iPod and photo log: across the Brooklyn Bridge and back.

Another iPod and photo log (or, if you prefer, photo log with music). This one is longer than the one I posted on November 27, as this time I went over the Brooklyn Bridge, did a circuit of City Hall Park, stopping to look at some pieces in the "Lightness of Being" sculpture show there, then back across the Bridge, down to Pier 1, Brooklyn Bridge Park, up and across the pedestrian bridge, then back down the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to home. I've let some of the photos speak for themselves, but have added explanatory notes for others.

1. The Four Tops, "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)": a Motown classic. I was fortunate to hear the original lineup live at a National Association of Insurance Commissioners meeting on Mackinac Island back in the 1980s. Listen here.

2. Tracy Nelson, "Ruler of My Heart": deep blues from a lovely woman with whom I had a pleasant chat at the Lion's Head bar years ago. Listen here. 

3. The Cranlyn apartment building (80 Cranberry Street, corner of Henry) (H.I. Feldman, 1931) is a fine example of the high art deco style popular between the two world wars. The photo shows a decorative motif above a doorway that may have been inspired by a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign.

Kingston Trio, "Utawena": I've dished on these guys before. Call them button-down shirt wearing bourgeois poseurs; well-to-do white men singing poor folks' music. Still, they were damn good singers and instrumentalists, they had a Mets connection (Nick Reynolds dated Tom Seaver's sister), and they introduced American audiences to what we now call "world music." Then there's "Utawena," which doesn't appear to be in any known language. You can listen here.

4. A monument to New York City Mayor (1910-1913) and Brooklyn resident William Jay Gaynor, designed by sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman, stands near the north end of Cadman Plaza Park.

The Everly Brothers: "Bye Bye Love": these Kentuckians were reliable hitmakers from the late fifties through the sixties. "Bye Bye Love" was their first, going to number two on the Billboard pop chart and number one on the country chart in 1957, and began their long collaboration with songwriters Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. It was later covered by Simon & Garfunkel and by George Harrison. Hear it here.

5. Great Big Sea, "Boston and St. John's": Newfoundland's most popular folk group does a bittersweet piece about a sailor leaving his woman for a short voyage. Live performance video here.

6. The west (Manhattan side) tower of the Manhattan Bridge (Leon Moisieff, 1912), seen from the Brooklyn Bridge.

Giuseppe Verdi, Sinfonia from Nabucco, Orchestra of the Teatro Comunale di Fiorenze, Ricardo Muti, Cond.: here is an audio clip of Muti conducting the Nabucco overture with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

7. The west tower of the Brooklyn Bridge (John Roebling, 1883) seen from the pedestrian walkway. This tower was completed in 1875, but the bridge would not be completed until eight years later.

The Holy Modal Rounders, "Flop-Eared Mule": from grand opera we go to...a group once described as "the originators and sole exponents of the genre known as acid-folk." Join the real world here.

8. The 76 story 8 Spruce Street/"New York by Gehry" shows off its Bernini drapery in the morning sun. Peeking past it to its right is the top of the Woolworth Building (Cass Gilbert, 1912); to 8 Spruce's left is 1 World Trade Center (David Childs/SOM, expected completion 2014). At the far left is the top of the "understated and deferential" 4 World Trade Center (Maki and Associates, 2013).

Neil Young, "The Emperor of Wyoming": this dreamy cowboy movie music is the opening track of Young's first solo album after Buffalo Springfield's breakup. Hear it here.

9. A gilded pyramid crowns the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse (Cass Gilbert, 1931), named for civil rights lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in a rededication ceremony in 2003. The building was Gilbert's last major commission.

Neil Young, "The Loner": this track immediately follows "Emperor"; I have the two joined as a segue on my iPod, but there's no video or audio track that combines the two, although I think they belong together. When you get to the orchestral bridge just past the middle, you'll know why. Listen here.

10. For the past several years I've kept watch over the Brooklyn Bridge cactus. A year and a half ago, I was distressed to find it bisected. Now it's becoming overshadowed by something that looks like a spider plant.

Dusty Springfield, "That Old Sweet Roll (Hi-De-Ho)": down 'n' dirty blues by Goffin and King, with a little inspiration from Cab Calloway. Hear it here,

11. 250 Broadway (Emery Roth & Sons, 1962), at right, is typical of the "wedding cake" style of New York City skyscrapers designed between 1916, when a zoning rule limiting the bulk of tall buildings and requiring setbacks went into effect, and 1961, when the regulation was amended to encourage tall buildings without setbacks so long as developers provide adjoining public plazas. To the left is the Woolworth Building (photo 8 above); in the background is 7 World Trade Center (David Childs/SOM, 2006).

Derek & the Dominoes, "Layla": one of the three best rock songs about being in love with someone else's wife. (The others are "Midnight Confession" by the Grass Roots and Neil Young's "Saddle Up the Palomino.") Here's a version of "Layla" by Eric Clapton, with a different band, that's still dynamite.

12. Part of the "Lightness of Being" sculpture show in City Hall Park is "inverse reverse obverse" by Cristian Andersen. It's topped by two bronze broad-brimmed hats. Behind it is the Manhattan Municipal Building (William M. Kendall/McKim, Mead and White, 1914), topped by another sculpture, "Civic Fame," by the same Adolph A. Weinman who designed the Gaynor Monument (photo 4 above).

