Lake Champlain & Moriah redux.

Last summer, I posted about riding Amtrak's Adirondack from New York City to Plattsburgh, New York (the train continues north to Montreal) on the way to visit my in-laws in Massena. In that post, I included a couple of photos and some text about a preserved locomotive, ore jenny and caboose from the Lake Champlain & Moriah Railroad that are on display adjacent to the Port Henry, New York station. At the time, it was raining, and the quality of the photos (which I had to shoot through a window because the stop at Fort Henry was too brief to allow me to detrain) suffered accordingly. When I took the Adirondack north again a couple of weeks ago, the weather was better, so I got these shots, which are correspondingly more satisfactory:

Portland Head Light

Last weekend we took Liz to Maine to start three weeks of camp at Kingsley Pines (I'm giving them free advertisng because I think it's an excellent camp run by great people), and stayed with Lori, my wife's step-cousin once removed, in Cape Elizabeth, near Portland. Our first evening there, we had dinner al fresco in the park surrounding Portland Head Light. The park commands sweeping views of Portland Inlet and the southern reach of Casco Bay, with its many islands.

Soon after we arrived, I looked westward and saw two large sailing vessels, a two-masted schooner and a sloop, between the breakwaters at the entrance to Portland Harbor.


A short while later, a cargo ship came out of the harbor, heading for sea.


The ship proved to be Jutta, a typical small tramp freighter, capable of carrying containers or dry bulk cargo.


Lori told me Portland Head is the most photographed lighthouse in the U.S., but that didn't deter me from snapping it once again.


As I went back up the hill, the sun was obscured by a cloud, softly backlighting the flag.

Odds and ends.

I've been neglecting the blog lately. Partly real life interfering; partly summer doldrums. There are several things I've been meaning to post about, but have back-burnered. I'm going to mention them briefly here, and maybe get back to them later in more detail.

QE2 to Dubai. I was surprised to read that RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 (photo from Wikipedia Commons) was being withdrawn from service; even more surprised to be reminded that she's forty years old, and will be forty-one when she makes her final voyage in 2008. That means she's served longer than any other large passenger ship of the last century or so: longer than either of the first two Queens, the Aquitania, either Mauretania, the Ile de France or the Europa/Liberte, the America or the Vaterland/Leviathan.

I'm delighted that Dubai interests have purchased her for use as a floating hotel, thereby sparing her the breaker's torch. Having spent most of her career cruising the world, she'll be more at home in Dubai, which she may at some time have actually visited, than the first Queen Mary is in Long Beach, when she never got closer than 3,000 miles to California in her active days.

What I'm wishing is that someone will buy one of the few surviving relics of the transatlantic liner era - United States, which lies at a pier in Philadelphia (see here), seems the only realistic bet - and dock it somewhere near the old "ocean liner row" on the west side of New York City for use as a hotel or museum.

Blog shout-out: While we're on maritime matters, or if you're just interested in unusual New York City scenes, take a look at Tugster.

Guns: I've been meaning to do a post on the Second Amendment, in light of the Virginia Tech shootings and the controversy over Mayor Bloomberg's attempts to stem the flow of handguns into New York City. I'm not an anti-gun fanatic. I'm familiar with, and have fired, many types of firearms, both in my brief Army career and with friends who live outside the City. Nevertheless, I've held the view that the Second Amendment was never intended to protect an individual right to own arms; only to allow the formation of state militias, i.e. the National Guard. My position was that a system of "local option" was best, with rural areas able to be more "liberal" (in the classic sense of the word) about gun ownership, and cities having the choice to be more restrictive (the prospect of a large portion of the population of New York City packing heat does give me the willies). It came as a surprise to me that as "liberal" (in the contemporary sense of the word) a constitutional law scholar as Larry Tribe has come to the conclusion that the Amendment does protect an individual right. Also, I've just started reading Michael Barone's Our First Revolution, in which the author claims (I haven't yet got to the relevant part) that the origin of the individual's right to bear arms is in the British "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. Stay tuned.

Update: (See comments below) Richard, who has taught a constitutional law seminar at my undergrad alma mater, South Florida, reminds me that Warren Burger, Nixon's choice for Chief Justice, was adamant about the Second Amendment's not protecting an individual right. Nevertheless, he says, he remembers Tribe's argument as convincing. I still need to read Tribe.

Meanwhile, Twiffer brings to mind a cartoon that Marty Redish had taped to his dorm room door during my first year of law school. It showed a guy in late eighteenth century garb haranguing a bunch of similarly dressed guys, saying something like, "Oh, come on, now. 'Freedom of speech' means freedom of speech. Everyone knows that." This isn't meant as a put-down, Twiff. There are lots of legal scholars who agree with you concerning the Second Amendment. My problem hasn't been so much with the word "militia" as with the words, "well ordered." Again, I'll have to read Tribe and Barone before giving a better response.

Riding the train with Fred Exley.

On Monday, my daughter, Liz, and I rode Amtrak's Adirondack from Penn Station, New York City, to Plattsburgh, New York, en route to join my wife on a visit with my in-laws in Massena. Packing for the trip, I took from the shelf where it has sat unread since I bought it some years ago my copy of Frederick Exley's Pages from a Cold Island.

One evening about fifteen years ago, I was where my bride had learned to expect me to be more often than she wished, which was at the bar of the Lion's Head, in Greenwich Village. After a few beers, I felt the inevitable (my maternal grandmother used to say, "Know why beer goes through you so fast? It doesn't have to stop to change color.") need to visit the room a few steps from where I was seated. Having spent thirty seconds or so reading the superurinary graffiti ("God made Shakespeare, then broke the mold. God broke the mold, then made Jacqueline Susann. Mailer will advise God what molds he's trying on.") and doing the obligatory manual ablution, I swung the door open and saw a man with disheveled hair and a sallow complexion, wearing a rumpled sport jacket, sitting on the barstool I had temporarily vacated. Tommy Butler, the bartender, spotted me and tapped the man on the shoulder, saying, "Hey! That's his place. You'll have to move." The man cast a plaintive glance at me as he slid off the stool and began to walk away. He seemed frail, and I wanted to say, "Wait. It's OK. You sit; I'll stand for a while." But Tommy, although genial and a great raconteur, would brook no challenge to any of his orders, even from their putative beneficiaries. So I retook my seat and got another beer. After a few minutes, when Tommy was out of earshot, I mentioned to a friend sitting next to me that I felt bad about the man who'd been ousted from my place. "Oh, yeah," my friend said, "that was Fred Exley."

