly the same evolution that SOHO in Manhattan did starting about two decades earlier: from decaying industrial area to place where artists could occupy cheap if not yet quite legal loft spaces to trendy Bohemian neighborhood to pricey place for the rich but hip, combined with office space for tech companies.

I have a particular affection for the Manhattan Bridge: it was my first crossing of any of the East River bridges. This happened in 1954, when I was eight years old.  My parents and I had just returned from England, where my dad, a U.S. Air Force officer, had been stationed for three years. We came by ship, and debarked at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. There we boarded a bus to Penn Station that took us by way of Flatbush Avenue (when we turned onto this broad thoroughfare my dad, an Indiana native who had spent some time in New York City early in World War Two, said "This is Flatbush": noticing some low-lying shrubbery in a planter box on the median, I thought I knew what he meant) to the Manhattan Bridge, where I was thrilled by the view of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and East River traffic.

The  Manhattan Bridge was the last of four East River bridges--the others, in order of completion, are the Brooklyn (1883), the Williamsburg (1903), the Queensboro (now officially the "Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge"; also known as the 59th Street Bridge and as such immortalized by Simon & Garfunkel; March, 1909)--to be completed. The Manhattan Bridge was partially opened late in 1909, but not fully opened until 1912. It was designed by Leon Moisseiff, who was also involved in the design of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, but whose reputation was blotted by his having been the principal designer of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a.k.a. "Galloping Gertie" (caution: if you're at all nervous about bridges the linked video may give you nightmares, though it may also warm the hearts of dog lovers).

Update: there was a wild party on the Manhattan Bridge walkway Friday night. Read about it here; videos too!

No, you can't reach a crescendo. Or can you, if you're a famous writer?

Miles Hoffman, a fine fellow I'm sure, takes umbrage with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the historian James M. McPherson, George F. Will, William Safire, and others, for using some variant of the phrase "reach a crescendo." This strummed a mystic chord of memory for me. Sometime in my tween years, I read a Walt Disney comic in which Donald Duck got into a noise war with a neighbor. Donald decided to finish it off by turning his record player to top volume and putting on "the fortissimo crescendo from Bombpopoff's 'Eruption of Vesuvius.'" I was pretty sure there wasn't a real composer named Bombpopoff, but I couldn't resist mentioning this to my music teacher. He laughed, and said there could be no such thing as a "fortissimo crescendo." "Fortissimo," he said, means "as loud as it can get." "Crescendo" means "getting louder." Nothing can be as loud as possible and getting louder at the same time.

This, essentially, is Hoffman's argument. To say or write, "The battle reached a crescendo," is nonsensical. a crescendo is a process, not a completion. It may end at fortissimo, or somewhere below that, but once it gets there, it's not a crescendo anymore. I could only agree.

But then I read a letter to the Times editor by Jamie Apgar, of Berkeley, California, in part as follows:

I am disappointed by Mr. Hoffman’s article. “To reach a crescendo” is an idiom. Idioms are suited for neither syntactical analysis nor literal interpretation. ...

More broadly, the point of language is to convey meaning. I doubt that any of the sentences by the famous authors that Mr. Hoffman mentions are rendered opaque by including the “crescendo” idiom. They may indeed be clearer or more powerful because of the metaphor. I think that I’ll stick with Fitzgerald.

Well, to say, "The battle reached a fortissimo," seems silly and confusing. One could instead say, "reached a climax," thereby substituting a sexual reference for a musical one. Or, there's "reached its acme," which might bring to mind Wile E. Coyote.

Jamie Bernstein, daughter of Leonard Bernstein, wrote to the editor that she was "gratified indeed" by Hoffman's piece for its "elucidation on the word 'crescendo.'" She went on to suggest "a reason for the pervasiveness of the misuse":

I’m certain that it’s because the sound of the word so felicitously evokes the crashing of cymbals: “the crash at the end-o.”

Be that as it may, I'm inclined to agree with Apgar: "reach[ed] a crescendo" is one of those usages that, through repetition, has come to mean something specific to most readers, although it may be at variance to what musicians and students of music understand "crescendo" to mean. I suspect John McWhorter would concur. (You can read the full texts of Ms. Apgar's and Ms. Bernstein's letters here.)

Perhaps the best known example of a crescendo, one that extends for the entire length of the composition, is Ravel's Bolero. Anyway, I couldn't resist the opportunity to send you to another of my posts.

Image:Best Clip Art Blog.

A cliché captured on camera.

A gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis) surveys an earthworm (probably Eisenoides sp.) early in the morning in Brooklyn Bridge Park. I've seen catbirds before on my walks through the Pier 1 section of the Park, where dense shrubbery and trees provide an ideal environment for them.

