Hilly Kristal, 1932-2007.

Last year I posted about the perhaps temporary demise of the famous new wave rock venue CBGB & OMFUG. At the time, I noted, there was a possibility that the club might reopen at a different location, although that location might be Las Vegas, not New York.

Yesterday, as I was sad to learn, lung cancer counted as its latest victim CBGB's founder and guiding spirit, Hilly Kristal.

The economics of lobster rolls.

Matthew Yglesias presents this gem in the Atlantic (be sure to scroll down through the comments, too, for discussion of such worthy topics as why hot dogs taste better at the ballpark), with inspiration from Tyler Cowen.

Thanks to WikiFray companion John McG for the link.

Studebaker GT Hawk

The GT Hawk was a European style grand touring car made in South Bend, Indiana. Designer Brooks Stevens borrowed extensively from other makers, most noticeably in the Mercedes Benz style grille and the Lincoln Continental inspired taillights. Nevertheless, the overall effect was handsome and well-integrated. Studebaker even had some success selling it in European markets before shutting down production in 1964.

This specimen is not in the best of shape, and is missing some chrome trim strips (to my mind, addition by subtraction). Still, it's eye-catching.

Erie Canal delineated!

If you survived elementary school music, you can probably remember the line:

From Al-ba-nee to Buf-fa-lo-oh

(If you need your memory refreshed, more of the lyrics are here.)

Anyway, it's good to know that New York State's government, despite its present continued dysfunctional nature, can get something done. According to this AP story:

Ending a dispute over the location of the ends of the Erie Canal, Gov. Eliot Spitzer [NY] said yesterday that Albany and Buffalo are the official eastern and western ends of the historic waterway. Supporters believe the designation will help develop the areas, particularly Buffalo's inner harbor. When the canal was built in 1825 it stretched 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo; an expansion in 1905, which allowed the passage of larger vessels, moved the navigable ends to the Hudson River in Waterford and the Niagara River in Tonawanda.

Thus, the original end-points are established. Woe to you, Waterford. Tough luck, Tonawanda. (Thanks to Johanna Turner of NYCMaritime for the link to the article.)

Update: Twiffer sez: i bet this will help buffalo get, like, a pro football team or even a hockey team. (New dads get excused from having to hit the shift key.) I can't resist recounting my first hockey game, which was a Sabres-Bruins match in Buffalo in 1971. I got to see Bobby Orr set some record -- I think it may have been scoring in a single game by a defenseman.

Meanwhile, August proposes a contest to name the Albany hockey team. He suggests the Pork; I counter with the Impasse.

Red Hook revisited, and the Really Big Art Show.

Yesterday my wife, our friend Barbara and I drove to Red Hook to help another friend, the artist Kei Andersen, remove and take home her two paintings that had been displayed at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists' Coalition's annual Really Big Show, which is held in one of Red Hook's magnificent nineteenth century warehouses. Below is a photo of Kei and her paintings, Broken Whelk I (left) and II.


After looking over the show, and seeing among many things some fine displays of photography, I was drawn to the windows.


From the westward side, I had a view of the trolleys that were the subject of this post, but from the opposite end, so that the trolley that once served the King of Norway is nearest.


From the eastward side, I had a panoramic view of the ruins of a sugar refinery and the pier from which bulk sugar was once unloaded.




The area east of the sugar refinery was once occupied by a shipyard, and is now the site of an Ikea store under construction. A graving dock that was built in the mid-nineteenth century, and in which work was done on many ships, including the Civil War ironclad Monitor, has been filled in for a parking lot. I have nothing against Ikea (love the meatballs!) and am glad we will no longer have to drive to New Jersey to shop there, but wish they could have found a way to preserve this bit of history.

Addendum: On the subject of preservation of historic sites, Gowanus Lounge reports that several early nineteenth century buildings in downtown Brooklyn that played a part in the Underground Railroad are being taken by eminent domain for demolition to make way for (ironically) an underground parking garage. Read it and weep, here.