I first heard of Exley some twenty years before the Lion's Head incident, when I was in my third year of law school. I had become acquainted with some Niemann fellows, experienced journalists who spent a year at Harvard studying whatever they wished. Prominent among these, in my memory, was Paul Hemphill (Update: I'm saddened to learn of Paul's death from throat cancer in July of 2009). Occasionally, seeking respite from discussions of shifting and springing remainder interests, I would join these worldly folk at their lunch table, where, among other things, I could hear Paul talk about country music, the subject of a book he was then writing (it's titled The Nashville Sound, has recently been re-released, and contains, among innumerable gems, two of the most felicitous geographical descriptions I've encountered: one of the topography of Middle Tennessee, which perfectly validated my own memory--"nursery rhyme hills that blip across the horizon as if drawn by a child's crayon"--and another of the city of Nashville, which, he wrote, "squats on the red banks of the Cumberland River like a frog about to jump"). Anyway, at one of these lunches Paul and the others were discussing a new book they were all excited about. It was A Fan's Notes, by a first-time author named Frederick Exley.

I didn't rush out, buy and read A Fan's Notes then; I had a third year paper to complete and finals to take. Indeed, I didn't read it until about fifteen years later, when another friend (at the Lion's Head, of course) recommended it. I got it, and loved it. A synopsis is here.

So, on that ill-starred night at the Head, I thought to leave my seat again and search for Exley in the crowd. But what would I say to him that hadn't been said by a thousand admirers before? Would he be in one of the foul, alcohol induced moods described in his book, and see fit to skewer me with sarcasm? Anyway, there was sure to be another, more propitious opportunity.

A few months later, paging through the Times, I saw his obituary.

Exley wrote two books after A Fan's Notes, the aforementioned Pages from a Cold Island and the ominously (and, unfortunately, accurately) titled Last Notes from Home. Neither of these garnered the critical praise the first book had received; Walter Kirn, citing Exley's biographer, Jonathan Yardley, pegs him as a "classic one-hit wonder."

I decided to bring Pages with me on this trip because I was headed into Exley country. He grew up in Watertown, New York, and, in his later years, he sometimes stayed with his widowed mother at her house in Alexandria Bay, the principal town of the Thousand Islands region, to which Larry, my stepfather-in-law, had promised to take Liz and me during our visit. Indeed, I thought I had read or heard that the "cold island" of the title was one of the Thousand, where Exley had camped out in a cabin while writing the book. Besides, Exley seemed an appropriate companion for a train trip. According to his bio, while still in high school he worked in the rail yards at Watertown. Later, he did public relations work for the New York Central, and after that for the Rock Island. So Exley at least shared, if not my love of, at least an affinity for, railroads.

As the Adirondack rolled northward through the Hudson Highlands, I found myself agreeing with the critics who dismissed Pages as an unworthy successor to A Fan's Notes. The island in question proved not to be one of the Thousand, but Singer Island, Florida ("cold" only in respect to Exley's emotional state while there), described by the father of one of Exley's woman friends, in an affidavit supporting the father's petition for custody of his grandson, as a "shabby resort area, the heart of Palm Beach County's drug culture, and a hothouse of whoredom, practiced both formally and informally." In other words, the very sort of place one might find an impecunious, alcoholic and perpetually horny writer holed up while trying to find a way to finish a book. After fifty or so pages of Dionysian drinking and coital calisthenics, both real and imagined (as I was reading Exley's account of his sport with an exotic dancer called Zita the Zebra Woman, I nervously glanced to my right to see if Liz was reading over my shoulder, and was relieved to find her studying To Light a Sacred Flame - Practical Witchcraft for the New Millennium), I felt rather as my wife must have after enduring (while I was enjoying)  ninety minutes of Oliver Stone's The Doors, when, with 111 minutes to go, she whispered to me, "This movie glorifies self-indulgence, and I'm bored."

So I closed the book, thinking to take a break, maybe read the Times for a while, or just enjoy the Hudson Valley scenery. As I was about to slide the book back into my bag, my eye was caught by the two blurbs on the back cover. The first was:

Even better than A Fan's Notes...marvelously funny. One of the truly remarkable personal chronicles of our time. - WILLIAM STYRON

Well, maybe Styron was among the minority who found A Fan's Notes unimpressive. Maybe, by "truly remarkable," he meant "truly remarkably awful." By 1975, when Pages came out, ol' Bill was surely wise in the ways of blurbsmanship. The second blurb, however, seemed more specific to my concerns:

Exley matters because beneath the surface of a life seemingly given over to too much booze and random sex and aimlessness, there is a true writer, an artist unseduced by fad and fashion. - JONATHAN YARDLEY, NEW REPUBLIC

This, of course, is the Yardley who later became Exley's biographer. So encouraged, I resolved to persevere, to see if I could get "beneath the surface." This proved a good resolution.

Pages is a mess, but it's a mess worth sorting through. A recurring motif in the narrative is the difficulty Exley had in completing it. At one point, he describes it as "unreservedly desolate." Its major theme is Exley's relationship with Edmund Wilson (for an excellent short summary of Wilson's life and works, see this New Yorker piece by Louis Menand), one that it's tempting to compare with his connection to Frank Gifford as described in A Fan's Notes. In both instances, there was a commonality of place, time or both: Exley and Gifford were students at Southern Cal at the same time, and Wilson, though born and raised in New Jersey, divided his later years between Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, and his mother's family's old stone house in Talcottville, New York, not far from Watertown. Despite this, Exley's contacts with both men were minimal. His closest encounter with Wilson was a telephone conversation, described in Pages as ending thus:

"Who are you?" And there was no doubt that he meant was I someone of such eminence that I should be pushing myself on him.