The Royal Teens, "Believe Me": I heard this once as a pick hit of the week on WDAE in Tampa when I was in eighth grade, then never heard it again until I was in my thirties and, flipping through a record bin in one of those Bleecker Street oldies shops, found a Royal Teens greatest hits album. I ran home to play the song that had been engraved on my memory so many years before. Hear it here. The tinkling piano is by one of the song's co-authors, Bob Gaudio, who later became part of the Four Seasons, wrote Sherry and, with Bob Crewe, other hits of theirs.

13. Another set of sculptures in the "Lightness of Being" show is this untitled group by the late Franz West, described by Ken Johnson in The New York Times as "brightly painted bulbous shapes, like enormous carrots planted point-first in the ground."

The Kingston Trio, "Across the Wide Missouri": the Trio's version of a traditional American song, also known as "Oh Shenandoah." Listen here.

14. Statuary decorates the exterior of the Surrogate's Courthouse (John R. Thomas/Horgan & Slattery, 1907), formerly called the Hall of Records, at the corner of Chambers and Centre streets in lower Manhattan. The statues are by sculptors Philip Martiny and Henry Kirke Bush-Brown.

The Rolling Stones, "No Expectations": on my more optimistic days, I think the Mets' theme song should be Dolly's Faut y croire (loose translation: "Ya gotta believe!"); on my gloomier ones, I think it should be this Stones ballad. Live version here.

15. The South Street Seaport Museum's tall ships Peking and Wavertree, seen from near the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Peking is in the foreground; Wavertree, which is still under restoration and missing her topmasts, is behind.

R.E.M., "Driver 8": an infectious guitar run; inscrutable lyrics. What more could you want? Video here with railroad scenes featuring pre-CSX B&O/C&O locos bearing the "Chessie" logo. (It takes almost a minute until the music starts.)

16. Neil Young: "Cowgirl in the Sand": didn't I hear this on my previous walk? That's OK; I love this song so much I don't mind hearing it again so soon. Hear the studio version here.

17. Hank Williams, "They'll Never Take Her Love From Me": maybe the best country song about being in love with someone else's wife who used to be your wife. Listen here.

18. This Georgian apartment building on the north edge of Brooklyn Heights sports precast triangular "English sunrises" above the dormer windows. Also note the dentils below the cornice.

John Prine, "Paradise": "Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River where Paradise lay?/ Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking. Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away." Hear it here.

19. Fenton Robinson, "You Don't Know what Love Is": Robinson, who died in 1997, was a solid Chicago blues artist and author of "Loan Me a Dime," which was a hit for Boz Scaggs with Duane Allman. This song should not be confused with another, recorded by Billie Holiday, which is also on my iPod. Listen here.

20. Doug Sahm, "Is Anybody Going to San Antone?": from the Doug Sahm & Friends album; this cut features, among others, Bob Dylan on harmony vocal and Flaco Jimenez on accordion. Hear it here.

21. Scott Joplin, "Magnetic Rag"; Itzhak Perlman, violin and Andre Previn, piano. From The Easy Winners. Listen here.

22. The Tom Russell Band, "Haley's Comet": a song about the lonesome death of rock 'n' roll pioneer Bill Haley. Live performance recording, with Dave Alvin and Katy Moffat, here.

23. Seen from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, Manhasset Bay tows a much smaller tug down the East River, past Pier 2 in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

George Thorogood & the Destroyers, "It Wasn't Me": an able, nay, exciting, Chuck Berry cover by the hottest band ever to emerge from Delaware. Live performance video here.

24. Looking across from the Promenade, I saw the Manhattan Municipal Building (see photo 12) briefly bathed in sunlight.

Delbert McClinton, "Before You Accuse Me": another cover, this of a Bo Diddley b-side, by a superb Texas bluesman I once heard at the old Lone Star Cafe on lower Fifth Avenue. Hear it here.

25. Vivian Blaine, "Adelaide's Lament (A Person Could Develop a Cold)": a bathetic tale of blighted love, in Brooklynese, from the original (1950) Broadway cast recording of Guys and Dolls. See and hear Ms. Blaine's live performance from the 1971 Tony Awards here.

This Year's Lionel Train Display at Grand Central Terminal

For the past two years I've been making videos of the Lionel Train display at the New York City Transit Museum Annex and Gift Shop in Grand Central Terminal. This year I've paid more attention to the models of New York City landmarks (Grand Central itself, the Met Life Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building,  the SONY--formerly AT&T--Building with its Chippendale top), ordinary buildings, and rustic scenery, as well as model train action.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013

Two of his many memorable quotations (thanks to Huffington Post):

What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.

I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

Addendum: my friend John Wirenius has these sage remarks.

Photo at top: Wikimedia Commons.

"Anesthesia" by the Nation Rocking Shadows and "Baja" by the Astronauts

It's December so, of course, it's time to think about surf guitar music. In this instance, surf guitar music from places far from Southern California, although the first one is from another O.C. What started me thinking about this was that a movie called Anesthesia was filming in my neighborhood. This brought to my mind "Anesthesia" by the Nation Rocking Shadows, which I heard once in the spring of 1967 in a friend's dorm room at the University of South Florida, but which stuck in my mind over many years, as did "Believe Me" by the Royal Teens and Uska Dara by Eartha Kitt. My friend who had the record said the band was from Orlando, that he had seen them live, and that they had tons of electronic equipment onstage.