O Florida, venereal soil.*

Every time I think my former home state has done its utmost in the way of legal lunacy, something happens to confound me further. The latest Flori-DUH award must go to Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne and, in particular, State's Attorney Mike Satz, who should have had better sense, for mounting a successful prosecution and trial of one Terry Lee Alexander, age 20. Young Mr. Alexander's offense was that, being jailed on a ten year robbery sentence, he had, in the confines but not privacy of his cell, what in my high school lingo was called a hot date with Sally Five-slide. As Fred Grimm observed in his July 26 Miami Herald article:

At the time of the offense, Alexander was punished with 30 days without TV, music, exercise time and other jail house perks. But obviously self-abuse demands a criminal charge and a full-blown jury trial, and two prosecutors, and a court-appointed taxpayer-paid defense lawyer and six jurors (and an alternate), and a judge, and a court reporter, and a couple bailiffs, and a pretrial deposition, and a daylong trial.

The upshot of all this was a guilty verdict and sixty extra days tacked onto Alexander's ten years. Perhaps an aggravating circumstance was that Alexander was observed in the act of, as we said in my college dorm, making the beast with one back**, by a female jailer. Nevertheless, the jailer, Coryus Veal, was on notice of the prospect of such an observation. According to Grimm, she testified: "They had warned me about what goes on in there." Indeed, as Grimm commented:

In the course of the one-day trial, prosecutor Cynthia Lauriston and Veal managed to describe Alexander's offense in startling detail, eight times, once with Lauriston approximating the action with arm motions. It was hard to imagine the original act had a much more lascivious effect than the lurid stuff those poor women had to utter, over and over, in Courtroom 417 Wednesday.

It may be that resort to a "law and economics" approach would have been helpful here. A simple cost/benefit analysis would likely lead to the conclusion that allowing, or at least tolerating, prisoners' resort to a time-honored method of relieving certain tensions would have benefits, in the form of a more docile inmate population, that outweigh the cost of occasional discomfort to jailers. Update: Nick asks, quite reasonably, just what was the crime of which Mr. Alexander was convicted? According to Grimm's article,

[t]echnically, Alexander faced charges of indecent exposure, with lots of lewd, lascivious, wicked, deviant, etc. tacked on. He also faced the prosecution's tortured contention that his jail cell qualified as a "public place."

This article by Debra Cassens Weiss in the ABA Journal gives additional interesting details. Veal testified that she observed Alexander doing the deed "from a master control room." Evidently, technology has enabled penology to realize Jeremy Bentham's vision of a panopticon with efficacy undreamed of in Bentham's time.*** 

Weiss's article also notes that, in attempting to convince the jury that her client's action was harmless, Alexander's attorney, Kathleen McHugh, asked Ms. Veal if other prisoners were thereby inspired to, as it were, take matters into their own hands. "Did you call in a SWAT team?", McHugh asked. Ms. Veal answered, "I wish I had." Another ABA Journal piece, by Martha Neil, reports that during voir dire Ms. McHugh asked prospective jurors about their own history with respect to recourse to self-help. According to Ms. Neil, all nine men and eight out of ten women asked the question gave an affirmative reply. 

*With apologies to Wallace Stevens. 

**Cf. Othello, Act I, Scene I; also see here. 

***Of course, Bentham's consequentialism would argue for a hands-off policy concerning Mr. Alexander's hands-on practice, just as would a University of Chicago style law and economics analysis, which has consequentialist underpinnings.

It's a boy!

Hearty congratulations to Twiff and Persephone.

Phil Rizzuto, 1917-2007

Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows that I loathe, hate and despise the New York Yankees. However, this doesn't necessarily translate to the individual level. Today I saw someone wearing an old Yanks jersey with the name O'Neill on the back, and thought, "What excellent taste." I'd feel the same about someone wearing one that said "Williams." DiMaggio, Gehrig, Ruth: all names I revere. Even Maris and Mantle.