"Well, nobody," I said. "Look, I'm sorry, really sorry. I shan't bother you again."

Before ringing off, the great man, in his cooing pitch, spoke his last words to me:

"Stout fellow!"

The contrast between Gifford and Wilson, the football jock and the literary lion, is also obvious. Kirn sees Exley and Gifford as polar opposites:

A Fan's Notes divides the world into two camps: tortured, bewildered misfits (Exleys) and serene, fair-haired conformists (Giffords). In America, Exley implies--indeed, he shouts it--a person is either a suffering poet or a cheerful drone.

Wilson was anything but a cheerful drone, but he was hardly a suffering poet, either. By the middle of the twentieth century, he was universally known, and almost universally admired, in literary intellectual circles. His life was not without difficulties. As Menand observes:

He had three children, each from a different marriage. He moved a lot, usually from one shabby rented place to another, and, thanks to the divorces and, later, the negligence about taxes, money was a serious problem right up to the end. He was a functioning alcoholic but an angry drunk (one cause of the problems in the early marriages). His figure was not prepossessing. ... When it came to most physical activities, he was inept. He did not, for instance, know how to drive a car. But he was an ardent lover. Sex seems to have been the one place where he felt natural and in control, a zone of wholeness in a world that, for him, was characterized mostly by tension, rupture, and decay. The other place he must have felt that way, of course, was his writing.

Money problems, drinking, sex, disdain for popular and literary culture--Wilson seeemed to have much in common with Exley. Unlike Exley, though, he didn't cast himself as a beautiful loser. In Pages, Exley recounts saying this to his students at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop:

"Your real literary life," I offered as my one piece of tendentiousness, "will begin the day you accept the conditions, apartness, confusion, loneliness, work, and work, and work--the conditions so many of your peers have already accepted and that Edmund Wilson and his stone house so vividly and hauntingly evoke."

I asked the student to accept this from me as a man who understood these things too late, when alcohol, fatuous dreams and disappointed life had all too dearly sapped the youthful ambitions. Wilson's stone house, I said, was a condition of the heart, a willingly imposed isolation from the "literary scene" or anything resembling that scene. ... Do what I say, I said, and not what I've done, and I promised my student that, like Edmund Wilson, he would in the end hold up to America a mirrored tryptich from which, no matter in which direction America turn, she would--to her dismay, horror, and hopefully even enlightenment--be helpless to free herself from the uncompromising plague of her own image.

Wilson, then, was for Exley an ideal, an exemplar of what Exley, fulfilled, would have been. He wasn't perfect: Exley cites Wilson's Upstate, from which he quotes liberally in Pages, as an even-Homer-nods moment. But he pays Wilson perhaps the ultimate compliment. During one of Exley's institutionalizations, in deep depression, he says, Wilson's prose kept him alive.

There are minor themes as well in Pages, one of them concerning Gloria Steinem. Exley, who called himself apolitical, nevertheless loathed Nixon enough to wish (though he knew it a very long shot) for McGovern to be elected in 1972. He was concerned when he read about the demands that Steinem and other militant feminists were making regarding the Democratic platform, particularly for "abortion on demand" (this was before Roe v. Wade), which, Exley was convinced, would doom McGovern's campaign if included. Exley made it clear that he personally had no problem with the feminist agenda; his concern was with its likely short-term political consequences and the strident way it was being advocated by Steinem and others. He also believed that feminists, and those on the left generally, were hopelessly naive about political reality in America at the time.

When Exley learned that Steinem was coming to the Palm Beach area to give a speech, he succeeded, after much effort, in getting permission to interview her. He recalled that he "had been struck by the likeness of our backgrounds, how much she 'cared' and how little I did. With all my heart I wanted to know why she did, and to understand that it was essential I discover who she was."

Throughout the interview (with the exception of one exchange in which Exley commented on the smallness of her breasts) Steinem remained cordial, but relentlessly on message. When he asked her about Mailer's The Prisoner of Sex, which attacked her friend Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, she said she hadn't read it, but was sure Mailer wouldn't have written it if he knew Millet, who was "really nice." She then laughed, and said she thought The Prisoner of Sex was a perfect title for Mailer's book because "Norman really is a prisoner of sex." Exley's "bewildered" reply was, "Well, I guess we're all a little of that."

Summing up his thoughts on Steinem, Exley writes:

Look Gloria, you want to do something meaningful with your life? Get Freidan and the rest of those meatballs, rent a bus, pack some picnic lunches, go to Wellfleet on the Cape, bow your heads at Edmund Wilson's grave and pay homage to one of the century's great men! Do anything but what you're doing. What I'm imploring of you, dear, dear Gloria, is that you help me see your man McGovern as a man for whom I'd interrupt my love-making. You won't do so until you and his followers become a lot less brassily strident, until I detect in your demeanors at least a tacit admission that, like Ms. Germaine Greer [the one 1970s feminist Exley unreservedly admired], you too are becoming vulnerable and might yet find yourselves the victims of love.

Another minor theme in Pages is one that I find particularly redemptive. Exley was traveling from Florida to Watertown, and had a layover at La Guardia. Naturally, he found a bar. In no mood for conversation, he took a stool at the far end, and ordered a double vodka on the rocks with a splash of tonic. No sooner had he taken a sip than he heard a voice saying "Hello, hello, hello." He responded by moaning, and didn't turn his head. Undeterred, his interlocutor continued with the unpromising words, "You're from Florida! Me too! Just missed my flight to Tampa, gotta wait for another!" Despite Exley's refusal to acknowledge him, the man persisted, explaining that he'd been visiting family in Babylon, Long Island, where he'd grown up, but that, with his parents long dead and his siblings "so caught up in their own lives that he felt a stranger among them," he'd decided to leave early. He'd settled in Florida after World War Two, started what became a successful business, married, raised three children, the youngest of whom, a daughter, was a student at Syracuse University on an exchange program to Florence, Italy. He spotted Exley as a Floridian, "a beach rat with sand in [his] shoes," by his tan and his clothes.