J.J. Cale, 1938-2013

J.J. Cale, the Oklahoma native singer and songwriter whose work was performed by Eric Clapton and Lynyrd Skynyrd, among many others, died today at 74. In the clip above, he performs "Call Me the Breeze," a song recorded by Skynyrd. He's accompanied on this version by Clapton.

Cale's "Tulsa Sound" (not his term) was an amalgam of blues, country, and rockabilly. It was a precursor to what is today called "alt country," "Americana," or "roots" music. He may have been an influence on the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and others in taking rock back toward its country music partial ancestry.

Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung, Seigfried's Funeral March

Today is the bicentennial of Richard Wagner's birth. The clip above, thanks to mitjanus, is of Siegfried's Funeral March from Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the fourth and climactic opera in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, or as it's usually called in English, the "Ring Cycle." (Was it an influence on Tolkien? The author of The Lord of the Rings denied it, but as Alex Ross in The New Yorker argued, it almost certainly was.)

The performance is by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by Klaus Tennstedt. The Sturm und Drang is momentarily broken at 5:50 when Tennstedt drops his baton.

Bing and the Duke: "St. Louis Blues."

In 1932, Bing Crosby recorded this with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. An early example of Irish soul music, anticipating The Commitments?

Thanks to old Lion's Head friend Mike Pearl for the link, and nicoley133 for the clip.

Rembrandt van Rijn, 1606-1669

Google's search engine start page today reminds me that this is the 407th anniversary of the birth of perhaps the most celebrated painter in the western canon, Rembrandt van Rijn. Above is a self portrait done when he was about 28. Note the brilliant (in both senses) use of illumination on his face and collar, the almost palpable fleshiness of his face and texture of his garment, and the intensity of his half-shaded eyes.

Although Rembrandt is best known for his portraiture, his landscapes are also sublime. The Mill (1645-48) again demonstrates his skillful use of light, as well as the delicacy and precision of his brushwork, as seen in the cirrus clouds at the top of the painting, the texture of the cliff face, and the woods on the far shore.

Addendum: Michael Sorgatz tells me they've just rehung the Rembrandt gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that it's "fantastic."

Images: Self-Portrait, Wikipaintings; The Mill, Wikipedia.

Dolly, Faut y croire. Happy Bastille Day!

Dolly was one of France's most popular rock bands from the early 1990s until 2005, when their bassist, Mickaël "Micka" Chamberlin, died in a car crash. After that, the group stopped recording and touring, but later, the surviving three members--Emmanuelle "Manu" Monet, the charismatic lead vocalist and guitarist; drummer Thierry Lacroix; and guitarist Nicolas "Nico" Bonnière--added a new bassist and began performing as "Manu."

I once suggested, not entirely in jest, that the Mets ditch the inane "Meet the Mets" as their fight song, and replace it with Faut y croire, which roughly translates as "Ya gotta believe!"

Addendum: A friend asks this question on Facebook: "Why does it sound like they're saying 'delenda est' after the title lyric?" My reply: "Maybe they are."

I forgot to mention that there are Bastille Day festivities right here in my neck of the woods.

Michael Simmons, "As I Walk by the Moon"

My erstwhile Lion's Head drinking companion Michael Simmons, now living in L.A., has been a steady source of mostly music related material for this blog, including a clip of the song "Instant Forget" by his band Slewfoot that was very popular according to the stats I get from Google. Now I have a clip, thanks to Kassamiia (aka Tiina Bockrath), of a very young Michael's solo performance, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, of a lovely song titled "As I Walk by the Moon," which he wrote with Barry Parker. The audio is accompanied by a still photo of Michael by John Duke Kisch.

British Pathé Newsreel: S.S. United States wins the Blue Riband on her maiden voyage.

The Blue Riband? It's an award that is not likely ever to be given again. It was for the passenger ship that made the fastest crossings, both eastward and westward, of the Atlantic, measured between the Ambrose Lightship off New York harbor and Bishop's Rock off Cornwall, England. S.S. United States won it on her maiden voyage in 1952, and retired with the title as transatlantic jet service supplanted ships. Queen Mary 2 annually makes one or two  transatlantic voyages between  my beloved Brooklyn and Southampton, England, traditional home port for Cunard liner services. Designed for cruising, Queen Mary 2 is unlikely to challenge any speed records.

Unfortunately, the United States is now in danger of going for scrap. The S.S. United States Conservancy, headed by Susan Gibbs, granddaughter of William Francis Gibbs, the marine architect and engineer who designed the great ship, is trying to raise funds to save her.  I'm hoping she may be preserved as a floating museum and perhaps hotel at a pier along what used to be "ocean liner row" on the west side of Manhattan, where she used to dock.

Update: The Conservancy has a Facebook page. Please consider giving them a "like."

Messrs Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, and Usher, wish you a happy Fourth.