Cut to about twenty years later, at the bar of the Lion's Head, where I heard a man reciting to a woman "Anesthesia's" peculiar spoken bridge: "Scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, sponge, sponge, sponge, sponge, suture, suture, suture, suture...." He omitted the scream at the end, or he would have gotten some unfriendly attention from the bartender. I said I didn't know anyone outside of Florida (besides, of course, me) had ever heard of this odd piece of music. He assured me there were those like him who had.

I didn't actually listen to "Anesthesia" for a second time until a few days ago, when seeing the movie title made me curious enough to do a web search that led me to the YouTube clip embedded above. The music begins with an ominous "drip drip drip" on bass, some alarming guitar riffs and an organ build, then it resolves into a main theme that seems a variation on the Chantays' "Pipeline". This is broken by the spoken bridge quoted above, which ends with a scream. The main theme then returns, but shortly after gives way to riffs like those near the beginning, and ends in cacophony.

Thinking of the Nation Rocking Shadows, from Florida, made me think of another surf guitar band, this one coming from far from any ocean. The Astronauts called themselves the "mile high surf band," having originated in Boulder, Colorado. "Baja," which you can hear in the clip above, is one of my favorite surf numbers. The staccato high notes on the guitar foreshadow a style that is frequent in contemporary pop, as in "Night," by Dolly Trolly. The suggestions of similar music YouTube gives to the right of the "Baja" video includes a piece that seems akin to surf music, though also originating a long distance from California: "Wild Weekend" by Buffalo's Rockin' Rebels.

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

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

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

e.e. cummings, "i thank you God," by The Western Wind.

I posted this e.e. cummings poem two years ago on Easter. Yesterday I found this version set to music by Elliot Z. Levine, a member of the a cappella choral group The Western Wind. The poem and song seems appropriate for today. Happy Thanksgiving to all.

iPod and photo log from a short walk around Brooklyn Heights and Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Yesterday morning I took a walk down the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, across the pedestrian bridge to Pier 1 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, around the pier, and then along the new path through the Pier 3 and 4 uplands to Pier 5. I did a circuit of Pier 5, then went up Joralemon Street to Hicks, across Hicks to Remsen, over to Montague Terrace (former address of W.H. Auden and Thomas Wolfe), then home. On my walk I had my iPod set on shuffle, and made a log of the music I heard on the way. As each song played, I took a photo of what I was passing. I've listed the songs, with video or audio links where available, below each photo. I've let the photos speak for themselves, except for some explanatory notes at the end of the post.

1. Martin & Neil, "Baby": Vince Martin's and Fred Neil's only album together, Tear Down the Walls, was released in 1964. My college roommate had a copy; I loved it and got my own. Years later, I met Vince at the old Lone Star Cafe on Fifth Avenue. I told him I how I liked that album: he asked if I wanted to sing a song from it. He borrowed Rick Danko's guitar and we sang "Dade County Jail", with me trying to reach Freddy's low notes. "Baby" is Florida blues at its best, about "sailin' on that St. John's River", with raga-style strumming on the twelve string guitar and John Sebastian on harp. You can hear it here.

2. Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "Cowgirl in the Sand": This has been a favorite of mine since I got their first album, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, during my last year of law school. The version on my iPod is from Live at the Fillmore East, March 6 & 7, 1970. Video of another live performance here.

3. Rod Stewart, "Reason to Believe": Rod the Mod takes a Tim Hardin song and makes it a gut-wrenching masterpiece. It's from Every Picture Tells a Story, one of the best rock albums ever. Live performance video here.

4. Fleetwood Mac, "Station Man": a driving rocker from Kiln House (1970), the band's first post Peter Green album and the last to feature Jeremy Spencer, and with cover art by Christine McVie. Hear it here.

5. The Byrds, "The Times They Are a Changing": jangling Rickenbacker guitars and vocal harmonies make this Dylan song a rock anthem. My generation were "your sons and your daughters" then. Live performance video here.

6. Yvonne Fair & the James Brown Band: "I Found You": From Roots of a Revolution, a chronicle of James Brown's early days with King Records, based in Cincinnati. The Ambassador of Soul later took this song and made it a hit under the title "I Feel Good." Hear the early version, with Ms. Fair, here.

7. The Flying Burrito Brothers, "Do Right Woman": Gram Parsons' and Chris Hillman's post-Byrds group did this Chips Moman/Dan Penn song, a favorite of my mom's, on their first album, The Gilded Palace of Sin. Hear it here.

8. Sue Foley, "Shake That Thing": uptempo blues by a Canadian singer I like a lot, and not just because she shares my wife's surname. Listen here.

9. Dolly Lyon, "Palm of Your Hand": solid R&B from 1957 by a singer who, not for lack of talent, never made it big. There's excellent instrumental backing, including what I'm pretty sure is Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson on sax. Read about the singer and hear the song here.

10. Bunny Berigan, "I Can't Get Started With You": one of my favorites from the Bells of Hell jukebox. Hear it here.

11. Bob Dylan, "Gospel Plow": from his first, eponymous album, a frenetic blues and one of his earlier original compositions. Hear it here.