"When you walked through the door," he said, "it hit me like a shovel full of shit in the face that Florida was my home and has been for a quarter of a fucking century."

At this point, Exley, softened by the stranger's having bought him two drinks, turned to him and began talking, at first about Florida, then about other things. They quickly formed a bond. The man showed Exley pictures of his family, and of his waterfront house, with boat docked behind. "Where in Florida?" Exley asked. The man was reluctant to answer, but finally admitted to living in a town with the absurd name Panacea. They both had a good laugh over this, then the man excused himself to catch his flight.

A few days later, Exley heard the news that the powerful Hurricane Agnes had made landfall at a small Florida Gulf Coast town called Panacea. On hearing this, he wrote:

[I] underwent the worst crying jag I'd ever had. It was awesome, an expression of some consummate grief compounded of I know not what and into my mouth came first the words of [a] Nabakovian creation, the pathetically comic emigre Pnin:

"I haf nofing left, nofing, nofing," words I abruptly found myself transposing to "He won't haf nofing left, nofing, nofing."

Ex, you were a piece of work, but one fearfully and wonderfully made. I wish I could have that night at the Head back; wish I could have found the courage to defy Tommy, sit you back down, buy you a drink, and talk.

Update: for more about Exley, see here.

Cormorant

I saw this bird, perched on the shoreline riprap, on my walk through the Empire - Fulton Ferry State Park this morning.

Update: Nick asks (see "comments" below) if I used a telephoto lens. The answer is, "Yes, but just a little." I did zoom in slightly, but the bird was no more than twenty feet away when I took the photo, and showed no nervousness as I approached.

Note to Twiffer: Work?

Solar-powered Liberty ferry eclipsed.

Circle Lines' plans for a solar-powered vessel to run on its Manhattan to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, detailed in this earlier post, have been scrapped by the National Park Service, which licenses the concession, and which has elected to terminate Circle Line as the operator and replace it with a company called Hornblower Yachts. According to this story, Hornblower is best known for ferrying tourists across San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz.

Ever wonder what a bunch of bloggers, and Miss Heather, looks like?

First off, credit where credit is due. I stole this picture from Xris of Flatbush Gardener who, along with Anne Pope of Sustainable Flatbush, organized this gathering. I took some pictures, but none were as good as his; besides, his have me in them. In case you're wondering, I'm the guy front and center in the above pic, wearing a blue Brooklyn Dodgers cap and looking characteristically rumpled and curmudgeonly. Just behind me, holding the camera with the big lens, is a New York Times reporter named, if I recall correctly, Liz Boylan. Behind her, in the red shirt and Mets (yes!) cap is Adrian Kinloch of Brit in Brooklyn. To my actual left (right in the photo), seated and wearing a green shirt, is Robert Guskind of Gowanus Lounge. Seated at the far end of the tables, wearing a blue dress with a striped collar, is Petra of Bed-Stuy Blog. Behind her, almost to the window, is Rob Lenihan of Luna Park Gazette. Next to Petra, in profile with Crayola-red hair, is Miss Heather of New York Shitty. (Update: Miss Heather -- see "comments" below -- denies being, or ever having been, a blogger.) On the wall side of the table is Dave Kenny of Dope on the Slope (hidden behind him is his wife, who wore a shirt emblazoned with a picture of Erszebet Bathory). The svelte, dark-tressed young woman in the foreground, addressing her Apple notebook, is Amy, who was sitting alone, enjoying an iced drink and her solitude, when a bunch of bloggers came in and a disreputable looking older guy asked if he could share her table. She graciously said "Yes." (Others who showed up later included Brooklyn blogosphere den mother, and author of the Brooklyn Paper's Smartmom column, Louise Crawford, of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, and her taciturn, genius photographer hubby, Hugh.)

The occasion was the Flatbush edition of the Brooklyn Blogade Road Show, an occasional gathering of bloggers from the Borough of Cherce. The venue was Vox Pop, a combination bookstore, coffee house, restaurant and tavern that seems transported en suite from Berkeley, Cambridge, Madison or New Paltz to gritty Cortelyou Road, and is run by the exemplary Sander Hicks, who treated us all to free samples of his succulent barbecue.

Cyclones off to a good start.

I hope my posting this doesn't jinx them, but the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets' Class A New York - Penn League affiliate, have opened their season by winning a series with their across-the-Narrows archrivals, the Staten Island Yankees. This is a promising beginning to the second stint of Edgar Alfonzo as manager. (Edgar should not be confused with his brother, Edgardo, a former Met who now plays for the Long Island Ducks. Venezuelans seem to have an odd penchant for giving their sons similar names. Endy Chavez has a brother named Ender, who formerly played for the Cyclones.)

Update: Cyclones have now won two series in succession, the second from upriver rivals Hudson Valley Renegades, so their record now stands at 4-2.

Joe Martini (see "comments" below) offers this testimonial:

My Dad often goes to Keyspan Park with the rest of his cronies from Avenue U. It's a great experience. Young kids getting their first taste of professional ball and that great ocean view.

Joe may be the only commenter on my blog who can link "Grand Opera" with "Port-o-San."

Solstice

A breeze batters branches;
the honey locust whispers,
¡Esperanza, esperanza!
On the harbor, tugs flit
on fathomless errands,
and beyond, the dentate skyline
no longer bears the memory
of Yamasaki’s towers, their image now
recumbent in brass at my feet.
A squirrel, brazen, fixes me with blank eyes

while lithe young women, bobbing in tandem,
do pushups against a park bench.
Toddlers screech and stumble,
as nannies share news in lilting
island accents. The sun arches
on its marathon course as I turn
toward home. A gust rattles
the gingko: “It’s all downhill from here.”

Dolly Lyon

Since I first posted this, I've learned more about Dolly Lyon's singing career, and obtained some of her recordings, so I've been able to rewrite this extensively.