One who fit in that category was Phil "Scooter" Rizzuto, who died today at the age of 89. A Brooklyn native, he tried out for the Dodgers, and never forgave Leo Durocher for saying the unforgivable: "You might as well go shine shoes." The Yanks, to their credit, saw a diamond in the rough and signed him. He was with them from 1941 to 1956, and contributed to seven world championships. He's probably best remembered, however, as a game announcer for the Yanks, a role he filled until 1996. It was this guise that enabled his brief foray into rock 'n' roll.

To finish this off, I'm going to abase myself by giving you a link to a rabidly pro-Yankee blog.

Update: Joe Martini shares a Scooter memory here.

The tragedy of Fred Exley.

I'm writing this in Massena, which Exley, in Pages From a Cold Island (the subject of my earlier post), called "a far northern and perhaps fantasy village in St. Lawrence County." Being here, I can testify to its being "far northern," at least with respect to New York State, and to its presence within St. Lawrence County. But I can also affirm that it's a very real place with real problems: GM is closing its powertrain plant here, which will mean the loss of many jobs; local folks are hoping that a proposed NASCAR track will boost the economy.

Reaction to my first Exley post was mixed. My wife said, "It was too long, and it turned into a rant at the end." I protested that it wasn't any longer than book reviews in The New Republic; she said, "They're too long, too." Other responses, in the comments below the post and in OTBKB, were more positive. Thus encouraged, and with some inspiration from Keifus, I've decided to write more.

My earlier piece quoted Walter Kirn's observation that, in Exley's view, "[i]n America...a person is either a suffering poet or a cheerful drone." Keifus had this to say in his comment:

It's tempting to separate the world into suffering poets and cheerful drones, isn't it? People glorify the geniuses that drown their muses in booze and sex, as if the ones who force themselves to just suck it up [don't] share a similar burden. (And maybe they do.) People identify suffering with [genius], and imagine (no doubt wrongly) that the suffering implies bigger capabilities...

[K: I've taken the liberty of inserting "don't" in your second sentence and substituting "genius" for the second "suffering" in your last sentence, as that's what I think you intended. Please correct me if I'm wrong.] In Pages, Exley at one point confesses a desire to be a "cheerful drone" of a sort. This came during his description of his interview with Gloria Steinem. After meeting her at the airport, Exley stumbled trying to retreive her luggage from a conveyor belt, then apologized for his awkwardness, saying, "It's just--you know, you know--that I'm so intimidated, you know, being with you and all."

Then if possible I became even more nauseating. I smiled with a weakness verging on illness, batted my big baby brown eyes at her, and gave her a helplessly feeble shrug by way of eliciting her utmost in pity. Gloria looked down at me and with deadly serious and sympathetic earnestness said, "Don't be." And, oh Lord, I score that as the moment I fell head over heels in love with Ms. Gloria Steinem!

As the interview progressed, though, Exley found it hard to break through Steinem's reserve. Trying to get an emotional response, he began asking her about men with whom she had been said to be romantically involved. In each case, she responded that the man in question was a "friend." Finally, Exley asked about Thomas Guinzberg, a publisher whom Exley admired and thought well suited to Steinem. She said she had been with him shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and thought "he took [it] too cavalierly." To underscore her assessment, she said, "Tom Guinzberg should have been a sports reporter for the Daily News."

On hearing this, Exley realized that his love for Steinem was doomed:

Ye fucking gads, dear reader, where could Gloria and I go from there? One must understand that the dream of my life--the dream of my fucking life!--was to be a sports reporter for the Daily News! I'd have a lovely and loving wife named Corrine; three sons named Mike, Toby and Scott; two boxers, Killer and Duchess, with bulging muscles under their fawn coats, and black ferocious masks, and like all boxers they'd be big whining slobbering babies who couldn't even sleep when they were denied access to the boys' beds. I'd have a split-level home somewhere on the north shore of the island, say, at Northport; and just at the moment I was up to here with Corrine, the boys, Killer and Duchess, my boss at the sports desk would telephone me and cry, "Hey, Ex, don't forget you got to fly out to the coast and cover the Mets' five-game stand with the Dodgers." And off I'd wing, to stand in the press box, a paper cup of Coors beer in my hand, the klieg lights dissolving the faces of the crowd into one another, cheering like mad for Seaver and the guys; after which, much renewed, I'd fly back to the loving Corrine, Mike, Toby and Scott, Killer and Duchess.