12. Turner & Kirwan of Wexford, "Second Chance": T&K were the house band at the Bells of Hell for a year or so. Pierce Turner has since become a successful solo artist while Larry went on to front the soon to disband Black 47 and to be a playwright and novelist. There's no video or audio link to this song, but there's one video, with less than optimal sound quality, of them doing "Freeborn Man of the Traveling People".

13. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, "Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer)": the King of Western Swing and his band got together in 1974 to make an album titled For the Last Time, which includes this lively number. Live performance video here.

For architecture and theater buffs, photo 1 is of the Arlington Apartments (Montrose Morris, 1887), 62 Montague Street, a fine example of the Romanesque revival style, and home of playwright Arthur Miller before he married Marilyn Monroe.

For tugboat buffs, photo 3 is of JoAnne Reinauer III heading out of the East River toward the Buttermilk Channel, with Governors Island in the background.

For picturesque ruin and rail buffs, photo 7 is of the collapsed outer end of Pier 4, formerly a rail car float terminal at which freight cars were loaded onto, and unloaded from, barges that ferried them between the railheads in New Jersey and the docks below Brooklyn Heights. The remains of Pier 4 are being made into a sanctuary for birds and marine life.

For ferry buffs, photo 10 is of the ferry that runs between the lower tip of Manhattan and Governors Island, seen at its Governors Island dock.

For horticulture buffs, photo 11 shows some colorful ornamental kale along with a small evergreen and something that might be ivy.

For steeply inclined street buffs, photo 12 was taken on Joralemon Street between Furman and Hicks, perhaps the only block to live on in Brooklyn if you miss San Francisco.

Marshall Chapman does songs from her album Blaze of Glory at Hill Country, New York City.

Last Wednesday night I went to Hill Country NY a restaurant, market, and music venue, to see and hear my old friend Marshall Chapman, whom I hadn't seen since 2006. This proved to be a much better venue than that on her previous visit, when she had to play in a pit behind a pool table. She opened the show with the first track on her latest album, Blaze of Glory, the lively rocker "Love in the Wind":

"Think Bo Diddley on acid," Marshall said as she started to strum the familiar "shave-and-a-haircut, two bits" rhythm, then sang about "the difference between falling in love with the way you feel around somebody and falling in love with somebody."

She ended the show with the title, and closing, track from the album:

"Blaze of Glory" is an autobiographical song about changes in music, in mores, and in Marshall. Unfortunately, when she calls for a sing-along, you can hear me. I didn't have the song in mind a couple of weeks ago when I took, and titled, this photo, but I will whenever I look at it again.

Addendum: I almost forgot to add; Marshall sang her achingly lovely lament for Tim Krekel.

Richard Nelson's Apple family plays at the Public Theater

Tuesday night we saw a preview of Regular Singing, the last in Richard Nelson's series of four Apple family plays. Last year we saw Sorry, the preceding play in the series. We've yet to see the first two, but will.

My wife was invited to the play by a friend who had a spare ticket because her husband couldn't attend, so I secured my own ticket. I waited until late, and consequently got what was probably considered one of the least desirable seats. These plays are in the Public's Anspacher Theater, where the "stage" is a flat floor with steeply tiered rows of seats on three sides. The first row of seats is at stage level; mine was one of these, furthest toward the back of the stage. This actually proved to be a fortunate location, as I was close to the table where most of the action took place. So close, in fact, that, not having dined before the show, I had to fight the temptation to ask one of the actors if I could have a plate of the mac and cheese sitting enticingly in a bowl a few steps from where I was sitting.

It also helps to be close because these plays are performed in almost ordinary conversational, not full "stage", voices (the Public advises those who might have trouble hearing to get amplification devices they supply). This also aids the "suspension of disbelief." One really has the sense of being at an intimate family gathering. Some months after seeing Sorry, I found myself musing, "Who were those friends we visited up in Rhinebeck?" This illusion may have been facilitated by the fact--disclosure here--that two of the actors, Jay O. Sanders and Maryann Plunkett, Richard and Barbara Apple, brother and sister, in the plays, but husband and wife in real life, have been friends of ours since our children were classmates in elementary school.

Each of the plays is set on a historical date--That Hopey Changey Thing on the date of the 2010 midterm elections, Sweet and Sad on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Sorry on the date of the 2012 presidential election, and Regular Singing on the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination. Each of the earlier plays has had its opening on the actual day on which it is set; Regular Singing will have its opening tonight.

Regular Singing, like Sorry, takes place in the home of Barbara Apple, a schoolteacher, in Rhinebeck, New York. Rhinebeck is a small town in the Hudson valley, an easy drive north from New York City. One of the play's characters notes that Rhinebeck's main street, followed south, eventually becomes Broadway. Some affluent City residents have summer and weekend houses in and near Rhinebeck, but the Apples are locals. Richard became a successful lawyer in the City, but in Regular Singing he's moved to Albany, where he holds an important position in state government.