Shreve, Lamb and Harmon's 1931 masterpiece, still the world's tallest art deco building, is resplendent in its Independence Day illumination. William F. Lamb, the building's principal designer, used his  design for the 21 story Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, completed in 1929, as a starting point for his ESB plans. He was also inspired by the 49 story Carew Tower in Cincinnati (W.W. Alschlager & Associates/Delano & Aldrich, 1930).

Here's Usher, in the ESB's gorgeous lobby, turning on the lights. Have a happy holiday!

Pirates best in MLB?

My Mets have been showing some signs of life lately, so my earlier speculation that they might give the 1962 Mets a run for the season loss record has pretty much gone a-glimmering. Right now, they're at bat and leading the D-backs 2-1 in the bottom of the seventh with the bases loaded and no outs, and there's a rain delay. If they manage to win, they'll be ten games under .500 and in fourth place in the NL East, a familiar place for them. I can take some comfort in the fact that the Yanks are now in the same position in the AL East.

This would seem to be a good time to stop thinking about baseball and concentrate on important stuff, like the question posed by Dennis Overbye in his New York Times column yesterday:

Is the truth of the world to be found in the ways things change, like the river that you cannot step into twice, or the ways they remain the same, like the law of gravity or, indeed, the name of that river?

Well, "the way things remain the same" brings me back, unhappily, to the Mets. But "the way things change" brings to mind this startling fact: the Pittsburgh Pirates now have the best record in Major League Baseball. I can remember, back in the late 1980s and early '90s, when the Pirates were a respectable team, my thinking, "If only the Mets could have Bobby Bonilla." Since 1992, when they finished first in the NL East (they have since been moved to the Central) the Pirates have had twenty straight losing seasons, an MLB record.

We're not quite to the All Star break yet, and things could change drastically between now and October. Still, I can't help but think about 1960 when the "Beat 'em Bucs!" Pirates, emerging from another long period of mediocrity, won the NL pennant, and took the heavily favored Yankees to game seven, decided by Bill Mazerowski's walk-off homer (see video above).

Should the Pirates win the Real Baseball League pennant, as a Pennsylvania native I'll root for them against just about any Phony Baseball League champion.  Possible exceptions are the Red Sox, out of spousal loyalty, and the Rays, out of old hometown loyalty, although Tampa had no Rays until long after I left and had formed my loyalty to the Mets.

Neil Young sings Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds." Happy Canada Day!

One great Canadian singer and songwriter performs a song by another, with some help from Willie Nelson.

The Texas Archives War

The statue in the photo above is of Angelina Eberly.  I'd never heard of her until I read Gail Collins's column Wendy and the Boys in Wednesday's New York Times. The column focuses on Texas State Senator Wendy Davis's filibuster that succeeded in stopping a bill that may have effectively outlawed all abortions in Texas. Ms. Collins began it thus:

There is an old saying that Texas is “heaven for men and dogs, but hell for women and oxen.” But the state’s history is chock-full of stories of female role models. Barbara Jordan. Ann Richards. In downtown Austin, there’s a statue of Angelina Eberly, heroine of the Texas Archives War of 1842, firing a cannon and looking about 7 feet tall.

Collins then says she doesn't have time to explain the Texas Archives War, although she goes on to say, "it's an extremely interesting story." It seemed most interesting to me, as my wife is an archivist, and through her I've met many other archivists and learned a little about that fascinating profession. ("So, you're an archivist. What exactly do you do?" my mother asked my wife-to-be. "I read other people's mail and I don't have to answer it," was the reply.) Although I once had a silly fantasy about a comic book series called Action Combat Archivists, the notion of an "Archives War" seemed, well, bizarre. I had to look it up. The Texas State Historical Association website tells the tale:

In March 1842 a division of the Mexican army under Gen. Rafael Vásquez appeared at San Antonio demanding the surrender of the town; the Texans were not prepared to resist and withdrew. On March 10 President Sam Houston called an emergency session of the Texas Congress. Fearing that the Mexicans would move on Austin, he named Houston as the meetingplace. The citizens of Austin, fearful that the president wished to make Houston the capital, formed a vigilante committee of residents and warned department heads that any attempt to move state papers would be met with armed resistance. President Houston called the Seventh Congress into session at Washington-on-the-Brazos and at the end of December 1842 sent a company of rangers under Col. Thomas I. Smith and Capt. Eli Chandler to Austin with orders to remove the archives but not to resort to bloodshed. The Austin vigilantes were unprepared for the raid, and the rangers loaded the archives in wagons and drove away, but not before Mrs. Angelina Eberly fired a cannon at them. On January 1, 1843 the vigilance committee, under Capt. Mark B. Lewis, seized a cannon from the arsenal and overtook the wagons at Kenney's Fort on Brushy Creek. Only a few shots were fired before the rangers gave up the papers in order to avoid bloodshed. The archives were returned to Austin and remained there unmolested until Austin became the capital again in 1844.