With her sparkling wide set eyes and radiant smile, she looked ready to take the world by dint of sheer charm. But that demure face belied a powerful, though honeyed, alto voice. There's little information available about this talented singer who was active in the mid to late 1950s. The most I've been able to find is here.

Evidently, her earliest recordings were as a singer with Erskine Hawkins and his Orchestra. Through web searches I was able to get two 45 RPM Erskine Hawkins records on which she's the vocalist on one side of each. These are both Decca promotional records (i.e. distributed free to DJs); one is identified in a discography as probably dating from 1956, the other, from its slightly higher sequential number, I presume is from about the same time. Hawkins' big band (best known for originating "Tuxedo Junction", although the version by the all white Glenn Miller Orchestra unfortunately eclipsed the Hawk's--in my opinion--superior rendition) broke up in 1953; after that, he played with smaller groups and his style evolved from the big band swing popular in the 1930s and '40s to the jump blues and bop that began to dominate the dance scene after World War II.

The two Hawkins records featuring Lyon as vocalist are "Waltz in Blue", which has a strong R&B flavor, and "Nobody Plays Piano Like Sacramento", an uptempo number which, as its title implies, has lively piano accompaniment. The piano is by Ace Harris, who had been with Hawkins since the big band days. Unfortunately, these records are well worn, obscuring the quality of Lyon's vocal performances.

Probably as a result of her work with Hawkins, Lyon came to the attention of Charles Merenstein, then of Apollo Records. He is nowadays remembered for having penned, along with Otis Blackwell and Jimmy Jones, "Handy Man", which was a hit for Jones in 1959 (love the Triumph TR roadster in the background) and later covered by Del Shannon and James Taylor. Merenstein recorded Lyon doing two songs released as a single in 1957, "Palm of Your Hand" and "Call Me Darling".

"Palm of Your Hand", the "A" side of the single, is a steady rocker that kicks off with two drumbeats, then joined by piano and sax, then by Lyon, whose voice is seductive and smoky, reminiscent of Peggy Lee but warm where Lee is cool. The sax is in a style like that of Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson (hear him on Papa Daddy accompanying his then wife, Ruth Brown). Indeed, it may have been him, as he was one of the artists who recorded for Apollo. "Palm" also includes a lovely, languid guitar bridge. (Thanks to cadlagh1 for the clip.)


"Call Me Darling" starts with Lyon's voice, initially a capella, sounding the words "call me", then joined by snare, piano, bass, and sax. Over this standard R&B accompaniment, her voice soars, dips, and sways, with occasional vibrato, at once flirtatious and precatory. This is slow dance R&B at its hug-your-sweetie-tight-and-shuffle-your-feet best. The song was also recorded by, among others, Peggy Lee, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Ann-Margret.

Despite Merenstein's enthusiasm, neither "Call Me" nor "Palm" ever charted, though "Palm" made the "new records to watch" list at Chicago's WJJD for the week of October 13, 1958.

Merenstein later had Lyon front the Cellos, a five man doo-wop group out of the old Charles Evans Hughes High School on Manhattan's West 18th Street, on a song titled "Don't Wait", which could have been a contender for hottest teen romance novelty song of 1958, but was not released. It's the second song on the clip above, following the Cellos, sans Lyon, doing "Doo Doo Wah," (If you want to go straight to "Don't Wait," go to 3:06.) On "Don't Wait," Lyon's voice builds on the seductive quality heard on "Palm", and she manages to make the words "first date" sound like the prelude to a Neronian orgy. Maybe the song was just a little too spicy for its time. It's now available on a Cellos compilation CD that came out in 1992, "Rang Tang Ding Dong" (Relic 7029).

Prowling the back alleys of the web I managed to find one more Dolly Lyon 45: "Memories of You" and "Chattanooga Cha-Cha", on the Buzz label (this is evidently a long defunct indie label that was based in New York and not related to any similarly named outfit existing today, of which there are several). The record is badly worn, but it is possible to make out that Lyon's voice has taken on (I'm assuming, though there's no date on the record, that it was made after her Apollo recordings) even more of a smoky quality, edging into Billie Holiday territory. "Memories" is a standard slow R&B number, while "Chattanooga" is a shameless attempt to cash in on the cha-cha craze of 1957-58 by taking a jazz standard (see a clip featuring the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers here) and setting it to a cha-cha beat, which only makes it sound silly. It's an unfortunate end to what was a promising career. (There may have been a later recording. A record dealer in Michigan lists “Dolly Lyon—’I Feel It / Stop’ white disc jockey copy , xol ,Doe 104” in his inventory; however, when contacted, he said he couldn’t locate the record and may have sold it.) Update: thanks to Andrew Bohan, I now have a YouTube clip (audio with a still of the record label) of Lyon doing "I Feel It" on the Doe label:


"I Feel It" is a pedal-to-the-metal rocker featuring a frenetic vocal and a wailing tenor sax bridge. Lyon's voice sounds fresh, without the sultry, smoky quality it has on "Don't Wait" and on the Buzz recordings.

While Dolly Lyon is largely forgotten in her own country, judging by hits on my blog off web searches since I first posted this, I can say that she has something of a fan base in Europe and Britain, particularly in the north of England, where "Palm of Your Hand" is considered part of the Northern Soul canon, and in Belgium, where "Palm" is part of a popular but hard to define genre called popcorn.

Pride of Baltimore II visits New York.

A few days ago I saw Pride of Baltimore II docked at the North Cove, Battery Park City. This evoked a bittersweet memory. In the summer of 1983, I was visiting Vancouver, and saw the first Pride of Baltimore docked there. Three years later, she was lost in a severe storm at sea, along with four of her crew.

Pride II, like the first Pride, is a replica of a ship named Chasseur which, under the command of Thomas Boyle, raided British shipping during the War of 1812. Chasseur exemplified a type called the Baltimore clipper, a topsail schooner with sharply raked masts set well aft, a long bowsprit and raked stern, and deep draft giving excellent ability to sail close to the wind. These characteristics made the clippers well suited for privateering, as well as for transporting aspiring prospectors around Cape Horn to California during the 1849 gold rush. Unfortunately, they also made them adaptable for the slave trade.