Moving seems characteristic for Richard. He's tightly wound, ready to spring, but at the same time elusive. In both Sorry and Regular Singing he keeps saying he needs to leave while Barbara implores him to stay. Barbara, single and childless in middle age, is the nurturing mother figure of the Apples. She shares her house with a younger sister, Marian (Laila Robins), also a teacher, who separated from her husband, Adam, after their daughter's suicide. There is a third, even younger, Apple sister, Jane (Sally Murphy), described as "a non-fiction writer", who lives nearby with her boyfriend, Tim Andrews (Stephen Kunken), an actor. Benjamin Apple (Jon Devries) is the siblings' uncle and a retired actor. He also shared Barbara's house after he suffered a heart attack that put him into a coma, from which he emerged with a mild dementia. The conflict in Sorry centers around the decision to have him moved to an assisted living facility, a decision that Barbara, ever the in-gatherer, opposes.

As is appropriate for a play set on the anniversary of an assassination, and perhaps for the final play in a series, the theme of Regular Singing is death. The Kennedy assassination is discussed, but the central concern is the impending death of Adam who, despite their separation, has remained close to Marian and to Barbara, who has made her house his hospice. The play begins with the family gathered around the dining room table, and Jane and Tim breaking into song, a song to be sung at Adam's funeral. This leads to Tim's short discourse on the play's title, which was a liturgical controversy in colonial America. As the play progresses, Marian is frequently called to attend to the needs of Adam's mother, who is in a room offstage with her dying son. Richard seems a caged tiger; after Barbara gets him to sit down he accuses her and his other sisters of sabotaging his marriage.  This leads to the play's emotional fulcrum, where his vulnerability becomes manifest. Amid the sturm und drang Uncle Benjamin, with his flat affect, sounds a note of stability. That may be why Barbara repeats almost everything he says.

Near the close of Regular Singing Barbara reads to the others sentences each of her students has written about death, an assignment she gave them in connection with the Kennedy anniversary. Then there is a recitation of a secularized 23rd Psalm Adam wrote for his own funeral, ending with, "and I shall dwell in Barbara's house forever."

I'll close with what Richard Nelson, the playwright, had to say about the Apple plays:

I wrote in the note for SORRY that it is my hope that these plays are about the need to talk, the need to listen, the need for theatre, and the need to be in the same room together.

Maybe it's really just saying the same thing another way, but I want to add that it is also my hope that they are about the need to know, in small or even some bigger ways, that we are not alone.  

I'm very glad to have been in that room.

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright: one of his few designs in New York City was demolished.

The space behind these papered-over windows at 430 Park Avenue, between 54th and 55th streets contained an interior designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, widely regarded as the greatest American architect of the past century. I used to work in 430 Park, when it was a banal 1950s vintage international style building (originally a 1920s vintage apartment building that was stripped of its brick and limestone facade and given a glass and steel front), a poor cousin to the nearby Lever House and Seagram Building. When I began work there, I noticed that the ground floor housed a Mercedes Benz dealership that had a spectacular looking showroom. I later learned that this showroom had been designed by Wright, and had the distinction of being among only four things by him in New York City, the others being the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street; The Crimson Beech, a prefab house on Staten Island; and a display room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now only these last three remain.

This photo, from Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, depicts the showroom as it was at a time when the dealership sold Porsches as well as Mercedes.

In 2001, when the lease of the principal tenant at 430 Park expired, The New York Times reported that its owners, "a partnership headed by Oestreicher Realty and Midwood Management," decided to do an extensive renovation intended to make it "fit in better visually with its neighborhood and become what its managers hope will be a prime location for corporate tenants." I had hoped to be able to show a "before and after" comparison of the building, but can't find a photo of it as it was before the renovation. The photos below show it as it is after:

To me, the building does look better. The principal change is that the narrow north and south walls, which were previously clad in white brick, now are glass and metal, like the facade facing Park Avenue. While the long Park Avenue facade still has its pattern of horizontal strips of window alternating with strips of opaque green, the appearance is somehow softer. The overall effect is to make the building look like something inviting to touch, like a hand-held electronic device.

Mercedes Benz vacated their space in 2012, consolidating their sales operations in Manhattan at one location on the West Side, where many other auto dealers are located.* The Wright space was ready-made for another such dealership, but either none expressed any interest in taking it over, or (more likely is my guess) the new building owners wanted something there that would generate more, and more steady, revenue. Could it have been adaptively re-used by, say, a high end clothing boutique or shoe store? Possibly, although some modifications would have been necessary. In any event, the Crain's New York video below shows what happened (the narrator refers to the Wright-designed space as "the Hoffman showroom" after the dealer who occupied the space before Mercedes):



The building's owners acted lawfully and within their rights. And, as this New York Times article notes, the showroom wasn't considered one of Wright's more significant works. The article quotes the late, and eminent, Times architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, as calling it "cramped." Still, some saw in its spiral ramp an adumbration of the Guggenheim.

I'm very sorry that it's gone. Part of my sorrow is that few seemed to know about it, so I felt I was in on a choice secret. I liked to imagine taking one of my architect friends there and basking in their delighted surprise. In a better world  there would have been public funds sufficient and available to compensate the owners for the loss of income, which for a prime Park Avenue commercial space could be substantial, they would suffer from preserving it. Perhaps it could have been acquired, or leased for a long term, and used as a small museum commemorating Wright's life and works.