How to square this with what Exley said to his students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, in which he held up as an exemplar Edmund Wilson alone in his stone house, the embodiment of the discipline and unflagging effort needed to become the kind of writer whose work mattered? I think we can conclude that Exley, like, I suspect, many of us, was torn between conflicting desires: one for greatness, entailing a life of risk, sacrifice and hard work; and one for safety, comfort and small but rewarding pleasures. The tragedy of Exley's short life was that he was unable to muster the discipline to attain the former, at least not on a consistent basis, but perhaps because of a belief that it was inimical to a dream of greatness that he couldn't foresake (being subject to the erroneous belief discussed by Keifus), was also unwilling to exercise the lesser amount of self-control needed to achieve the latter.

Frayfriend JMB says:

I couldn't help but think that [Exley would] be disappointed in Singer Island as it is now--towering Condos and sprawling townhouse communities as far as the eye can see, one public beach, one fishing access park and one County park.

Actually, Exley saw this coming. Near the end of Pages, he tells of a final visit to Singer:

Never do I look inland. In the short time I've been gone two high-rise condominiums have gone or are going up. Looking inland at them reminds me of the doctor's words to the effect that money will not be stayed and that my days on this cold island are numbered. And as I walk I find myself thinking anxiously of the future, of other havens.

But JMB adds:

Then, this past weekend, I sat in with a blues band for a bassist I know who was going to be out of town. It was in a Club of 'questionable merit', connected to a motel that advertised "Hourly, Daily, Weekly Rates" in an area of Singer Island I hadn't seen before.

While sitting on the corner of the stage during a break (while the 'Lingerie Show' was happening and deals of some sort or another were going on outside the front door and the Riviera Beach Police made their 30 minute rounds) I thought that THIS was the closest I would come to what Exley experienced in his time here.

So, perhaps the struggle that goes on in our physical and social environment, one that reflects the inner struggle of Exley and others like him, the struggle between Apollo and Hermes, continues, with neither side, praise be, in sight of victory.

No words, just pix.*

*With a tip o' the hat to Hugh Crawford.

Taking a break.

I'll be away for a few days in a computer-free zone, so I'll defer those projects I've promised to work on (more on Exley; Second Amendment) until after next Tuesday. Best wishes.

Castillo to Mets?

Gotta like the deal for the strength it adds to defense up the middle, and the DP combo with Reyes. Offensively, Castillo looks like less of an asset. His .304 average so far this season (.294 career) is decent, though not as good as Ruben Gotay's. Run production is subpar, with only 18 RBIs for the season, compared to 19 for Gotay, who has batted 123 times compared to Castillo's 349. Castillo seldom walks (29 times this season), but doesn't strike out much, either (28). One reassuring stat is that he doesn't ground into a lot of double plays (only three this year). Evidently, he hits lots of well-placed grounders and bloops. He's no threat to clear the fences, with 23 dingers over a career now in its twelfth season, and none so far this year (Gotay has 4, again with only 123 ABs). All in all, though, this adds up to Castillo's being reasonably well suited to the role of number two hitter; he has a fair chance of advancing a runner and getting on base himself.

This deal may prove a test of Billy Beane's maxim that good defense is seldom worth what you pay.

Healey and Triumph

This morning, as I was on the homeward leg of my customary run/walk, I spotted an Austin-Healey 3000 parked next to a Triumph TR-6 outside the same garage where I saw the MGA last week.


Schad (see his comment under the MGA post) says he likes the look of the TR6. I do, too, but prefer the voluptuous curviness of the Healey and the MG to the angularity of the TR. As to whether I prefer the Healey or the MG, I'm still coming down on the side of the latter, largely out of agreement with Mies van der Rohe's esthetic principle: "Less is more."

More odds and ends.

A big "Thank you!" to Louise Crawford for posting on Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn her nice words about, and link to, my Fred Exley piece. (Louise, this isn't the P.S. I promised. That will come in the next few days, as we transplanted Appalachian hillbillies say, "Good Lord willin' and the cricks don't rise.")