Reversal of fortune.

August, my taking up your suggestion had the effect you wanted. (And now I know why you made it.)

Kudos to Reyes, Perez and Gomez.

Red Sox won, too. Unfortunately, so did the Braves.

Before the Yankee game, Tim Marchman delivered a trenchant analysis of the Mets' situation.

Update: Today's game? In the immortal words of Warren Zevon, "I don't want to talk about it."

6/19 update: Mets/Yanks season series ends in a tie, just like last year. Mets bounce back against Twins at Shea, with Maine showing good form. Marchman, however, has an unsettling analysis of the prospects for Carlos Delgado, who homered last night.

Meanwhile, down in kudzu korner, Schilling gets shellacked as the Red Sox fall to the Braves. No help there. Sorry, Twiffer, and dearest wife.

6/21 update: Martini on the Mets.

We were at the game Wednesday.
No hitting.
No pitching.
Five errors (Easley muffed an easy chance but the scorer found it in his heart to call it a hit).
AND $6.75 FOR A BEER!

Say it ain't so, Joe!

Homeland Security

Keeping close watch on the action outside the Damascus Bakery on Atlantic Avenue.

Before you do the war, do the math.

The ever-popular Cosmic Log provides a link to a University of Georgia press release announcing UGA assistant professor Patricia L. Sullivan's publication of a paper in which she describes a statistical method for predicting the outcome of a war. She claims an eighty percent success ratio in using her method to "predict", ex post, the outcomes of the 122 conflicts that have ocurred since World War Two, and which have involved one of the great powers against a weaker adversary. She says her method shows that the probability of U.S. success in the first Gulf War, i.e. of realizing its objective of driving Iraqi forces from Kuwait, was 93 percent. Similarly, the chance of the U.S. achieving its primary objective in the second Gulf War, the removal of Saddam Hussein's government from power, was about 70 percent. However, the likelihood of success at the longer term goal of maintaining a stable Iraqi government is now only 26 percent, and likely to take ten years to accomplish.

Sullivan also concludes that the Soviet Union had only a seven percent probability of prevailing in its war in Afghanistan. The press release doesn't state what her finding was with respect to the U.S. Afghan war, in which the long-term outcome still seems in doubt. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the probability of success with respect to overthrow of the Taliban government was high, given the existence of allies on the ground there. The likelihood of long-term stabilization may be less.

Of course, to apply Sullivan's method ex ante, you need accurate information concerning the various factors that affect the statistical determination. If your intelligence is faulty, your prediction of your chance of success may be off the mark. In other words: garbage in, garbage out

By popular demand, another baseball post.

August (see comments to this post) asks, in a friendly way, if I would mind posting about the streak the Mets are on now. Well, uh, yeah. But, then, he makes this useful suggestion:

Could you predict that we'll tank and lose 30 straight? ... Because that might be helpful. Thanks!

All right. I, CLAUDE SCALES, DO HEREBY PREDICT THAT THE METS WILL TANK AND LOSE THIRTY STRAIGHT.

There. That feels better, already. Kinda like blamin' it on the Stones.

6/13 update: I think I misread August's intention when he suggested that I predict a thirty game losing streak for the Mets. I thought he was convinced that, as soon as I made it, the Mets' fortunes would reverse (they didn't). What I'd forgotten is that he's an Orioles fan (see "comments" below).

A heartening thought: The Cyclones start their season in less than a week.

The banality of heroism.

I've counted myself lucky that, at the age of 61, I could only recall three instances in which I was, or believed myself to be, in immediate danger of death. The first occurred when I was seven, living in rural England. I was taking a walk one summer day and spotted Bonnie, our neighbors' draft mare, grazing in pasture. Full of boyish spirit, I decided to have sport with her. I ran a couple of figure eights around her legs, crisscrossing under her belly. Her response came on my second or third iteration: I can still clearly picture in my mind the leg lifting a few inches and the precisely calibrated flick of the hoof, enough to knock me away and cause a small abrasion to my shin, but no more. It's what I think of now whenever I hear the expression "surgical strike." I've since had great respect and admiration for horses, though I've never owned one or learned to ride.

The second was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. I was sixteen, a junior in high school in Tampa, within easy range of the missiles in Cuba. We lived about a mile from MacDill Air Force Base, an obvious target. One night, my parents and I were in the living room, watching TV news, when a siren began to blare nearby. I looked at my father, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, and said, "Do you think this is it?" He looked back at me, and I felt a chill when I saw on his face an expression I had never seen before, one of hopeless resignation, as he said, "Yes, I think maybe it is."

The third was when I was 24, driving on an interstate highway near Binghamton, New York in a torrential rainstorm, when I saw a sign for the exit I wanted and jerked the wheel. The car went into a spin; I could see other cars close behind, but, fortunately, none hit me. Almost before I knew what had happened, I found the car stopped, pointed directly onto the exit ramp I needed to take.

Now, thanks to this article, I know of one other instance, of which I was unaware at the time, in which I dodged the bullet (as did millions of others). While it is not certain that, had Lieutenant Colonel Petrov reported the radar sighting up the chain of command, this would have resulted in a thermonuclear strike against the U.S., the probability seems high given the reported paranoid mindset of the Soviet leadership at the time (see here).

What I find interesting about this story, besides its obvious relevance to my present day existence, is the fact that the person at the lowest point in the relevant chain of command, the one I would think most likely to want to prove his worth to his superiors by quickly reporting any suspicious sighting, instead exercised restraint. As a military veteran, I can't but wonder how I, having been trained to react quickly and aggressively to any perceived threat, would have acted had I been in Petrov's place.

Origins of a couple of well-worn phrases.