I can't resist the obvious gesture of closing with this Simon & Garfunkel song:



_____________
*For some reason, it seems to make economic sense for car dealers to locate in proximity to each other. Maybe the idea is that you get spillover from other dealers' potential customers who didn't like what was offered there. In giving up the Park Avenue location, though, Mercedes abandoned the place where, as reported by one of my fellow lawyers who spotted him, Jerry Seinfeld came to shop for a car. In any event, I can't help but wonder if Mercedes' decision to leave the space wasn't in some way encouraged by the building's new owners.

The Wall

My old Civil Air Patrol buddy Steve Scrivener's name is there, as are those of several soldiers I helped to train during my Fort Polk days. WNYC's website links to an interview with Maya Lin, who designed the memorial. There's also a recollection of the dedication on the same website.

Update on Lou Reed: his Grace Church connection (thanks to Binky Philips).

I damn near vandalized my briefs when I read the first sentence of Binky Philips' Huff Po piece:

I first met Lou Reed at the Holiday Fundraiser Fair at Grace Church in Brooklyn Heights, the day after Thanksgiving, 1967.

Lou at the Grace Church Fair? My wife has been a stalwart Fair worker for maybe the last thirteen years or so. Of course, 1967 was well before our time here in the Heights. I was starting my first year of law school in Cambridge, Massachusetts and she was a sixth grader at a Catholic school in Lynn, a few miles away. Had we been introduced at the time, and told that we would someday be married, we would both have been very surprised, perhaps even (at least in her case) horrified. (I would probably have thought: "Well, she's not the upper middle class WASP princess of my dreams, but she is pretty." She might have thought: "What an pretentious, pseudo-intellectual twit.")

Anyway, Lou was not present in person at the '67 Fair. Mr. Philips, fourteen at the time, "met" him in the form of a stack of the first Velvet Underground LPs (you can always get some really good stuff at the Grace Church Fair; trust me), one of which he bought, took home, played, and didn't like. He described Lou's vocal delivery as "Bob Dylan with a Brooklyn hitter accent." Two years later, stoned, and with a friend, he pulled the album out, played it, and SHA-ZAM! He was converted.

Later, Mr. Philips had several in person encounters with Lou, almost all of them in music stores. In one of these, he did manage a brief, inconsequential conversational exchange about a guitar. I was once (apart from the Detroit concert) in Lou's presence. This was at a party, sometime around the '70s-'80s cusp, in the then edgy (now touristy) Meat Packing District. My friend Charlie (not to be confused with Binky's friend Charlie) pointed him out to me, standing maybe twenty feet away. I resisted the temptation to introduce myself, knowing I was not cool enough to merit his attention.

Mr. Philips writes that he was in the Grace Church Choir (by which he presumably means the Youth Choir) for three years. Among his choir mates at that time might have been Robert Lamm, later keyboardist, vocalist, and songwriter for Chicago. Harry Chapin would have preceded him by a few years.

Classics IV, "Spooky"

I've marked other Halloweens with some obvious choices: "Night on Bald Mountain" and "The Monster Mash", and a less than obvious one: "Ambrose (Part 5)", by comely Brooklynite Linda Laurie. This year I've gone back to something obvious.

I remember "Spooky" from my first year of law school. I wasn't crazy about it; I was more into hard rock and folk at the time, and "Spooky" sounded a bit too jazzy for my taste. Now, having looked at the song's Wikipedia entry, I know that it started as a saxophone instrumental that was a minor hit for Mike Sharpe. Still, I noticed that the song seemed to stick in my head; as a rock critic would say, it had hooks. And their singer, the late Dennis Yost, had a way with a tune.

One of the WRKO DJs mentioned that the group was from Atlanta. Now, having seen the band's Wiki, I know they originated in my old home state, Florida, specifically Jacksonville. They have a history that intertwines with that of Southern rock at large. Two members of the group later joined fellow Jacksonvillian Robert Nix in the Atlanta Rhythm Section. Nix had been the drummer for the Candymen, a group that had been the backup band for Roy Orbison and several other stars before going on its own to record "Georgia Pines":



I also heard "Georgia Pines" during my 1L year, one night when I was up late studying and listening to WBCN, Boston's first "underground" FM rock station. The DJ introduced the song as "Southern white soul" and said the lead singer was Rodney Justo. I've since learned that Rodney is a fellow Tampan. (Some of my old friends have taken to calling themselves "Tampanians" because "Tampan" sounds too much like something else; I say "Who cares? We can absorb it!"). Rodney was with Nix in ARS as their lead singer. ARS did a cover of "Spooky", as did Dusty Springfield, Lydia Lunch, and many others.

Reading Arthur Danto on the Subway

You took me past the Brillo boxes

to the Sistine ceiling; there you died.

I'm not sure about the boxes.

I need to retrace my route.

Maybe somewhere, say,

between Borough Hall and Bowling Green,

you'll bring me to a wakeful dream;

or will it be the end of the line?

Arthur C. Danto, philosopher and lover of art, died last Friday, as I was reading What Art Is.

Lou Reed

This past June I posted the good news that Lou Reed had undergone what appeared to be a successful liver transplant. Today the news turned bad; he died at 71.