Sidebar on Larry Tribe: I mentioned the eminence grise of Harvard Law School in the "Guns" portion of the previous Odds and ends. Frayfriend Persephone replied (scroll down to the fourth comment) with the lyrics to a parody song performed by the HLS Drama Society. On reading this, I was reminded of having seen something a couple of years ago about Tribe being accused of plagiarism (a subject about which another Harvard faculty member wrote this song). A little Google research showed that the Drama Society had retracted the song after Professor Tribe complained that it did not reflect the facts. Reading further in the Drama Society blog piece, I discovered a link to this web page, which I assumed to be another parody written by a clever student. I was flat-out amazed when further reading showed it was Tribe's own creation. It strikes me kind of like Rupert Holmes' execrable "Pina Colada Song" (more about that later) fortified with a shot of Arthur C. Clarke and a dash of Janet Evanovich. Particularly mind-boggling is his apparent conflation of an Edith Wharton protagonist with a Mansonette who wasn't involved in the Sharon Tate murders but later may have tried to assassinate President Ford. To paraphrase Horace, even Homer nods; still, this seems more like an episode of narcolepsy.

Watch out, Wellfleet! College Point, Queens is breathing down your neck. Thanks to Tom of NYC Maritime for linking to Greg Beyer's Times piece about the Electric Oyster Experiment, in which scientists are trying, with apparent success, to create oyster beds in the East River (a misnomer; it's actually a tidal strait), where none have existed for many years. Their technique is to place metal racks in water and run an electric charge through them, which stimulates the growth of limestone on the metal. Seed oysters imported from Long Island Sound are then planted on the limestone, where they thrive. The racks are by Brooklyn sculptor Mara Haseltine, who makes them in the shape of DNA molecules.

Good earworm of the day: "Driving the View," by Son Volt; hear it here. Anthemic chord progressions; inscrutable lyrics. What more couldja want?

Bad earworm of the day: "Escape (the Pina Colada Song)," by Rupert Holmes. I was subjected to this on the car radio somewhere between Sturbridge and Hartford. If you're into masochism (not yoga), you can hear an especially cheesy instrumental version here. Be warned: I'm not responsible for any consequences.

Godspeed, Gary and Kate

I've been neglecting other blogs as well as my own lately, so this announcement from Gary, of runs Brooklyn/Brooklyn runs came to me late and as quite a surprise. I had the pleasure of meeting Gary and his wife, Kate, at the Brooklyn Blogfest in May. I'll miss them both, and the fascinating entries and photos on Gary's blog, very much. I'm glad, though, that he's decided to leave the existing body of runs available on the net, so I'll keep my link to it, as well. There's much there worth going back and savoring.

MGA

Maybe the best looking automobile ever. (I say "maybe" because it's a tough choice for me between it and the Austin-Healey 100s. Those of you who prefer Duesenbergs or early Lincoln Continentals are welcome to weigh in. Those who prefer 1960 DeSotos or Caddy Fleetwoods please keep your thoughts to yourselves.)

My closest friend in high school had a copy of Oscar Brand's Sports Car Songs, which had a "glossary" on the back of the sleeve. It defined "MGA" as "an abbreviation for meshugganah."

Update: Lots of reaction to this post (note to self: cars a good topic). Goinglikesixty plumps for the MG TC. There was a time, when I was more into retro for retro's sake, when I would have agreed. Now I prefer the minimalist, streamlined look of the MGA to the boxy, open fender aspect of the T series. Joe Martini agrees, though he prefers the Healey to the MG. Uh, Joe, unless you at some time drove a Chevy Vega, don't address the subject of combustible wiring harnesses. Karen Oh puts in a good word for the Morgan, a worthy mention indeed. I learn, to my delight, that Schad and I have something alike in our pasts - Sunbeam Alpines. Finally, Louise Crawford says a Healey was her family's car in the early 1960s. It must have been a very small family, and, at that, a very tight squeeze.

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