1. Keep it under your hat. I'm now reading Agincourt - Henry V and the Battle That Made England, by Juliet Barker (Little & Brown, 2005). At page 88, she describes the makings of the English long bow:

The best bow-staves were cut from a single piece of straight-grained yew, imported from Spain, Italy or Scandinavia, and shaved into shape. Unstrung, the bow would be some six feet long and tapered, with the softer, more flexible sap-wood on the outside and a thicker layer of heart-wood on the inside, a combination that gave the bow its natural elasticity. ... A regular maintenance regime of waxing and polishing ensured that the bow did not dry out or crack under the pressure of being strung or fired. Bow-strings, made of hemp or gut, were also waxed or oiled to keep them weather-proof, though this was not always successful. ... The English, perhaps because they were more accustomed to rain, had learned to deal with such possibilities. According to the French chronicler Jean de Vennette, they "protected their bows by putting the strings on their heads under their helmets," a habit that is said to have given rise to the expression "keep it under your hat."

2. Got the shaft. Nothing to do with bows or arrows. Paul Hoffman, late Lion's Head regular, wrote a book back in the early 1970's titled Lions in the Street - the Inside Stories of the Great Wall Street Law Firms. In his chapter on Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, he recounted the time when the firm had its offices in the old Equitable Building at 120 Broadway, which was built before air conditioning and consequently was designed in an "H" shape, with two large air shafts facing to the east and west. Anyway, the story went, when a lawyer fresh from law school started with the firm, he (as it almost always was in those days) was put in a "bullpen", a large room where he and other young associates had individual desks but otherwise shared space. After a few years, a winnowing would happen. The associates would be given individual offices. But, herein hangs a tale. Those who had been judged worthy of eventual partnership would be given offices with windows facing a street, while those destined to be asked to find other employment were given offices facing an airshaft. So, after these annual separations of the wheat from the chaff took place, word would rush throught the bullpen: "Did you hear about Joe? He got the shaft!"

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy ...

... (or team). I know, I promised no more baseball posts for a while, but this is just too good to resist.

I never thought I'd say it, but I'm actually beginning to feel sorry for the Yanks. Not, mind you, sorry enough to want them to win this weekend's series with the Red Sox.

6/10 update: When I looked at this post the morning after committing it to the ether, I felt a nagging sensation that I ought to delete it. A couple of days ago sydbristow (see "comments" below) pointed out that, since I posted, the Yanks had won five straight (it's now six). He tactfully did not add that the Mets have gone into a vertiginous tailspin.

Ye Gods! Forgive my presumption. I will never say I'm sorry for the Yankees again.

6/12 update: Twiffer, ever solicitous of my mental well being, tries again to cheer me up (see "comments" below), pointing out, inter alia:

they [the Yankees] have dangerous bats, but apparently streaky ones. and still don't have trustworthy pitching.

Hmmm ... what other New York team fits that description to a tee?

And visitor number 5,000 is ...

... someone in Mountain View, California who got here by way of a Google search for "Eisenhower Locks map". Massena, New York is a long way from California. I hope you enjoy the trip.

Anyway, unlike most of the people who get here via
Google searches, you were actually able to get what you were after by following one simple link from my blog. I'm tempted to say that should be reward enough, but, seriously, if you happen to read this and if your travel plans ever include New York City, I'll be delighted to buy you a drink (or, if you're off the sauce or just not in the mood, a genuine Brooklyn egg cream - if you're allergic to eggs or lactose intolerant, no worries, as it contains neither egg nor cream).

Bite (see "comments" below) asks: How do you know the city and town the guy was from?

If you scroll down to the bottom of my blog, on the left side of the page you'll see a button that says "Sitemeter". Double-click on that, and you'll get a list of the last twenty visits to the blog. In most cases, as you can see, the list includes the location from which the hit came. Some computers are cagey and only disclose what country they're in, some others simply say "unknown".

I'll admit that there's some uncertainty over the actual location of my 5,000th visitor. The Sitemeter says "Mountain View", but I get an awful lot of hits from that location, which suggests that there may be a large corporate server (or two or three) there that serves a number of locations. For example, if I were to visit someone's blog using the computer in my office, which is in lower Manhattan, and that blog had a Sitemeter, my hit would be shown as coming from Philadelphia, because that's where the central server for the firm is located. So, when I say my 5,000th visitor was from Mountain View, I'm really making a semi-educated guess based on the best information I have.

What I really don't know is that this visitor was a guy.

The Canadian nuclear family.

On weekend mornings, I've gotten into the habit of walking to the north end of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, then down Squibb Hill, across Old Fulton Street and under the Brooklyn Bridge to the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park. There, I've been encountering this trio, usually near the south edge of the Park, next to the east tower of the Bridge.


Here's a close-up of the young 'un.

Decoration Day

This morning, as usual, I woke up to WQXR, the New York Times affiliated radio station. The 7:30 news included an item about a group of people who set out to identify and (in some cases literally) uncover all of the burial places of Civil War veterans in Green-Wood Cemetery. They expected to find about 200 such missing graves; the actual number was close to 3,000. Having identified and located these graves, they are now replacing missing markers (see the Newsday story here) and, today, the Cemetery hosted a gathering of descendants and relatives of these veterans, many of whom who will now be able to leave flowers and other tokens of remembrance. In this connection, the WQXR announcer mentioned the original name of Memorial Day, "Decoration Day".

The Civil War was, not surprisingly, the deadliest war for Americans, with more killed than in all other wars in which this country has been involved, combined. The total number of dead was approximately 620,000.

Another solar ship proposal.

A while back, I posted about a small vessel that made what was heralded as the first solar powered crossing of the Atlantic. Now, New York institution Circle Line has announced plans to put a solar powered ferry into service on its enormously popular Battery Park to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island route. Below is an image (from the New York Post, via Tom Turner of NYC Maritime) of the proposed vessel.


In my earlier post, I noted that sailing vessels could be said to be "solar powered", as wind is created by solar energy. The Circle Line design makes use of wind as well as solar cells, by placing the cells on a rigid "wing" that stands above the vessel like a sail and can be rotated to secure maximal wind assistance. There is also a "cheat" to reflect commercial reality: auxiliary diesel engines.