Lou was a terrific guitarist, but it was his vocal performances that for me are most memorable. Delivered in, as Ben Ratliff's New York Times obituary puts it, "his Brooklyn-Queens drawl", lacking any soaring dynamics, they could be sardonic, scathing, or sweet. Sometimes they were mixtures of all three almost at once. "Coney Island Baby," the song he does in the video clip above, emphasizes the sweetness, but without being mawkish.

I saw him in live performance once, at the State Theater in Detroit during the 1980s. I was there for a meeting with several friends and colleagues from New York. One of them was a nun living in the secular world who ran a consulting business to fund her charitable ventures, which included serving Thanksgiving dinner to hundreds of homeless people on the streets of Harlem. She enjoyed the concert very much, although she found "Sex with Your Parents" a bit perplexing

In January of 1987 Lou and his former Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale appeared together in concert in my neighborhood. They performed the complete contents of their album Songs for Drella, made as a memorial to their artistic patron and friend Andy Warhol. I somehow missed this; fortunately, my Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague "Homer Fink" was there, and today published this recollection of the event, as well as his appreciation of Lou.

Just plain Bill's.

Back in 1970, during my first year as a New York City resident, my roommate and I brought dates to this place on East 54th Street.  At the time it was named Bill's Gay Nineties and, as the name implied, it was a pitchers of beer, peanut shells on the floor kind of place with a guy in a straw boater playing banjo and singing "Sidewalks of New York." Some years later I walked by and noticed that the name had been changed to "Bill's Nineties Bar," no doubt to avoid possible misidentification as a gay bar.  A few days ago, I walked along the same block again and saw that the name is now simply "Bill's." I suppose the passage of time means that "Nineties" now opens the question: do we mean the era of Diamond Jim Brady and "Remember the Maine" or the more recent decade characterized by, as a friend put it: "lots of Backstreet Boys and body glitter"?

It's 1967 again...at least in baseball. Red Sox vs. Cardinals.

From 1960, the year the "Beat 'em Bucs" Pirates took the measure of the big, bad Yanks, until 1967, I didn't pay much attention to baseball. I was amused by the '62 Mets (and never thought that someday I'd be a fan), and had a flutter of interest in the '65 Minnesota Twins and Harmon Killebrew.

When I arrived in Cambridge for law school in September of 1967, I was quickly made aware that the local team was on a roll. When they won the pennant, things went wild. "Owah Sahx ah th' greatest!" a townie kid cutting across the Yard on his way home from school yelled as he passed me. "They'ah gonna beat those Cahd-nuls." So I started paying attention to the sports news and learned about Lonborg and Yaz and Scott and Rico and the tragic injury to Tony C.--I found out that my then girlfriend, who lived in Richmond, Virginia, had a crush on him--that would keep him out of the World Series lineup. I heard "The Impossible Dream" on the radio a hundred times.

The dream would prove impossible. It took seven games, but the Cards beat the team that had last appeared in a Series the year I was born (1946) and last won one two years after my mother was born (1918). By 1986 I had become a Mets fan--a logical extension of my first baseball love, which was for the Brooklyn Dodgers--and so celebrated the Sox loss of that Series, though with just a hint of wistfulness.

This year I'm rooting for a reversal of 1967, in part because my wife is a Sox fan, but since I've long had a soft spot for the Cards on purely aesthetic grounds, I hope it goes to seven games again.

Addendum:  Archaeopteryx reminds me that 2004, the year the "curse" on the Sox was lifted, was also a replay of '67, Sox vs. Cards, though it was won by the Sox in a four game sweep. Because of my father's illness (he died the night the Sox won game four) I didn't pay much attention to that Series. Also, Richard B points out that the '46 Series also featured the Cards against the Sox. It was, like '67, a seven game battle won by the Cards, and featured two of the past century's greatest players: Stan Musial (Cards) and Ted Williams (Sox).

Zagat's fifty state sandwich survey: beef on weck gets its due, as does the Connecticut lobster roll.

When I was an associate at LeBoeuf, Lamb, "fifty state survey" was a dreaded assignment. It meant going to the library (no Lexis or Westlaw in those days) to determine the law governing some abstruse matter--say, eligibility of liability insurance on exterminators for export to the unlicensed or "surplus lines" market--in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. The good people at Zagat (yes, I really do like them) had a much more enjoyable task: finding the "unique regional sandwich" that best characterizes each state, as well as D.C. For the New York sandwich, I expected them to choose pastrami on rye with mustard, served with a half-sour pickle, and would have considered that a worthy option. Instead, I was surprised and delighted that they looked to the western end of the state and chose beef on weck (photo above). As I've posted here before, I came to love this sandwich years ago, during my tenure at LeBoeuf, when I was working on client matters in the Buffalo area.

In our neighboring state of Connecticut, Zagat picks another favorite of mine, the Connecticut lobster roll (photo above). There's more about it here. Not surprisingly, the Maine version gets the nod as the Pine Tree State's characteristic sandwich.

My old home state, Florida, gets what it ought to: the Cuban sandwich. The one Zagat chose to feature, however, doesn't look like any Cuban I've ever had. That's probably because it comes from a cafeteria in Miami, not from my old home town, Tampa, the Ur of el Cubano. My first, and therefore iconic, Cuban came from the Silver Ring Bar in Ybor City, an establishment that failed to survive the transformation of Tampa's Latin Quarter into a corporatized tourist mecca. There's a lively discussion in the comments on the Zagat piece about what a proper Cuban should, or should not, include. The Zagat description fails to mention what I consider the sine qua non: that the sandwich be pressed in a plancha, a device resembling that used to press panini.