So, there you have it. A war in which the first shot was fired by a woman, and in which nobody gets killed, or even hurt. And all over archives. Well, to be fair, really over what was to be the capital of the then independent Republic of Texas. Another reason, along with Wendy Davis (and many others; see the addendum to this post), for me to love the Lone Star State.

The photo is from the home page of an Austin based "psychedelic Americana band" called Archive War.

Sounds of the Niagara Frontier: the Rockin' Rebels, John Fogerty, and Screamin' Dick Biondi.

"Wild Weekend" by the Rockin' Rebels was recorded in 1959 by two Buffalo DJs, Tom Shannon and Phil Todaro, for their Mar-Lee (named for their girlfiends) label. Shannon and Todaro had written "Wild Weekend" as a theme song for their radio show on WKBW. It became a regional hit in the Northeast, securing the band a spot on the Dick Clark show. In 1962, it was re-released on the nationally marketed Swan label, and in 1963 it became a major hit, reaching number eight on the pop charts. This makes it, to the best of my knowledge, the only top ten hit to have originated in Buffalo, a city with which I have some familiarity. You can get the tangled history of both the music and the band and a discography here.

John Fogerty isn't from Buffalo, but listen to "Rock and Roll Girls." Instrumentally, it's practically "Wild Weekend" redux from the get-go, opening with the same hooky run and with sax accompaniment that sounds very similar to the Rebels'. Fogerty nails it in the vocal toward the end of the song with these words:

If I had my way, I'd shuffle off to Buffalo, Sit by the lake, and watch the world go by....

WKBW, home of Shannon and Todaro, also had for a time one of America's best known DJs, Dick Biondi. There's a sample of Biondi's frenetic style in the clip above. Biondi's edgy humor--he adumbrated the "zoo" style that became widespread on pop radio in the '70s--was often directed at station management, which sometimes led to his being fired. He became best known when he moved from WKBW to another 50,000 Watt platform, Chicago's WLS. Later he had a gig with KRLA in Los Angeles.

Happy Father's Day; happy Bloomsday.

Today is Father's Day, so best wishes to all my fellow dads. This year it's also Bloomsday, the anniversary of the day in 1904 when Leopold Bloom (sketch by James Joyce at left), father of Milly and mourner of short-lived Rudy, makes his way through various encounters in Dublin, as described in Joyce's Ulysses. The novel also gives us short excursions into the worlds of Bloom's cheating wife Molly (the story climaxes, as it were, with her soliloquy while in the arms of her manager and lover, Blazes Boylan), and of Bloom's bachelor friend (and Joyce alter ego) Stephen Daedalus. Dermot McEvoy has these thoughts:

Happy Bloomsday! “YES!” said Molly Bloom. It’s a day for aimless wanderings, gorgonzola, and, perhaps, a trip to a cemetery—after a neat drop off the 40-Foot in Sandycove. In celebration listen to the brilliant Jonathan Brielle’s “River Liffey,” taken from his equally brilliant musical about James Joyce, Himself and Nora: [Hear it here.]

You can see and hear me reading an excerpt from Jim Quinn's restaurant guide Word of Mouth, which incorporates the Burton Restaurant scene from Ulysses, at a Bloomsday celebration two years ago. Then scroll down to get a much better Joyce reading; Molly Bloom's soliloquy (NSFW!) as interpreted by Aedin Moloney.

Van Dyke Parks, "Donovan's Colours."

Van Dyke Parkes is a musical genius who surprised and mostly delighted the rock crit world in 1968 with an album titled Song Cycle. My friend Michael Simmons calls it "The Great Overlooked Classic Of American Popular Music." I certainly overlooked it for many years. Before the album was released, one of the cuts, "Donovan's Colours" (video above), appeared pseudonymously as performed by "George Washington Brown." In his story linked above, Michael tells of his and his colleagues', and the members of Moby Grape's, efforts to figure out who GWB was. The Mobys at least had him sending his recordings to Parkes, who was then an in-demand L.A. studio musician. Parkes later said he had it released under a nom de guerre because he "craved anonymity." Here's the original "Colours" by Donovan: Parkes does a classical thing with the song. He begins with a statement of the theme, but at about 1:20 in the video at the top of this post the theme dissolves into variations. The theme is reasserted triumphally at about 2:50. Michael notes the similarity of the sound to that of a music box. I also sensed a similarity to that of a Trinidadian steel band, another musical style of which Parkes was fond. Donovan was also a fan of Trinidad's calypso music.

The (short) life of pie.

We were expecting company Sunday evening, so my wife made a good sized pie using rhubarb and strawberries sourced (maybe even curated) from our local Greenmarket. In the photo above, it's fresh from the oven.

  It didn't take long--maybe fifteen minutes--for six people to reduce it to this.

Then, quick as a wink, it was down to this.