The mother ship's the one.

See here (lyrics by Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart).

Another baseball diatribe.

Thank God the Red Sox won. Otherwise, I'd be in a much worse mood.

The horror of horrors is happening: the Mets' starting rotation is collapsing. Maine has been shellacked twice in a row. Glavine was lucky to get a win in his last outing. Now Sosa, who, like Maine, began so promisingly, has joined the parade of failure. And, of course, against the hated Braves.

I'm going to avert my eyes for a while; I suspect things are about to get very ugly. For those of you who could care less about the game, I promise no more baseball posts for a while.

Update: In an apparent effort to get me out of my funk, Twiffer asks when Pedro's due back. Well, according to the Mets' official site, he could be back by August. I shudder to think how big Atlanta's division lead will be by then.

Another update: OK, I said no more baseball posts for a while, but, in my mustelid fashion, I'll be quick to point out that I didn't rule out multiple updates. Anyway, Joe Martini, who is both a Mets and a Met fan (and thereby a worthy fellow indeed) takes a page from Douglas Adams and advises me, "Don't panic." (See comments below.) OK, we did rebound from losing another series to the tomahawk choppers by besting the flopping fish, with El Duque coming off the DL and providing a strong showing on the mound. Maybe there's hope. Tonight we see if Maine has recovered from his funk.

Joe also accuses me of giving this blog a tautologous title. Any thoughts?

5/29 update: Rhonda Byrne's theory looking shaky! How 'bout the power of negative thinking to produce positive results? See, I knew that if I wrote that the Mets are toast, they'd turn right around and go on a big winning streak, just to prove me wrong.

Of course, my writing this probably assures that they will now go into a death spiral.

5/30 update: one of my pet theories is also in trouble. I used to believe in the "curse of the ex-Met"; i.e., that players traded away by the Mets or allowed to go as free agents would be poison when the Mets played their new teams. Now, it seems like they can be candy.

5/31 update: Do I now have to worry about the curse of the Met who never was?

We're approaching a milestone.

According to my sitemeter, S-AB will soon have its 5,000th visit.

What would be an appropriate gift for my 5,000th guest? Some possibilities:

1. an autographed copy of Charles Reich's The Greening of America;

2. a vinyl LP of Full Sail, by Loggins & Messina;

3. an art nouveau style poster advertising a concert featuring Quicksilver Messenger Service and It's a Beautiful Day, at Winterland; or

4. a non-autographed copy of Theory of Value, by Gerard Debreu.

Actually, I don't have any of these, except 4.*, which I'm not about to give up (I'm still trying to make my way through Chapter 1, "Mathematics", of which the author says, "Its reading requires, in principle, no knowledge of mathematics." (Emphasis in original.) Wonderful words: "in principle". )

Anyway, you'll get some kind of recognition, even if (as seems likely) you're someone from Bulgaria who happened on my site by doing a Google search for guitar tablature for "Strong Boy" by the International Submarine Band. And, if you're ever in my neck of the conurbation, I'll be glad to buy you a drink.

*I'll admit, though it pains me, to having once owned 2.

Yanks 6, Mets 2

Yuck.

As a long suffering Mets fan, I (1) knew this would happen, and (2) know that the only conclusion to draw from this is: the Mets can still lose the season series against the Yankees. Well, that, and maybe Maine has fallen into some vortex of doom from which he will never return.

Bright note: Red Sox took two of three from Braves.

Update: Twiffer accuses me of sounding like a Cubs fan. The Mets, like the Cubs, have a way of disappointing their fans; nevertheless, I'll admit that the Mets have, at least, participated in four, and won two, World Series within the memory of many living Americans. Also, I'll confess, Tim Marchman's characterization of Mets fans fits me well. (Perhaps I should consider, too, the possibility that Rhonda Byrne is right; that my negative thoughts are actually contributing to John Maine's inability to locate his pitches.)

Meanwhile, August says, "we can all be glad we're not from Pittsburgh." Well, I was born not too far from Pittsburgh, and did briefly come out of a baseball latency period (which began in 1957, when the Dodgers went to L.A.) to root for the 1960 "Beat 'em Bucs!" Pirates, who rewarded me with a historic Series victory over those horrid Yanks before sinking once again into oblivion. (Actually, I can recall the Pirates being a halfway decent team in the late '80s and early '90s, when I would occasionally think, "If only Bobby Bonilla was a Met ... ".)

Mets 10, Yanks 7

As a long suffering Mets fan, I know that the only conclusion to draw from this is: the Mets will win their first series this season against the Yankees.

Kudos to Wright, Chavez and Heilman.

Bosox: Great first game, but what happened in the second?

Mets 3, Yanks 2

As a long suffering Mets fan, I know that the only conclusion to draw from this is: the Mets will not be swept in their season series with the Yankees.

Kudos to Perez and Chavez.

More news on the alternative energy front.

I have a reflexive distrust of scientists who claim to be victims of misunderstanding, and compare themselves to earlier "crackpots" like Galileo or Einstein. Nevertheless, I found this story interesting, if only because Professor Woodall is on the faculty of a respectable university* and I'm beginning to believe just about anything bad about the executive branch of the federal government these days. This does seem to have more traction than cold fusion, even if, like the solar powered ship, practical application seems a way off.

It's not so far off, however, as any prospect of our tapping into the ultimate source of clean energy.

Meanwhile, it's nice to know that you can do a little bit for the environment just by sucking down a tube of Foster's.

*Yeah, I know, there's a guy at Harvard who believes in alien abductions.

Galactic demolition derby.

Further to an earlier post about the eagerly-awaited Milky Way/M31 (Andromeda) smashup (don't hold your breath), here's an interesting piece about what sometimes happens when galaxies collide. (The image above, by Max, Canalizo and deVries of the University of California at Santa Cruz, taken with the Keck 2 telescope in Hawaii, is an infrared picture of NGC 6240, a system of two galaxies in collision.)