My wife wanted to know what Zagat considers the characteristic sandwich of her home state, Massachusetts. She was amused and pleased to know that it's the fluffernutter, a variant of the PB&J with Marshmallow Fluff in place of the jelly. Evidently the  General Court (what they call the legislature in the Bay State) and Governor made it the Commonwealth's official sandwich. Zagat tells us that Marshmallow Fluff was invented in Somerville (though it's now made in my wife's hometown, Lynn) by a man named Archibald Query, who sold it door-to-door. Somerville now has an annual Fluffernutter Festival, and it seems we just missed National Fluffernutter Day. Did Congress and the President actually agree to proclaim that? Ah, for the days when they could find common ground on important matters.

The Zagat folks threw a few curves. For my native state, Pennsylvania, one might well expect the Philly cheesesteak, no? No. The "cheesesteak" award goes to...drumroll...Idaho. I put cheesesteak in quotes because the version Zagat chose is made with chicken and bacon. Turning to Philly, Zagat anoints as the Keystone State's sandwich a hoagie made with roast pork, melted provolone, and broccoli rabe. It looks and sounds delicious, so the next time I'm down there I'll try to find time to visit Tommy DiNic's at the Reading Terminal Market.

Baseball: down to the final four.

You can see clearly where my loyalty lies, now that my old home town team (Rays) and team from my native region (Pirates) have been eliminated from contention. I have some feeling for the Tigers--God knows, Detroit needs all the help it can get now--and I've long admired the Cardinals on purely aesthetic grounds based on the way they play. I've never forgiven the Dodgers for leaving Brooklyn, even though I now know it was more Robert Moses' than Walter O'Malley's fault, and for Davey Lopes' loping around the bases with his finger in the air as they beat my Mets in the 1988 NLDS.

So, I'm hoping that the Cards soundly thrash the Dodgers (they're tied at 2 in the 11th in the opening game at St. Louis as I write this) and that the Red Sox beat the Tigers (but not so badly as to be humiliating.) This would set up a replay of 1967, the year of the Sox' "Impossible Dream," when I had just arrived in Cambridge and, after years of baseball latency, succumbed to Fenway fever until they fell to the Cards after a hard fought seven games. This year I hope they go seven games again, but that the Sox win the Series.

Update: Cards go one up in the NLCS thanks to a walk off single in the 13th by ex-Met Carlos Beltran.

Second update: Cards now up by two in NLCS (yay!), but Anibal Sanchez and the Detroit bullpen blanked the Sox as the Tigers won the game 1-0 and went up 1-0 in the ALCS.

Giuseppe Verdi, 1813-1901

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, perhaps the greatest pop tunesmith of the nineteenth century. The video above shows the chorus va pensiero sull ali dorate, or the "Hebrew Slaves' Chorus," from his opera Nabucco. The clip above shows a performance from the Gran Teatro La Fenice. When I saw the Met's Nabucco, at the close of this chorus someone in the audience yelled Viva Italia! A friend later told me that va pensiero is considered "the unofficial Italian national anthem."

  This video is of the triumphal march from Verdi's Aida, at the Metropolitan Opera in 1989. This march, which I first heard on the Columbia Records album Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music, bought by my parents when I was about eight, provided the soundtrack for my most grandiose childhood fantasies.

Update: WQXR is celebrating Verdi Week.

Mets realize my modest hope.

They did it. They finished third in the NL East, not fourth, as they did the preceding four seasons. They did it with a record identical to that of the 2012 season, and worse than those for the two seasons before, so their modest success is a result of how poorly their rivals the Phillies did this year. Going into the final day of the regular season, the Mets and Phils were tied with 73-88 records. In their final game, the Mets got past the Brewers 3-2 while their resurgent erstwhile nemeses the Braves were clobbering the hapless Phils 12-5.

They also did it despite what it seems has become so characteristic of the Mets: a DL that looks like a casualty roster from Chateau-Thierry or Ypres; one that this year included a season ending elbow ligament tear to promising young starter Matt Harvey.  At first it was thought Harvey would need Tommy John surgery; now he has decided to try rest and rehabilitation. Depending on how things go, he could be available sometime next season.

The Mets won't be in the postseason, but as of now there are three teams still standing that I wouldn't mind seeing a World Series winner. The Red Sox, whom I like out of spousal loyalty, take the best record into the playoffs. The Pirates--my affection for them is explained here--have clinched one of the NL wild cards. My old home town's Rays may get an AL wild card if they can beat the Rangers tonight. Update: The Rays live, having got by the Rangers 5-2 in the elimination game, so they advance to the playoffs.

Second update: Matt Harvey had a talk with Mets' GM Sandy Alderson (a Harvard Law alum I had the pleasure of meeting at an HLS alumni event this summer), and he will now have the surgery, which means he's definitely out all next season. Meanwhile, the Pirates and Rays both advanced past their wild card elimination games. Since then, the Pirates and Cards have split the first two games of their series, and the Rays got clobbered by the Red Sox 12-2 in the opening game of theirs. My wife is happy.

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).